Gerald Richman: A Collector and Keeper of Fiction in Boston

Gerald Richman: A Collector and Keeper of Fiction Set in Boston



Gerald Richman is an energetic man, with a white bristle mustache and a strong sense of purpose. Richman, a professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston, is the creator of an online bibliography the: “Annotated Bibliography of Fiction Set in Boston.” It started out as a two page reading list for a course Richman taught: “Boston: A City of Fiction” at Suffolk. Later it turned into a 40-page list, and presently it is an online list of 240 pages, with thousands of entries and detailed annotations. I talked with Richman on my Somerville Community Access TV Show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: To undertake a detailed project such as this you to have a touch of the obsessive. There was a Dr. Minor (June 1834 – March 26, 1920) who was quite obsessive, locked away in a mental hospital in England, who was a major contributor to Oxford English Dictionary for instance.

Gerald Richman: I don’t think I am as obsessive as all that. But in some ways I have gone into more detail than I expected. The bibliography was about 40 pages long in Dec. 2007. I thought by March I would be putting the finishing touches on it. But I am not finished. Simply put, writers will continue to write novels set in the greater Boston area in 2008, 9, and beyond. There are older novels that I have missed. There are 20th century novels I missed. I even missed 19th century novels, in spite of all my searches on Google, WorldCat, etc… I stumbled on these and I added them to the bibliography. It has become a little bit of a burden on me. I know I will never complete it. By its very nature it’s never going to be completed.

DH: Are you ever going to pass it on to anyone?

GR: I never thought about it, accept to the fact that I will do it. Because of the nature of the Internet it will remain online in spite of what Suffolk does to it. The “Internet Wayback Machine” has a good portion of my bibliography.

DH: Is there a need for a resource such as this with Google, and all the other search engines, etc… available?

GR: My bibliography makes the search a lot easier. For instance: If someone was interested in all the fiction written about the Boston Red Sox they could find it. Like: “Murder at Fenway Park,” or several novels before 2004 that deal with the fictional breaking of the ‘Curse”—can all be found. If someone had to look in WorldCat or Google, it would be piecemeal. I am an organizer. I don’t do anything creative

DH: So what was your motivation to undertake this?

GC: It was originally to fill in the gaps of a reading list in a course I taught: “Boston: The City In Fiction.” There were no great works of fiction set in Boston between the Revolutionary War and the 1870’s, where Henry James and William Dean Howells set their novels. The Irish immigration, commercial development, rural New Englanders leaving the farm, many came to Boston and changed the face of the city. That was the gap I wanted to fill.

DH: Do you have to be a native Bostonian to write good fiction set in Boston?

GR: You don’t have to be a native Bostonian to write good fiction. For instance “The Last Hurrah” by Edwin O’Connor was written by an author who was born in Providence, the author James Carroll is also an outsider. Although you don’t have to be a native, in certain ways it helps. Jean Stafford, who wasn’t a native Bostonian, wrote “ Boston Adventure” which did a wonderful job of depicting Boston. Her introduction to the Boston aristocracy was no doubt from her husband Robert Lowell and his family.

DH: What is unique about fiction in Boston?

GR: There is no one single thing because there are many Bostons. In Beacon Hill upper crust Boston fiction, what’s important is not how much money you make, but who are your relatives. In this society cousins are all married to each other. Elizabeth Hardwick wrote in an article about Boston that you have to watch out about what you say in this stratum because you never know who is related to whom.

DH: I am going to throw out a few books I loved that were set in Boston and have you comment on them.

“The Last Hurrah.” Edwin O’Connor.

GR: An interesting book because it actually never mentions the word Boston. When I was researching “Fiction Set In Boston” on Google, etc…the book didn’t come up.

DH: The book was based on the political life of the late and very colorful Boston mayor James Michael Curley. What did he think of it?

GR: Jack Beatty, the author of “The Rascal King” the biography of Curley said that Curley would sue at the drop of a hat. When the film version with Spencer Tracy came out, Curley supposedly had a show down with Warner Brothers. There was a world premier in Boston and Curley wanted his cut of the gate.

