My Life as a Doll by Elizabeth Kirschner

My Life as a Doll
by Elizabeth Kirschner
Autumn House Press
ISBN 978-1-932870-20-6 $14.95
www.autumnhouse.org

A review by Mignon Ariel King



If you are going through a rough time, don’t read this collection. Separated into four parts, each serving as a eulogy to the lost periods of the poet’s life, this is excruciating stuff. Cuckoo recounts in brutal detail the childhood head injury inflicted by the narrator’s mother via a baseball bat; and if you ever wondered what it feels like to lose one’s mind and know it, you will find out. The traumatized adult narrator’s words punish the reader as well as the now-deceased abusive mother. Keep reading anyhow, for although the story never gets better—that is, expect no pretty made-it-through-the-storm ending—the language can be magnificent: “Whatever emerges at season’s end/comes from a harrowing heaven…”(3).



By page six the narrator has disappeared into the basement to hide. In her addled brain, there she is ostracized from a community of dolls. Do not expect her to lead you out of the dark. She does not want to leave as: “[s]alvation was a hardship/I was not yet ready to bear”(6). The concepts of forgiveness and moving on are not part of this narrative.

The adult narrator obsessively fantasizes about confronting her mother with tears that are

“glass splinters.//Let them slice, slice, slice/her dead tongue…”(7). The contradictions that once swirled through her mind were supported by the mixed messages of the only women around her, her mother and nuns. Pages fourteen through fifteen gave me goosebumps—the good kind. One of the narrator’s purely vulnerable moments occurs

when she explains how she tried to appease her mother:



“I hid Dixie cups full of violets

in the kitchen cupboard

for her to find and penny candy tucked



into the mailbox with the mail…”(14).



Despite her anger toward nuns, the narrator constantly calls out to God, asks what keeps him too busy to save her, talks of drowning in demons. The narrator is casually cuckoo at times, like a broken talking doll stringing disjointed phrases together, yet her dark humor does not inspire the reader to sing along to the Itty Bitty Ditty that is the second section. This section could easily be renamed Itty Bitty Deaths, with sexual allusions intended. The alcoholic young adult narrator gets bogged down in too much imagery here, the result of which is that a shift on page thirty-four begins a style that sometimes smacks of flat and ordinary prose. There is death, bird, and burning imagery, but it is combined with so much cutesy nursery rhyme that the poet appears to have yielded to the

child narrator for the first time in the narrative. This appears badly-timed and could easily inspire the old “is this art or mere therapy?” debates.



If the lack of transition to Tra-la-la makes sense to you, my hat is off. Ditto for the recurring “dust baby.” Understandably, the narrator, now wife and mother of a charming 11-year-old son, has had a complete psychotic breakdown by this point, and has better things to do than keep the reader up to speed, but still…. Now, however, come brilliant, snarky lines to describe her talk therapy: “I was a talking tree/and my leaves were on fire”(43). The description of inpatient mental health care is hilarious. Try not to laugh at: “our twitchy fingers/and even twitchier minds/needed something to do”(48). Also in this section is one of the few safe places for the reader to land as the narrator falls in love with her own madness—her compassion for her son.



The final section O Healing Go Deep is mostly as melodramatic as it sounds. Yes, it seems cruel to label the deeply disturbed “melodramatic,” but Kirschner pulls no punches, nor will this reviewer. Perhaps the first section, the weakest poetry in the book, could be summed up by three phrases from the fourth: “Why oh why did she/thunder my head with the bat”(59)? “[I] turned into a mannequin/in rigor mortis”(59). “Can the living/divorce the dead? Hell’s bells, it’s time”(61). This collection is a must read for anyone going through an okay time yet feeling haunted by parental imperfections and childhood memories. Read it. Then call your mother.

Somerville Writer Patricia Wild: A Self -Described ‘Old Hippie’ writes a new memoir.

Somerville Writer Patricia Wild: A Self -Described ‘Old Hippie’ writes a new memoir.


By Doug Holder

At a recent editorial meeting at The Somerville News Patricia Wild was asked what brought her to Somerville, she laughed and said: “What else, a man.” But Wild’s roots in Somerville run much deeper than that. Her father was born in Somerville, and since the late 70’s this School St. resident has contributed to Somerville in many ways: as an educator, journalist, writer and community activist.

For 17 years Wild was a fixture at the adult education program SCALE where she taught a women’s writing class. Her first short novel was titled “Swimming In It,” that was set in Somerville. The protagonist was based on a young woman Wild taught in a homeless shelter. The girl was in the shelter due to sexual abuse at her familial home. Later this girl tragically died from a heroin overdose. The book created a strong reaction and a lot of feedback. Wild said that 1 in 4 women have been sexually abused at one point according to recent studies, so many were able to relate to this girl’s sad fate.

Wild’s ambitions do not stop at fiction writing. She writes a popular and sometimes controversial column for “The Somerville Journal,” and is currently working on a draft of play about an Alzheimer’s victim, and his caretaker titled: “ Not For Nothing.”

In her new memoir “Way Open” she recounts her years in the early 60’s in Lynchburg, Virginia, where two African American students first integrated her high school. Wild said she was aware that she has lived a life of “white privilege,” and she wanted to revisit those years through this memoir. Wild went back to Lynchburg to interview these students who are now successful professionals. She struggled with writing a book that would not have her as a focus but rather the black community and their struggles with racism. To her surprise and annoyance the students, the black community, and the white community met her arrival with caution and reluctance. Eventually after questioning her own motives with the help of her Quaker faith, she slowly gained the people’s trust.

Wild clearly loves Somerville. She said: “This is a city that makes you feel that you might change something if you attend a meeting.” She used the example of the zoning plans for Union Square that have been modified due to community input.

Wild, who describes herself as an “old hippie,” continues to be an optimist. She feels the Internet is a good thing because it connects people across the world. Injustices like genocide can’t be covered up as they once were because of the accessibility of the Web.

Wild told the staff of The Somerville News, many of whom are in their 20’s,: “ I look to you, to your generation, for the real changes to come.”


For more information go to http://www.patriciawild.net

Micropleasure by Janann Dawkins

Micropleasure

Poems

by Janann Dawkins

Leadfoot Press, Detroit, Michigan , no price

Paperback, ISBN 10: 0-9817106-1-1, ISBN 13: 978-0-9817106-1-7


Review by Zvi A. Sesling



Every book of poems I’ve read has some poems that are worth reading and some that are not. So it is with Janann Dawkins’ book Micropleasures. An associate editor for poetry at Third Wednesday magazine, Dawkins pursues erotic poetry with fervor and explicitness that can be both exciting and unnerving at the same time as in these lines from “Daydreams.”



I lift a false memory of your cheek

onto a stranger’s face, the stubble

a dull burn, so unlike you, a million

dimples of friction.



There is also an explicit two line poem “Give me your lifeforce,/It will warm me. You can guess the title.



If Dawkins can do one thing, it is to let you know what she is doing and what she feels. Her poems are laced with her obsessions and her obsessions often cross the border of the explicit. Each of her poems is an expression of her micropleasures be they enjoyed with someone else or by herself. Try “Autoerotic” for example for a young girl’s fantasy.



As Third Wednesday Magazine editor Laurence W. Thomas states in his introduction, “The poems step outside their frames, leaving readers to tread among carefully chosen words and interweaving phrases to conclusions suggested by not belabored.”



And, I might add, the suggested conclusions do not leave one wondering what she was up to. If you like the direct, in-your-face approach to sex, try reading this brief, but active chapbook.


Zvi Sesling/Ibbetson Update/ June 2008/Somerville, Mass.

FOR LOVE OF A SOLDIER BY JANE COLLINS

FOR LOVE OF A SOLDIER: Interviews with Military Families Taking Action Against the Iraq War

Jane Collins;

Lexington Books, 2008

ISBN-10: 0-7391-2373-4

$23



FOR LOVE OF A SOLDIER is a collection of plain-spoken stories of families who have loved ones serving in the military in Iraq. It took me a while to get around to reading it because I thought, yeah, I know the drill: the poor bastards who joined up thinking they were doing something patriotic are getting screwed by the flag-pin-wearing neo-cons whose cronies are making billions off this war. And indeed they are. But once you start reading these 27 individual stories, it becomes up-close and personal. I found myself welling up at nearly every story I read.

The families are of divergent backgrounds. Some are old hippies with a long tradition of anti-war activism. Many others come from a long line of military service. Some are Republicans who were Bush supporters. In some ways, the latter’s stories are the most heart-rending because they recognize they are, to a degree, responsible for their grief and their loved one’s suffering or death.

Nan Beckwith opens her story by saying she used to be a Republican delegate. Her family has a tradition of military service that can be traced back twenty generations. Her son, Ryan, continues that tradition by serving in the Marine Corps. He joined up a year before September 11 and was sent to Afghanistan soon after the attacks. In the Spring of 2004 she got a call from him. He and his fellow marines were starving in the field. They had one MRE (Meal Ready to Eat) and a bottle of water each per day. That was all. She sent food, socks and medical supplies to her son and his buddies. Her packages got through with no problem. She writes that Kellogg, Brown and Root had an installation one hour’s helicopter ride away but claimed they couldn’t transport supplies to the Marines because of “rough terrain.” She says: “I live in Virginia. I don’t want to hear BS that they couldn’t send supplies because of rough terrain. My supplies got there. I believe Halliburton/KBR wanted to save a buck.” She adds: “I had no idea the man I voted into office would do what he did, what a corrupt administration it was going to be. I love the military. I love the U.S. Constitution; I’d take a bullet for it. I hate what they’ve done to our liberties. Don’t you mess with our Constitution! That’s where my outrage is. They betrayed my country.”

Joyce and Kevin Lucey lost their son Jeffrey to suicide after he returned from Iraq with severe PTSD and alcoholism. They describe things their son told them he’d witnessed, such as an older family trying to return to their home being gunned down by the Americans, such as children being run down by trucks, referred to as “bumps in the road.” Kevin says: “Joyce and I believed in our government. Even though we’d disagree with the administration, we’d never believe they’d be as bad as all the other regimes in the world.”

Many families talk about the difficulty of getting medical care for their soldiers. The VA often tries to avoid treating PTSD by claiming that the soldier had a pre-existing personality disorder. One Iraq vet was told by a Vietnam vet who’d sustained the exact same kind of wound how much better was the care he had received years ago, with a longer hospital stay and much more therapy. And it’s not only the soldiers who suffer. Anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, radical weight loss, hypertension, heart attack are among the symptoms that many of the parents and spouses of soldiers report.

When the family members joined or started chapters of Military Families Speak Out (MFSO) their sons and daughters in the service were supportive. Contrary to common perception, most soldiers and marines know the war was based on deception and that there is no exit strategy. Many officers are supportive rather than critical of their soldiers’ activist families. Claire Andre says: “I thought ‘I’m going to research my way to the bottom of this, I’m going to find out what the point is.’ But there’s not a point….It’s all tragedy, and the government is incompetent.” Anne Chay correctly characterizes the” mission” as impossible; an occupying force cannot bring peace and stability to a country. “If we are the enemy, what are we accomplishing?” she asks. Many of the interviewees express sorrow and compassion for the fate of the Iraqi people whose lives have been made exponentially worse than they were even under Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime.

Jane Collins, who interviewed these families and brought together this book, notes that these anti-war activists are not stereotypical. Most of them have always held the military in high regard and are mostly just middle-aged parents who feel our troops have been betrayed by a corrupt and self-serving administration. So, too, the reader of this book begins to feel their sadness at how these soldiers and marines have been treated by our own government. This book should be read by every citizen and especially by those war supporters who prattle on about how they “support the troops.”



Richard Wilhelm,

Ibbetson Update

A Review of Lo Galluccio's "Being Visited" by Regie O'Hare Gibson

Hip-nogogic Exorseduction: Being Visited by the Queen from Mars
A Review of Lo Galluccio’s “Being Visited.”

By Regie O’Hare Gibson




With her concept album “Being Visited”, multi-talented singer, actress, poet and memoirist Lo Galluccio delivers a velvet pile driver of an offering. In this effort, Galluccio adopts the persona of the “Queen from Mars”—a pink haired, siren-like waif who, like Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” (sans androgyny), is a visitor come to observe our world.

From the first notes of the flagship tune Creamsplit we make contact with the Queen’s world of hip logic. A world infused with funky congas and a bass line tight enough to slit wrists. This kind of scaled down instrumentation permeates Galluccio’s “Being Visited” (a welcome change in an era of over-produced music projects). It would be a mistake, however, to assume in this case, simple instrumentation equals anorexic sound. For each song on “Being Visited” is made much more complex when Galluccio’s voice begins snaking between its rhythmic dialectic and straddling the gap between song and sense.

Galluccio’s voice is breathy as blown incense smoke and sassy as an adolescent girl just getting hip to what her hips can do. Galluccio’s Queen speaks in riddle and metaphor and often weds sharp, clear imagery to those more hidden and obscure. Again, take the song Creamsplit:
“Falsity stuck in my teeth like sourdough
There is nothing to creep up my leg but the condor”

Galluccio’s “Being Visited” is replete with such jarring juxtapositions and demanding tandems that caress the mind with a heightened view of the familiar, then slaps it silly with the fantastic and surreal. It is as though this is the only way the Queen from Mars can communicate with us: she has to translate her thoughts into our language–– and the result is highly charged poetry.

The next track These Diamonds are my Very, features Galluccio’s potent poetry sandwiched between arrhythmic percussion and Galluccio’s own sinewy voice overlain electronically. Underneath it all is Galluccio’s chanting of “These diamonds are my very teeth”. This streamline piece of hypnotica places Galluccio somewhere between Sybil and chanteuse.

Then we are confronted with the dark light of Black Sun. An ode to both Eros and Thanatos that asks us to find ourselves, along with the Queen from Mars, “in the midst of the grave, the grapevine and the rose combined.” This muscular tune drips with its Galluccio’s own poetic duende, even as she nods respectfully (as she does several times throughout “Being Visited”) to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground.

Smog in Athens I and Smog in Athens II (with Leda’s Swan) complete the first leg of the Queen from Mars’ musical/poetic visitation. Part I invades the head with a cavalcade of voices as an electronic metronome sets an urgent tone that quickens to critical upon entering part II, where the mind is torn between Galluccio’s singing, the metronome, and the simple yet effective drum beat and guitar riffs pushing toward a retro-rock, head-pumping rush. This then trails off gracefully into the Queen cooing us into the next track You go to my Head–– the vintage jazz ballad by Tin Pan Alley lyricist Haven Gillespie. Galluccio wields this standard like an axe in a trembling fist (You never know where it’s going to come down, but when it does––something’s gonna bleed).

But Galluccio’s Queen from Mars doesn’t only wish to slam us against walls and drop us into dark pits (though she enjoys this and I mind it not at all) she also wants to seduce. And she does so with the beautifully delivered Lou Reed classic “Pale Blue Eyes”. In this, Galluccio let’s the Queen’s softer voice (she has many) take the lead in this dance. Galluccio does Lou Reed honor with her airy texturing and expert phrasing.

In the track Mona Lisa/Mozart’s Wife Galluccio’s Queen conjures images of both eternal muse and forgotten woman. As Mozart’s wife she scolds the composer for being “drunk…wet and full of weird chamber music.” At the end of this Galluccio’s Queen (as Mozart’s wife) recognizes Mona Lisa as sister by asking (via the Evans and Livingston lyric) “Are you warm, are you real Mona Lisa, or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art?” In this, it seems the Queen from Mars is also asking herself this question. She is, like the Mona Lisa, the perpetual observer forever out of reach.

Next, we come to the eerie title track “Being Visited”. The poetry is, of course, brilliant––and the music brooding and broad. It is, perhaps, something Blake or Bosch might have played to get into the mood to paint. This track is part prayer, part exorcism. To listen to it is to hear the perturbation of dark wings smelling of apples and ash (I love this song).

Finally, we arrive at the dreamy, pulsating Queen from Mars. Interesting that on this track the Queen herself doesn’t speak, but is instead spoken of. It features the sardonic voice of a woman who “accepts” that her lover has been seduced by the Queen of Mars. She sings:

“I can understand why you had an affair with he Queen of Mars.
She’s got pink hair and her teeth are sharp.
You left earth to kiss her and I bear the scars.”

This lyric may as well say to a philandering man: “Yeah, baby, it’s cool. Don’t worry about it. Just go to sleep, now.” Were I her cheating lover I would sleep with one eye open clutching a knife.

This track (like Mona Lisa/Mozart’s Wife) features saxophonist extraordinaire Roy Nathanson of the Jazz Passengers. Nathanson, who has worked with such luminaries as Debbie Harry and Elvis Costello is always the consummate professional. He complements Galluccio’s disorienting, often forbidding lyrics with sparse licks, rhythm, attitude and atmosphere. Also accompanying Galluccio on this album are Miki Navazio on electric guitar, Brad Jones on upright bass, Michael Evans on drums and percussion and a host of other heavy hitters: EJ Rodriguez, Satoshi Takeishi, Chris Bowers, and Khartik Swaminathan.

Lo Galluccio’s “Being Visited” fuses well-wrought poetry, spoken word, song, jazz, rock and funky pop with serious artistry, intellect and an eclectic vision unlike any I have heard.
Don’t buy this album if you need a little mood music to play while you tend other duties (you will only be cheating yourself). But if you are able to carve out 45 minutes to journey with Galluccio’s “Being Visited” it will be a great musical and poetic odyssey.




Regie O’Hare Gibson is an author, songwriter, educator and poetry workshop facilitator he has read taught, lectured and performed at universities, theaters and various other venues in seven countries most recently Monfalcone, Italy where he was winner of the International Absolute Poetry Competition. His work has also appeared in a number of anthologies and journals including The Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Iowa Review and Poetry Magazine. He performs with Synesthesia–– a literarymusic ensemble that fuses literature with American funk, jazz and blues, European classical elements, Middle Eastern percussion and smatterings of electronica.

Field of Wanting – Poems of Desire by Wanda Phipps

Field of Wanting – Poems of Desire
by Wanda Phipps
Blaze VOX {books}
Buffalo, NY
Copyright 2008
139 pages

Review by Lo Galluccio

A long-time admirer of Wanda Phipps’ poetry and voice, since first catching her at the Marathon Day Reading at St. Mark’s Church, I eagerly devoured her latest tour de Force, “Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire” released this year on Blaze VOX {books}. She is gifted with a powerful writer’s imagination and a lovely voice which articulates such pieces as “Heaven and Earth” and “Desire,” interwoven with doubled voicings, rhythmic breathing and spare instrumentation. As an example of her capacity to enchant with concrete ephemera, you can check out the first track on her Myspace page (www.myspace.com/wandaphhippsband) and hear a lush reverberating guitar under her softly declared words:

“I’m heaven over fire, fire under heaven. I’m heaven into eleven:
two plus eleven seconds of heaven.”

The pink and the shimmering white in “Desire” seem like floating pieces of divine candy you can almost taste but would rather spare.

Wanda and I share a similar background that spans the theatre arts world and writing (both prose and poetry) – Wanda having studied at Naropa, after theater school, and incorporating a kind of free-associative, open and broken phrasing style which sculpts thoughts that scan her monitor second by second.

Her poetry has been published over 100 times in a variety of publications, including several anthologies. A denizen of New York City – the City which marks much of her verse like a maze-like tattoo – she’s also curated several readings and performance series at the renowned Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, as well as other New York venues.

In 2004, Soft Skull Press released her full-length poetry book, “Wake up Calls: 66 Morning Poems” which rivaled, from a contemporary and female angle, Frank O’Hara’s famous “Lunch Poems.” The author successfully undertook to capture her own state of mind upon waking, on 66 successive mornings. The results are poems that refresh in their hybrid revelations, daily task-lists and sensory detail. This book put Wanda on the poetry map as a serious literary voice, one with both a learned and maverick’s approach to verse; one who’d been around and mentored; one who was still experimenting with how she wanted to paint.

Her latest collection is part anthology and part new works, some written under the influence of the break up of a long-term relationship with a live-in soul-mate and collaborator. Anyone who’s loved, labored and lost knows the agony of wanting to somehow pay tribute, kick the despoiler in the teeth, and run like hell, all in the same fell swoop. Phipps’ language wand casts such a powerfully luminous spectrum of colors that nothing feels bitter-black, rotten or remorseful in this collection. Nothing seems concocted in a frenzied rush to win, either. All seem like newly bred creatures; part of a poet’s evolutionary schema.

“Field of Wanting” contains nine sections – each honing to the mode and mood and particular style of its poetry zone: sonnets, prose-poetry paragraphs, numbered blues, and short-haiku like slivers, along with more traditional free-verse. In the opening poem, from “Your Last Illusion,” she writes a kind of prelude:

I am pure madness
If I yell and scream and bleed
Is that pure enough? is that raw enough?
If I wear my sensitivity like a crown
Is it a tool?
can I touch you with my frailty?
touch you with my vulnerability?
Is my weakness
my strength?

p. 13
“A Purist at Heart”

She continues with a series of 19 modern sonnets (inspired by Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets)—also called “Your Last Illusion” or “Break Up Sonnets” – each 14 lines, not rhyming.


12
.
So you left, you bastard, so what?
I’m ready to include the world
through with internal wars
weather’s clear
and lies are angels in the snow
best be off and running babe
one messy satellite still hovers
you are the one and only blinking muscle
God’s a shining fuck
step on your own toes to keep someone
else from beating you to it
the bathtub isn’t long enough for four
don’t dream now float
it’s best with Sunday morning peaches.

p. 21


In “Suddenly Everything” Phipps in her poem “Galloping Personas” touches on a villanelle-like repetition scheme (without writing a proper villanelle) using the noun phrase “golden blouse” alternately as distraction and conceptual device. :

She begins:

“So the mask remains baffling
say hello to the mask
a new way of being a “Person”
or a hurricaine Cordelia in Biloxi beauty
there’s a mountain out my window.”
and you must wear a golden blouse.”

And ends:

“songs of a baffling mask
experiencing persons of great beauty
by love’s window in a golden blouse”

p. 34-35

In “Hours” she creates 12 pieces that combine hallucinatory pop culture visions with an almost home-spun delivery of the world around her:

Fourth Hour

“she was late
for a meeting
with her therapist
found Linda Evans
in her bathroom
ripping her shower curtain
and she kept trying
to piece it back together
but Linda kept ripping it
into neat little squares.”

p. 48

Fifth Hour

“it’s raining today
they say snow soon
I need boots
I love those black barked trees
bare and soaking wet
branches like lace
against Chelsea lofts
my hour’s over”

p 49

What leaves me grounded and breathless within Wanda’s wondrous matrix of poems is her equally balanced formal intelligence and wild-child juxtapositions of disparities.

In the Section “Womb Dreams” a poem called, “Talks with a Stranger” (including a few words by Jorge Luis Borges) entices with:

“I’m in the voice before zero
I’m in the macaroni
I’m in the calculator
I’m in the refrigerator.”


“Velocity = Delta D
Change in Distance
Over
Change in Time
Delta T
p. 112


In a deliciously erotic riff in her final section, “Gray Fox Woman” Wanda slips into an ode to a double who is also herself:

“kiss my shaved cunt
and bow to its beauty
introduce me to Dangerous
the woman in the spiderwebbed dress
the wild child filling her mouth
by the newspaper stand

let me watch you
unroll my fishnet stockings slowly
let me wait until you scream
because men do make noise when they fuck
but only as a form of worship.”

p. 124


Wanda will be appearing at The Living Theatre in NYC on July 28th. For more information check out her website: www.mindhoney.com and www.blazevox.org.

An investment in buying this book on Amazon.com or from the publisher is well worth your ducats. As Grace Slick once wailed: “Feed your head!”


Lo Galluccio is a vocal artist and poet whose prose-poem/memoir, “Sarasota VII” will be out on Cervana Barva Press in fall of 2008. www.myspace.com/lolagalluccio

Strange News (poems) by Lawrence Kessenich

Strange News (poems)

by Lawrence Kessenich

Pudding House Chapbook Series

ISBN 1-58998-6690-5

www.puddinghouse.com

© 2008 $10.00




“Strange News” by Lawrence Kessenich takes news factoids to a place of

metaphor that borderlines on urban legend while elaborating on

poetic editorialization. The language is familiar, the images well crafted.

Kessenich places his personal stamp on current and obscure stories such as

Japanese children born in Myanmar, David Belasco’s infamous theater-apartment,

and an Oregon woman arrested for dialing 911 and asking for the cutest cop.

These snippets supply the nub which delivers the poem, often presented

in dramatic monologue.




In Slow Burn, epigram: “Cook pleads guilty in Bed and Breakfast killing spree” -

the water boils for a love-struck B&B cook/owner who is seduced by a girl

named Lila, “ . . . the coquette of my graduate/ writing class, . . .

head full of impossible dreams . . .”

And after Lila lounging around in the garden sipping iced coffee and swimming

naked in the quarry, periodically “screwing” the male guests, the speaker,

(who, is being very much victimized) realizes that she knows she has him,

“ . . . wrapped around her/ little finger”.

Sticking to the title, the speaker finds a revolver and concludes:

“I liked / the way it made me feel/ as if I were a man again.”




Aside from the humorous, Kessenich maneuvers into darker thought-streams.

His Poem “Death Wish” is a flat-out, telling-it-like-it-is catalog of world images,

“twisted streets of Baghdad” and suicide bombers blooming “Bloody roses . . .”.

Images of a world, Kessenich says, we “pretend does not exist . . .”

The final lines portray in words a gesture of hands being thrown up in the air:

“Perhaps it’s time

to sweep the shards of broken

test tubes from the laboratory

table, watch them glitter through

the air like falling stars

as we take our dying breaths.”






















The sparseness of language in “Strange News” might appear basic or half-trying,

even exhibiting the occasional cliche “Took the wind out of her sails”, for example,

but what’s being presented in this work is an opulence of voice, culled from

news stories that, at times, are not-so-poetic, then reinvented into gems.

“The Need to Believe” uncovers a verity never found on the front page, but always

stirring in the heart:




“We’d love to believe we’re special

that out tiny lives impress the earth.

But it has seen trees that live

for centuries, hidden places

we will never see, forgets us

as quickly as raindrops

evaporating on hot stone.”




(Take that, Paris Hilton, Bill Gates, Steve DeOssie Etc. . . .)







Finally, the ending poem entitled “Play On” offers a testament to persistence.

Each stanza begins with the refrain “After it’s all over”, suggesting any

catastrophic event of the reader’s choosing.




“After it’s all over

the Indian will dig up

a beaded leather bag

buried in a mountain

pull out a smooth wooden

flute his grandfather carved

and wail his people’s

pain into the sky.”













Mike Amado is a reviewer for Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

and is an Associate News Staff & Roadpoet eMagazine book and music reviewer.

Two books are slated for release in 2008, “Stunted Inner Child Shot the T.V.”

(Cervena Barva Press), and “Rebuilding the Pyramids” (Ibbetson Street Press

River Tracks by Holly Guran

River Tracks
by Holly Guran
Poets Corner Press
ISBN 978-0-9798594-1-0 $12.00
poetscornerpress.com

review by Steve Glines

Each of us is a collection of stories, poems and portraits. Our lives alternate between being utterly dull and being the source of the most profound inspiration. It’s the use of language that makes the ordinary, extraordinary and the mundane, profound.

The rapper Eminem drew thoughtful inspiration from a less than ordinary industrial slum south of a road called eight mile in Detroit Michigan. He wrote and sang about it in the movie by that name. The movie made eight mile road intriguing and when I was in Detroit I carefully drove down this great divide drawing my own inspiration. To the north are the tony sanitized suburbs of middle class utopia where life mimics the art of Barbie and Ken. No bugs here. To the south are the leftovers. To Eminem, life began at eight mile road and progressed south. I understand. There passion where the Great Depression never left. There are rows upon rows of abandoned factories, abandoned houses, abandoned cars, abandoned lives. It is the detritus sloughed off the Great American Dream. It is inspiration by contrast and I don’t want to go there but I am compelled to look. I drive down dead end streets in my new shiny rental car, make mental notes and back out quickly.

River Tracks draws its inspiration from the mundane as well. Buttercups, wind, a rumbling train carrying commuters home, everyday life in a city, the suburbs and on the farm serve as a backdrop on which to tell a story:

Break-in

They took jewelery, small things
you care about, never
touched the typewriter,
but touched the clothes
inside the drawers,
inside the closets.

The police, too busy to come,
took your report over the phone.

The landlord nailed a board over the hollow
where they knocked the window out. You spoke
of new locks. He fell silent like your apartment.

After you folded the scattered cloths
and laid them in the drawers,
after you put your son to bed,
you opened the typewriter,
stared at the gleaming keys
and wed your fingers to their light.

The world does not always loom large. Life is not always as big as eight mile street.

Sometimes we need to look at the little things and draw small joys from whatever we find. River Tracks tells of the small stories that brighten and sadden a life. The largest among us sometimes need to be reminded that in the larger universe our lives are indeed very small. It’s a quick and pleasant read.

Black Mountain Whispers – A tribute to Raymond Carver ($15.00 U.S.D.) (Cave Moon Press, 2008) by Douglas P. Johnson

Black Mountain Whispers – A tribute to Raymond Carver ($15.00 U.S.D.) (Cave Moon Press, 2008) by Douglas P. Johnson




Review by Pam Rosenblatt



In 2008, Douglas P. Johnson’s Black Mountain Whispers – A tribute to Raymond Carver was published by Cave Moon Press. The one hundred and five page paperback is filled with short stories and poetry, entertaining with surprising (sometimes terrifying, and sometimes humorous) twists and turns, especially towards the end of the pieces.

Johnson wrote Black Mountain Whispers with the renowned short story writer and poet Raymond Carver in mind. Carver graduated from Davis High School, the Yakima, Washington high school where Johnson is currently an English teacher. Carver passed away in 1988. Black Mountain Whispers is a tribute to Raymond Carver’s short stories and poetry or, more specifically, minimalism.1

What is minimalism? Minimalism began in the mid-1960 and its style was developed in music, art, and literature, remaining strong through the 1980’s. The definition of minimalism, according to Raymond Carver, is “ordinary language [is used] to expose the inability of communicating the reality of experience through purely referential language.”2

Some minimalism musicians include Terry Jennings, Dennis Johnson, Richard Maxfield, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Barbara Benary, Julis Eastman,

Jon Gibson, La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Harold Budd, and Phill Niblock.3

Such American artists as Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd and Sol Levitt created in the minimalism style.4

Major literary minimalists are Raymond Carver, John Barth, Richard Ford, Fredrick Barthelme, Mary Robison, Peter Cameron, Judy Troy, and Alice Mattison.5

According to Hiromi Hishimoto in “Trying to Understand Raymond Carver’s Revision’s” published in Tokai English Review, No. 5, (December 1995), pp. 113-147, minimalism in literature is about “economy of word”, “very short, abrupt but impressive sentences”, “lack of psychological impact”, characters that are “completely stripped down”, “sensibility by outer and inner description as well as lacks empathy and lack of interest”. Usually something vital is not mentioned in the story or poem which generates confusion, uncertainty, and inarticulateness.6

In the literature of minimalism, there’s “no verbal communication, no depiction of informing another character about a matter of grave concern.” It’s impersonal and without unity. If there’s any empathy, it’s dramatic, or it doesn’t exist at all, showing up at the end of the writing. The minimalist writer leaves out “communal grief” and no character description is given. Repetition doesn’t happen, and lengthy sentences are replaced by phrases. Traditionally, a piece of literary minimalism is “short words with short sentences and paragraphs, super-short stories”.7

Often people either like minimalism or they don’t. It’s a style that is often found to be “different”. In “Bowing to the Great God Usage”, writer Kyle Gann writes about minimalism in music:




For me, minimalism, for me, was always a different kind

of music, requiring (to misquote John Rockwell) a different

kind of listening. It wasn’t for everybody. It acquired a cult

following of unusually patient listeners. It was, and is, a different

type of listening experience than the attention-holding narrative of conventional classical music.8




Johnson’s Black Mountain Whispers is a “different kind of [book]”. He takes minimalism to an extreme with both his short stories and his poetry. In this review, we’ll analyze the clever, humorous short story, “Color of Milk” and the poem, “Sitcom Sabbath”, to better our understanding of minimalism in literature.

Johnson begins Black Mountain Whispers with “Color of Milk”, a short four and one-quarter page short story about two women enjoying each other’s company while one woman, a portrait painter, is putting the finishing touches on a painting that she made of the other woman, who is handicapped and sits in a wheelchair. The opening of the story consists of short phrases, short sentences, and short questions. This economical use of words makes the first fourteen lines of “Color of Milk” read very quickly, though true to literary minimalism, the reader doesn’t understand what he is reading right away. The beginning of this piece is confusing.




“Burnt Sienna”

“Doesn’t smell burnt. Next?”

“Cadmium Yellow.”

“What’s cadmium?”

“A chemical.”

“Next? Easy. Cadmium Black.”

“Close.”

“It is to[o] Cadmium Black. I’ve been practicing.”

“Just black. Not Cadmium Black.”

“No, you tell it. I need to keep working.”

“You, you tell it better.”

“Deep breath. Better than glue. What is this?”9


The different metaphors for different colors like “Burnt Sienna”, “Cadmium Yellow” and “Cadmium Black” suggest that something colorful is going on. There’s confusion as to whether one of the speakers is smelling or looking at the different colors in order to identify them.

The story begin to unfold when the second speaker identifies a smell

as “Turpentine.”:




“Turpentine. That one’s easy. He didn’t smell like turpentine.

Gasoline. He smelled like gasoline. Remember? He was working on a

lawn mower, so his fingers had old grease under the nails.

I could tell when he picked me up out of the gravel and put me back in

my chair. You didn’t mean to dump me. The wheel got caught in a soft

spot. Wait! Give me a chance before you wave it under my nose. What’s

the color?”

“Raw Umber”

“Like raw meat?”

“What do you think?”10




The relationship between these two women no longer seems blissful, as indicated by

the use of “Raw Umber”. The woman who’s the artist seems upset over something yet to be discovered by reading further.

As “Color of Milk” progresses, an interesting story unravels, one that includes

jealousy, love, and revenge. Johnson uses several minimalism techniques in the story to get his ideas across, or not across. He never identifies the women or man by proper name.

The only character he capitalizes besides the pronouns “I” and “You” is the name “Mom”.11 He never lets the female speakers show empathy, except when the woman

apologizes for falling dramatically out of her wheelchair.12 He stereotypes13 the man as a sex symbol type of handyman who flirts with the women, both of whom become jealous of one another. There is a danger lurking in this short story. Menaces are typically found in literary minimalism.14 In “Color of Milk”, it’s a complex danger. It’s the power of the paintbrush, as the artist keeps painting mustaches under the other woman’s nose either on her face or on a canvas, as it’s not clear, and the woman with the painted mustache has no idea what it looks like:




“What’s color is this?”

“It’s new. Don’t know. Paint a mustache under my nose, so I

can try and memorize it for later.”

“You look like Hitler.”

“Who is that?”

“Or Aunt Hilda.”

“Is it orange?”

“No.”15




Through economy of word, abstract thought, humor, and inarticulateness, Johnson has

written a fine minimalistic lead short story, one that motivates the reader to continue onto the following short stories, many of which aren’t as easy reads and contain threatening, violent, and scary situations which may cause the ordinary reader to put down the book and read the comic section of his Sunday newspaper. But, if you’re the type of reader who enjoys surprises, twists and turns of fate, then you probably will like the rest of the short stories in Black Mountain Whispers.

Black Mountain Whispers’s poetry is complex, abstract, innovative, and often confusing, the latter typical of literary minimalism, then again the writing is sometimes very economical and clear. “Sitcom Sabbath” is a fun yet serious poem found on page 90.

The poem’s speaker has prepared for the Sabbath by cooking


Tarragon Chicken




Fresh tarragon

Fresh garlic cloves

Six chicken breasts

Half cup of white wine

One cup of vegetable broth

Tablespoon olive oil

Teaspoon black pepper




Heat oven to 350º. Rub chicken with olive oil. Halve garlic

Cloves. Slit chicken breasts. Place garlic halves into slits. Place seven to

Eight sprigs of tarragon over and around breasts. Mix white wine with

Vegetable broth and pour over chicken. Cover with aluminum foil. Bake

For 30 minutes. Check chicken. Uncover and bake 10 more minutes.




Serve with brown rice or green salad.

Serve with pumpernickel.

Serve family on T.V. trays.16




Here the speaker has made a special Friday night dinner just to have this weekly holiday

event’s relaxing time thwarted by fate. Death acts as the menace here. The speaker’s grandmother dies.







Answer phone.

Listen to Mom’s hoarse, snorting sobs.




Grandma just died.

I talked to her an hour and a half ago and said I love you. I could tell

she was trying to say something, but it didn’t come out.17




The whole poem lacks empathy, until the speaker’s mother says to the grandmother, “I love you”. When the speaker’s mother says, “I could tell she was trying to say something, but it didn’t come out”18, the reader feels a sense of confusion and inarticulateness of verbal communication.

The speaker doesn’t commiserate with his, or is it her, mother after learning of

the grandmother’s passing. What she does is rote. The short, economical sentences lack emotion. Some repetitive phrases would probably be normal to hear, but Johnson doesn’t

write that way. In his minimalistic style, he uses sentences without a subject noun or pronoun to convey the emptiness of a holiday evening gone awry.


Check calendar. Confirm today is a full moon.

Listen to laugh track in the back ground.

Wonder how to say goodbye to Grandma.19




The last line of “Sitcom Sabbath” is beautiful in its simplicity. The speaker just says,

“Goodbye, Grandma.”20 Johnson has captured a distinctive moment and conveyed powerful feelings without emotion, without tears, without personal feelings exhibited.

“Color of Milk” and “Sitcom Sabbath” are two separate genres and reflect the development of minimalism in literature from the 1960’s through the new millennium. Johnson has written a book that capitalizes on the minimalism style, a style that not everyone accepts, but it has definite qualities and can be identified as such. Black Mountain Whispers is a good read to understand minimalism techniques in literature.

###

Bibliography


ArtLex, “Minimalism”, ArtLex on Minimalism.

http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/m/minimalism.html

Carver, Raymond and Gallagher, Tess, editor. All of Us: The Collected Poems. (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1996).

Carver, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1989).

Gann, Kyle “Bowing to the Great God Usage”, PostClassic.

http://www.artsjournal.cpm/postclassic/2007/08/bowing_to_the_great_god_usage.html

HighBeam Encyclopedia, “The narrowed voice: minimalism and Raymond Carver”.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/printable.aspx?id=1G1:15356194

Hasimoto, Hiromi “Trying to Understand Raymond Carver’s Revisions”, Raymond Carver: Precisionist, 6/5/2008. http://www.whitman.edu/english/carver/precision.html

Johnson, Douglas P. Black Mountain Whispers, (Yakima, Washington: Cave Moon Press, 2008).

“1970s AD – Decade | Studies in Short Fiction | Find Articles at BNET.com”.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2455/is_n4_v33/ai_20906637/pg_3













1 Douglas P. Johnson, Black Mountain Whispers, Yakima, Washington: Cave Moon Press, 2008, p, 107.

2 HighBeam Encyclopedia, “The narrowed voice: minimalism and Raymond Carver”, p. 1

http://www.encyclopedia.com/printable.aspx?id=1G1:15356194

3 Kyle Gann, "Bowing to the Great God Usage”, PostClassic, p. 1.

http://www.artsjournal.cpm/postclassic/2007/08/bowing_to_the_great_god_usage.html

4 ArtLex, “Minimalism”, ArtLex on Minimalism, pp. 1-3.

http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/m/minimalism.html

5 “1970s AD – Decade | Studies in Short Fiction | Find Articles at BNET.com”, p. 3.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2455/is_n4_v33/ai_20906637/pg_3

6 Hiromi Hasimoto, “Trying to Understand Raymond Carver’s Revisions”, Raymond Carver: Precisionist,

6/5/2008, p. 4.

http://www.whitman.edu/english/carver/precision.html

7 Ibid, p. 7.


8 Kyle Gann, “Bowing to the Great God Usage”, PostClassic, p. 1.

http://www.artsjournal.cpm/postclassic/2007/08/bowing_to_the_great_god_usage.html




9 Douglas P. Johnson, Black Mountain Whispers, p. 15.

10 Ibid, p.15.

11 Hiromi Hashimoto, “Trying to Understand Raymond Carver’s Revisions”, p. 3.

12 Ibid, p. 7.

13 Ibid, p. 4.

14 Ibid, p. 13, 15.

15 Ibid, p. 17.

16 Ibid, p.90.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

A TRIBUTE TO GRACE PALEY: A WRITER WHO FOUND BEAUTY IN THE EVERYDAY.

A TRIBUTE TO GRACE PALEY: A WRITER WHO FOUND BEAUTY IN THE EVERYDAY.

By Doug Holder

On a warm and humid morning in late June I jumped on the Red Line to go to UMass Boston, to attend the William Joiner Writers Workshop’s tribute to writer Grace Paley.

The Workshop is directed by poet Kevin Bowen, and is held every summer at the Boston campus. The late Grace Paley is a renowned fiction writer and poet who passed away in 2007. Paley was an enthusiastic, and much admired and loved teacher at the William Joiner. She was born in 1922 in the Bronx to Russian-Jewish immigrants. She published three collections of short stories “The Little Disturbances of Man,” (1959), “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), and “ Later the Same Day” (1985),and her “Collected Stories”(1994) was a finalist for a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. She published several volumes of poetry, was elected the first New York State Writer, and the Vermont Poet Laureate in (2003). Paley was also a political activist involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, as well as the Women’s Movement. In 1969 she accompanied the peace mission to Hanoi to negotiate the release of prisoners of war. In 1978 she was arrested as one of the “White House Eleven” for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner on the White House lawn.

Paley’s writing focuses on the lives of women, examining their gritty everyday world. Her characters ranged from left wing women, their kids, their husbands, their lovers, their aging parents, and their aging selves. She was a master of dialogue, and a champion of everyday life in contemporary literature.

At the tribute were a number of Somerville poets including: Pushcart Prize winner Afaa Michael Weaver, Off the Grid Press publishers Bert Stern and Tam Lin Neville, Somerville poet, writer and activist Alex Kern, and Ibbetson Street Press author Elizabeth Quinlan (“ Promise Supermarket”). Paley’s husband Bob Nichols was present, as well as her daughter Nora.

Sitting next to me in the audience was Henry Braun, one of the founders of Somerville’s Off the Grid Press, and a friend of Nichols and Paley. Braun, who was once an editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal said of Paley: “She was the voice of my people. People who came from New York, the Lower East Side, political activists from the Vietnam era.” Afaa Michael Weaver, who was teaching at the Joiner this summer said later that he had met Paley two years before at the Joiner Center and was impressed by her graciousness and her “commitment to society.”

Julie Thacker, a creative writing instructor at Lesley University in Cambridge, lead the discussion of Paley and her work. She told me that Paley had a “Singular and human voice, married poetry and prose together beautifully, and found beauty in ordinary life. She also exhibited a striking compassion.”

The audience often commented on passages from Paley’s work and peppered their commentary with memories of Paley’s teaching at the Joiner Center. Most were in agreement with the fact that Paley, along with Tillie Olsen, were the first writers to open up the idea of ordinary woman as being good fodder for stories. Poet Elizabeth Quinlan told me: “ For the first time I realized that you could write about being a struggling young mother, your babies, even, well, your period.” Martha Collins, the founder of the undergraduate Creative Writing program at UMass Boston said she was amazed how Paley could combine the “political” with the fabric of life, and do it with such great humor. Paley, according to the anecdotes of the many folks who knew her was a master of dialogue, organically bringing the conversational into her work. She was a big believer in revision. Her husband Bob Nichols pointed out to the audience that they should respond to her work not only on an intellectual level but also on an emotional level . He reminded the audience that her work was all about emotional content. He also noted that Paley when she was giving a reading was always looking down at the text, rather than the audience. Poet Fred Marchant, the director of the Poetry Center at Suffolk University
said this was testimony to her singular focus on her work.

Paley, to her credit, was able to marry the profound and the ordinary, without sounding stilted. And in all of her work there was endless conversation, rather than a strong sense plot. Like in her fiction, the tribute was an ongoing conversation punctuated by memories, and always-generous doses of laughter. One student remembered Paley asking her to her home to discuss her work. She said: “ Let me make you a cheese sandwich. You’ll love it.” And I guess Paley would like it that way, to be remembered by her work, and, yes, even her cheese sandwiches.


Here

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be

at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration

that's my old man across the yard
he's talking to the meter reader
he's telling him the world's sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips.

--Grace Paley


Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ June 2008

Steve Glines Photo Study of the Dedication of Louisa Solano Square

Steve Glines, founder of the Wilderness House Literary Review, and Book Designer of the Ibbetson Street Press, took a number of photos of the June 21 dedication of Louisa Solano Square in Harvard Square Cambridge. Louisa Solano was the former owner of the famed Grolier Poetry Book Shop.













Louisa Solano ( Left) Ifeanyi Menkiti ( Right)





John Hodgen (Left) John Hildebidle





" The Group" ( Elsa Dorfman--center)






Sam Cornish (Right)




Louisa Solano




Doug Holder






Harris Gardner ( Background) Louisa Solano Sam Cornish ( Left)





Martha Collins (Right) Louisa Solano ( Left)

Third Wednesday: Review by Zvi Sesling

Third Wednesday
Spring 2008
Volume 1, Issu 3
A publication of Gravity Presses
Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Third Wednesday is a magazine out of Ypsilanti, Michigan. To date they have published three issues (and I have been fortunate to be in two, including the latest). Within its 58 pages and inside back cover you will find some familiar names such as Simon Perchik and Wanda Coleman, maybe some other names you recognize or don’t. In addition to poetry there is art work, photographs, short stories.

The magazine is named for a group of poets who meet each Third Wednesday in Ann Arbor, Michigan (reminds you of the Bagel Bards who meet each week in Somerville and Cambridge). Some of the writers are undoubtedly from this group. However, regardless of where they are from, the material contained in this issue can be interesting and fun to read.

One poem, What Dad Got in the Divorce is a reminder of any separation of two people:
"He turns up the radio/mouths Madonna/and pushes the gas-/a lull of slick tires and fresh rain./Mom’s Chanel lingers in the upholstery-/a ghost that envelops/nauseates, gags me quietly..."

There is also Jan Worth-Nelson’s story, Clover Island, 1984, about looking back on life, sadly. It’s more about what a woman thinks and wants, not about love and tenderness. But then it takes place in Michigan and it gets quite cold up there.
"Half drunk, he follow her whim, stumbles abreast her confident stride through the noisy Pacific beach-side carnival crowd. Air electrified with the squeals and screams of joy riders is likewise peppered by her syrupy notions....." So begins Wanda Coleman’s The Wild Mouse which like Jan Worth-Nelson’s story, is about a woman who doesn’t get what she wants or needs. With a kicker on men.

And there’s Perchik’s untitled poem which begins "These leaves getting fat/the way a child born ravenous/almost devours its mother...

There are intriguing ideas throughout the magazine and Third Wednesday is worth reading and submitting to. You can check them out at thirdwednesday.org and submit to them at submissions@thirdwednesday.org. However, I suggest a read first.

*Zvi Sesling is the winner of the International Reuben Rose Award (2007) and the founder of the "Muddy River Review"

In the summer shade of the Quercus Review (number eight)—Review by Michael Todd Steffen

In the summer shade of the Quercus Review (number eight)—featuring Ed Galing,
an oak of the small press and friend of Boston area poetry.

by Michael Todd Steffen



The summer edition of Quercus Review (number eight), across the country from Modesta, California, will be of interest to Boston area readers and poets and writers. Its featured poet, Ed Galing, at 90 years young, stands as a great oak of the small press, with a publishing career that spans sixty-some years. Ed is known widely to the local eyes of the nation, not least to friend and editor of the Ibbetson Street Press Doug Holder from Somerville.
I became aware of Galing’s work first through the Ibbetson Street web site and in the pages of Holder’s Off the Shelf run weekly in the Somerville News.
The featured section in Quercus gives 42 pages to Galing’s work, the first four consisting of an informal essay by Doug Holder who characterizes Galing’s experience as a “hardscrabble life,” the poet’s compositional effect a “no-bullshit, call a spade a spade style” and his poetry’s turn of wit a “calculated ironic distance.” It is an apt description of a craftsman’s unseeming wisdom and acquired skill with words and sense and how to place them, ever so nonchalantly, as in ONE DAY IN A NURSIN HOME, in which Galing, pushing his wife in a wheelchair to the cafeteria for lunch, is asked where his is taking her, and—

i reply with a smile
i thought today we would go
into the forest, and see the
lake, and the trees, and maybe
stop in the pizza parlor…


Galing’s answer here is as wry as the names of those with whom he plays cards in SENIOR CENTER—

during
lunch.
every day,
there is moe epstein,
abie weisberg, and sam
adelman, and me.

Galing’s poetry bears on you to the extent that you are immersed in language. People of some age and wisdom are keenly attuned to language in a way others are not. Some of us must especially focus in order to perceive the music in what is being said. A dip of the hand
does not find the resistance of wading up to your breastbone in a pool or shoreline. Galing’s wit and expression are so at one with the fluency of his spirit, after these some years, the demarcations in the language, the poetry, simply breathes from him. Ed sums up the almost transparent union in his composition process:

I sit at the electric typewriter and bang them out… It is as if the poem has come to mind long before it develops on paper.

Quercus is a reputable biannual literary journal of poetry, fiction and b & w art, which has featured such names as X.J. Kennedy, Naomi Shihab Nye and Charles Harper.
Their number eight, along with this generous feature of Galing’s work, includes poets and writers from every direction in the United States, from Ashland, Oregon to Bristol, Rhode Island, from Houma, Louisiana to Broomfield, Colorado, not to forget poet Mary P. Chatfield from Cambridge, Massachusetts whose quiet description of waterfowl and winter ice melting on the river in “Waking” reads itself as carefully as the observation “the wing display the splashing the feathering/the reeds.”
The fiction section highlights Frank Arroyo’s “Acceptance,” written with an exquisite patience for detail and palpable ambience. Reserving the story’s plot for your curiosity, I can’t leave this article without quoting from Arroyo’s deft descriptive style, the narrator’s perceptions as a child lying in bed at night toward the end of the story:

The silence of the house turned the air around me electric. I could hear the steady hum of the refrigerator; a car slowly turning some corner, and then speeding up; the wind seemed to rise with some great force, as if the ocean had come with it, leaves crackling against the bottom of the house, the wind caught in the swaying trees, a branch tapping the roof in a steady rhythm. Outside my bedroom window, through the twisting and blurring black branches, I focused on the thick blue air of the back field, how deep and tangible it seemed because for a moment it became a dark ocean of waves rolling with the rhythm of the tapping branch, the bright windows of the distant tenement building bobbing in the waves…

For a peak at this issue of Quercus Review and ordering information go to www.quercusreview.com.

Ibbetson Update/Michael Todd Steffen/June 2008

*Michael Todd Steffen is the winner of the 2007 Ibbetson Poetry Award.

DALE PATTERSON: A Somerville Poet with many hats.

DALE PATTERSON: A Somerville, Mass. Poet with many hats.

Doug Holder

Long-term Somerville resident Dale Patterson is a soft- spoken and modest man, but don’t be fooled by that. He is a well-respected grant writer, a Manager of Development Communications for the Boston Public Library Foundation, a former president of the board of Somerville Community Access TV, a lecturer at Simmons College in Boston, and a runner-up for the 2007 Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award. I interviewed Patterson on my Somerville Community Access TV Show: “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: You are the Manager of Development Communications for the Boston Library Foundation. Describe the function of the board and your position?

Dale Patterson: The foundation was formed in 1992 to do one thing: to raise money for the Boston Public Library for special projects that are insufficiently supported by taxes through the city of Boston, or the people of Massachusetts. It was originally formed to restore the McKim Building; the old wing. Since then it has been polished and spruced up, and that was basically by a public/private partnership. We are still working on the renovations of the third floor. The third floor houses the Fine Art Dept., the Print Dept, etc…. On this floor you will find the Sargent Gallery and John Singer Sargent’s famous work: “The Triumph of Religion.” (1919)

DH: There was a lot of controversy around that work

DP: What got people really angry was the mural that portrayed the Virgin Mary above that collapsed figure that represented Judaism. Not very subtle. Sargent argued that this was very European, and traditional, and that he didn’t mean anything by it at all. There was a national debate that surprised Sargent.

DH: Tell us a bit about the rare book collection?

DP: We have a first folio of Shakespeare out on display, as well as Whitman’s “Two Locomotives,” the hand-written manuscript. Our rare books collection is accessible to the public, but people don’t always know it is up there. It is not always accessible through the electronic catalogue, so you may not find a rare manuscript on Google.

DH: You came back to poetry after a hiatus for many years.

DP: I wrote poetry when I was younger. I was very interested in it in college. I put it away, but always kept it in my thoughts. 9/11 got me started again. I tried to make sense


of the event. I tried to feel better through poetry. Poetry lets me be outside myself…it’s a good thing. People put themselves in all sorts of states to transcend the everyday.


DH: You were president of the board of Somerville Community Access TV. What changes and improvement did you bring during your tenure?

DP: SCAT’S mission now was developed when I was president. We served the community with community-related content. We wanted SCAT as a media center, not just a cable access TV station. This continues to be the case. SCAT has evolved rapidly. We hired the current director Wendy Blom.

DH: You also teach at Simmons College in Boston?

DP: I teach Grant Writing. I enjoy working with social workers. It keeps me up to snuff.

DH: You are a long-time Somerville, Mass. resident. Is this city a good fit for you?

DP: I have lived here since 1996. I lived in Brookline and before that Cambridge. I lived in a house that William Dean Howells resided in, perhaps this inspired my writing. But I really like Somerville.

DH: The poetry I have seen from you recently has been concerned with the environment. Are you a Green Poet?

DP: (Laughs.) I try not to use toxic chemicals. I am very concerned about the environment. How can I walk around pretending everything is all right? We are in the middle of the biggest extinction of the species since the dinosaurs. Hopefully we will have more solar power, and cut down on our abuses.

--Doug Holder



IN TRANSIT

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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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

-- Dale Patterson

The Poet Sees His Family Sleeping by Samuel Charters

The Poet Sees His Family Sleeping

Samuel Charters
Kamini Press 2008
ISBN 978-91-977437-0-9
order@...
www.kaminipress.com $6.

"the girl across from me on the bus
thinks I'm staring at her, but I'm
just trying to read the advertisements over
her head. she scowls with pursed mouth
as sour as if I'd reached across the aisle
and tried to touch her,
since to her I look old."

Samuel Charters, like Whitman, asserts the mundane,
every day occurrences, the back and forth realities.
You are me. I am you. In his first poem in this small
volume of poetry, he brushes our ears, takes us on an
intimate journey through his writing rooms. The reader
becomes the child, parent, sky, night, "I move slowly
for a last time from one to the other."

Charters is open; he presents lust in a casual,
dignified manner. "what she presents of her elegant
thigh, slides beneath her swirling skirt." His poems
open all the windows and doors on a spring day, even
the heat of autumn bearing down over our laden walk,
we sit on his bench and breath.

"I notice that the deck needs painting,
I notice that it's still hot, that my legs are
too red for me to think of doing any
work in the garden.
I notice that the sunlight
wasn't given eyes or ears. it won't
see me if I sweat - or don't sweat."

Readers will enjoy the intimacy, the fit in your hand
size, the smooth way in which the poems appear and
gather into a complete song.

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

Case Fbdy by Kate Schapira

Case Fbdy
Kate Schapira
rope-a-dope press 2007
rope-a-dope-press.blogspot.com

Some of the language in this book of poems comes from,

"a found page of text from a medical journal."
Schapira's inspiration from the one page is fused with
meaning; an honest presentation of characters and
situations we may identify with.

"practice from the outside to the trachea
get her to swallow half the battle. limit
use to a similar instrument. this original
observation of the authors has been observed."

Case Fbdy is a tiny book carefully considered, hand
sewn, folded and more importantly, Kate Schapira
blends the words, each poem becomes her own, then it
becomes the readers:

"old enough to swallow herself
girls seem to be prone
with heads downward. attention
transfixes across the lumen
her obligation. chores.
like on little house
on the prairie sundays
no work as possible
as folded stillness.
staring. aged. enough.
cure. inhale. one every
year for the rest of your
life. see how you've grown"

There are eighteen poems in this unique book. All the
poems stand on their own as they meld with each other.
I will chose to read these poems over and over again;
it is insightful and requires frequent readings. Don't
let the size fool you. This book is an important
presence and deserves a careful read.

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

Interview with Poet, and Polymath Hugh Fox: Still a Wunderkind at 76

( Hugh Fox and his wife)

Poet, and Polymath Hugh Fox: Still a Wunderkind at 76

With Doug Holder



At the Sherman Café in Union Square, I met poet, translator, critic, playwright, Hugh Fox and his wife before a taping we were to do at Somerville Community Access TV of my show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.” Fox was visiting his daughter who lives in Somerville and teaches at area universities. Two of my next-door neighbors Kirk and Lucy joined us as Fox held court. At age 76 Fox no signs of slowing down. He regaled us with stories of his extensive travels, all peppered with his vast wealth of knowledge of ancient Aztec culture, mythology, literature, and publishing. Fox talks like a Bronx cabdriver, (decidedly from the side-of-his mouth,) and he is not afraid to use, to put it mildly, unsavory language. My friend described him as “Larger than life.” And so he is.

Fox, who was a tenured professor at the Michigan State for well over 30 years, recently completed a controversial memoir “Way, Way Off the Road” (Ibbetson Street) that dealt with many of the figures from the small press movement, a movement that has produced thousands of small literary magazines and books, and is the lifeblood of poets and writers of all stripes. Fox was a founding member of COSMEP, (a seminal small press organization), he published the well regarded literary magazine “Ghost Dance,”and penned the first critical study of the dirty old man of literature himself, Charles Bukowski. Fox has written and published many books and chapbooks of poetry, and has reviewed countless small press books for Len Fulton’s “Small Press Review.”



Doug Holder: Hugh you wrote critical studies of Henry James and Charles Bukowski, two vastly different writers. Whom did you have the greater affinity for?
.


Hugh Fox: I got my PhD from the University of Illinois and my dissertation was on Edgar Allen Poe. I was raised as an Irish Catholic, and all I read was Irish Catholic literature. I had no idea what was in the outside world. I decided to take on Henry James because it would be an Americanization process and I thought I would learn to write novels. I did like James’ work a lot.

I never intended to get involved with Bukowski. I was totally academic. And then one day I was in this bookstore in Hollywood, the “Pickwick,” (I saw Aldous Huxley at the store that day as well. I was reading him for years. There was this old woman standing next to me, and I said to her: “Look there’s Aldous Huxley!” She said: “ Don’t know what you are saying!” He heard us and then vanished!) So I bought Bukowski’s book: “Crucifix and the Death Hand.” I got a hold of his press LouJon in New Orleans, and they told me to look him up in the phonebook. So I called him up and said: “This is Hugh Fox. I love your work. I want to meet you.” He said OK come over tomorrow. He was living in a motel in Hollywood. I talked with him awhile. He took out these suitcases. There were all his books and magazines in them. He gave me five full suitcases. He told me if I saw doubles to keep them. My entire way of seeing the world changed after this. Bukowski and Henry Miller were big influences of change for me.

DH: You were friends with Harry Smith, the book publisher, and founder of “The Smith” magazine. Smith published such writers as: Duane Locke, Ruth Moon Kempher, John Bennett, Lloyd Van Brunt, Jeff Sorensen, Alan Britt, and Tristram Smith as well as my friends Luke Salisbury and Jared Smith. Can you talk about your relationship with Smith?

Hugh Fox: I’ll tell you what happened. Smith had no money at all. He meets Marian Pechak up in Rhode Island at Brown. So he marries her. Her parents die and she gets millions. So they move to Brooklyn Heights. They had a big Brownstone mansion. So Smith tells her he wants to be a publisher. His wife said:” Hey, we have the money do what you want to do”. So he started to publish. He had an office right by City Hall in New York City. I met Smith through COSMEP. I used to go to Smith’s all the time. I go between semesters, the summer; I’d go for a month a year for twenty years. Smith published everyone who was anyone. I did a lot of reviews for him. He paid me—I stayed at his house—he set up the basement for me. We used to go out for lunch and dinner. His wife told the kids to call me: “Uncle Hugh.” I was closer to Smith than anyone else. Through him I met Menke Katz who was a Yiddish writer.

DH: You edited the groundbreaking anthology “The Living Underground,” that our Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish was in. How did you get this collection together?

HF: It was formed due to my connection with COSMEP. This was the “Committee of Small Press Editors and Publishers.” Len Fulton and others formed it in the early 70’s. Len Fulton still runs the magazine “The Small Press Review and “Dustbooks Publishing” in Paradise, California. COSMEP used to have annual conventions around the country: St. Paul, New York, and New Orleans. Every convention had a huge reading. Almost every small press editor in the country was there. I got to meet all the writers and all the publishers. I got to know people in Boston, and of course Sam Cornish was in Boston, and as it happened he was included in “The Living Underground…” He was at the convention in Boston.

DH: What is an “underground poet?”

HF: Someone who is not published by the big New York publishers.

DH: What was “groundbreaking” about the anthology?

HF: We had living, contemporary small press poets. We had folks like Charles Potts, Richard Krech, and many others. We had a reunion almost forty years later in Berkley, Ca.

DH: How did you get involved with the small press literary award the “Pushcart Prize?”

HF: I got involved through a COSMEP conference in New Orleans. The Prize doesn’t have as much impact as it did in the day. I go to a Barnes and Noble today and nobody is
buying anything, everyone is there with his or her computer. Everyone is having coffee with their computers.


DH: Hugh you are the most prolific reviewer I know. How did you get involved with reviewing books, and why do you spend so much time on an activity that doesn’t provide you with monetary compensation?

HF: I became good friends with Len Fulton of the Small Press Review. Now, every four months or so I get a package of books to read. It’s good for me because I get to find out what’s going on with the poets. It influences my style—all these poets I read. It helps me get my name in the Small Press Review all the time. I want to be involved.

DH: Your are the doyen of the short review. How are you able to get to the essence of a book with such few words?

HF: Before I go to bed I always read a few things. Then I just react to it. It’s funny it is like I listen to an inner voice. The inner voice tells me what to write. The reason I got a degree in American Literature was really to learn how to write reviews of books. To react to books. My first draft of my Poe dissertation was horrible. My advisor said as much. He told me that I was going to write his way. He said: “ You are going to react, feel, and so forth. I learned to react. I learned this from academic teaching.

DH: You said you always considered yourself a wunderkind, a boy genius. How about now at 76?

HF: The same at 76. I haven’t aged mentally or psychologically. I’m still 26. I may have cancer of the prostate, arthritis, but my mind is the same. When I was in California recently I wrote 100 poems in two weeks.

DH: What do you want your legacy to be?

HF: I haven’t thought about it. I would like to see other people do the same thing. I want them to react to the world around them.


--Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update/ June 2008/Somerville, Mass.

Bagels with the Bards 3 edited by Molly Lynn Watt

Bagels With the Bards #3 (click on title to order)
Edited by Molly Lynn Watt
ISBN 978-0-6152-0762-9
88 pages at 15.95 paperback
Ibbetson Street Press
25 School Street
Somerville MA 02143

According to the Introduction by Regie O’Hare Gibson, a Bagel Bard is “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 into a golden brown.” The Bards featured in this anthology of 55 poems by 51 poets come together as writers over breakfast every Saturday morning. Every poet -- famous, unknown, or somewhere in between -- is welcome to share breakfast with the Bagel Bards while baking up some tasty treats.

I’ve chosen not to quote from any particular poem in this review. The work here is as individual and unique as each contributing Bard. Delighted readers will find a variety of styles and forms, including ekphrasia, prose poems, villanelle, and free form poetry. Between these covers can be found little day-to-day deaths, dreams, and wounds, lost causes and dead ends presented in playful, whimsical, and experimental ways.

If you haven’t discovered the Bagel Bards yet, start with their latest anthology. Short of having breakfast with them at the Au Bon Pain, reading the results of their Saturday mornings is the next best thing.

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

TOUCH CREATURES: SELECTED POEMS. Ryk McIntyre.

TOUCH CREATURES: SELECTED POEMS. Ryk McIntyre. http://destructibleheart.com $10

Ryk McIntyre is such an accomplished spoken word artist you forget how well his stuff works on the page. His wit is both deliciously subtle, and can also have the impact of a cream pie smacked in your unsuspecting face. McIntyre cut his teeth on the Boston poetry scene in the early 80’s, and if you have been around the block it would have been hard to have missed him at the many venues he read at, organized, hosted, etc…over the years. McIntyre has a hilarious and pithy poetry book out “ Touching Creatures…” that deals with his own creature comforts, those creatures or monsters who lurk in his fevered imagination or on the Silver Screen. McIntyre also writes about childhood friends, old movies; all his signature themes are in this collection. In his poem the “Jesus of Ugly” McIntyre realizes that beauty is skin deep, but ugly is to the very bone:

“ I’m a good example of a bad example,
I’ve never been one of them personable people,
but I got a good face for some bad memories,
Mirrors and me, we have agreed
if I don’t look at them, they don’t talk shit to me.

God must be Ugly,’ cause he gave me so much.
Was beauty born without two good feet,
and needs the crutch? One look at this face,
don’t your heart skip double- dutch? Don’t it clutch?
Medusa looked at his face and just had to get stoned.
Look up “ugly” in your Webster’s-that’s me:”

And talk about original work, how many poems can you recall that deal with an “aging” vampire. In “Old Blood” McIntyre writes about this poor old “sucker”:

“I am old.
I smell bad.
Hey, you sleep in the same dirt for five hundred years!
And I am not interested in going to a bar so we can talk
About how much you wish you were me.
I don’t drink…whiney people.

Okay, fine. I am a vampire!
But it’s not this hot-shit sex-thing you kids think.
The grim truth? Nothing stays stiff in the grave.
I don’t even take people in their beds anymore.
The last time I tried? You remember my bad back?
I made a very funny bat, hahaha….


Look kid, the best bloodsuckers today?
They’re alive and hold Law Degrees,
Not a cape and a badly faked European accent..”


Highly Recommended.