Once, by chance O’Connor found himself in a taxi or subway with Curley. Curley said to him: “You know the best part of the book was when I died.” One of the minor characters in the book said (while the Curley character was in a coma): “I’ll bet he is in hell.” Curley briefly came out of his coma and said “I’d do it all again.”

DH: “The Late George Appley” by John Phillips Marquand.

GR: I never used it in my courses because although it was once a very popular novel, it would go a little slow in class. The character, George Appley, was a satire of an outdated, decent, but lost in the modern world Brahmin. When he tried to meddle in politics he was easily outwitted. It isn’t a great work of literature. It is an interesting book in the context of Boston.

DH: “ The Friends of Eddie Coyle” George Higgins.

GR: I thought it was a very good book. I was disappointed by its lack of “Boston ness” It seemed superficial. It could have taken place in Detroit or New York.

DH: What are the criteria for being included in the bibliography?

GR: It has to take place in the greater Boston area.

DH: You are obviously a bibliophile.

GR: I love books. I love Boston. I never actually lived here. I worked here for many years. My great grandparents lived in the West End.

DH: Are scholars using this bibliography?

GR: It’s being used but not really by scholars. I did get an inquiry from Michael Kenney of The Boston Globe who published a literary map of Boston in The Globe. He found my bibliography online. I get inquiries from people who are going to visit Boston for the first time

Bibliography URL:

http://webcas.cas.suffolk.edu/richman/Boston/bosbib.htm

---Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update

Riverborne: A Mississippi Requiem, by Peter Neil Carroll

Riverborne: A Mississippi Requiem, by Peter Neil Carroll, 2008, 73 pp., CT,
Higganum Hill Books. ISBN-13:978-0-9776556-9-4. Paper: $12.95

Reviewed by Jared Smith,
8/12/08



Riverborne traces the erosion, confluences, and-inevitably-growth that is
available to men of awareness, even as the Mississippi River itself erodes
and gives promise to our continent and society. It is a remarkable book, a
leaning back into the time when poetry was both literature and timeless
social commentary.



It is a collection of poems built around the brotherhood of two men, one
black and one white, who have lived their separate lives together for over
40 years, wandering the country and building lives and families, following
cross-country roads, reading and teaching and loving, losing wives, going
on. More than a discussion or remembrance from these men, it is a book of
correspondence with past literary figures, most prominently Mark Twain, and
the American voices he created and recorded. And it is a discourse with the
waters themselves, and the backwater tributaries that pour into the vast
Mississippi drainage along with their pollutants and other industrial
discharges, and basic "FOUR WORD SIGNS" of eternal hope and food. All of
these are washed away, immersed in the waters, and brought back as something
more complex and stronger, more multi-textured and more seasoned, than the
individual visions these men set out with 25 years ago when they first
traveled along the banks of America's river.



Dates in time are given in the titles of the opening poems of this book,
emphasizing that change and growth happen over lifetimes, but soon the exact
dates disappear from the titles "gone the way two men get bleached/under
fast moving suns, rained upon, lose/ the shade of hair, their speed." Time
itself becomes another mingling force within the stream, another distillant.
Known objects, animate and inanimate change their places and interact: "we
parallel their path on the bridged height,/approach tall branches of bare
trees/dressed with castaway pairs of gym shoes/a girl's brassiere, strange
ritual of wintered students.Here, I said to Jim, 'Here's where we start.'"



The travel a landscape of real symbols.hard, bitter, cruel, and shock-edged:

One sun-glassed cyclist's lettered leather jacket:

IF YOU CAN READ THIS

THE BITCH FELL OFF

'Fell or jumped?' cracks Jim;

he knows about women

who leave men in a hurry.

Her dream; his fear; her insistence; his fury.



Time and experience speak from varied perspective echoes.overlapping
universes subsumed in poetic vision. The varied locational echoes are
important, adding depth and pull to the currents:

The running river speaks in signs, spills a low wave

to shore, startles a bare-armed mother spoon-feeing

her baby on the grass. Slow sun scorches

the torpid air, the wakened man lifts

a staticky radio to his ear,

catches the first pitch from St. Louis.



There are disembodied shocks that pull one in and out of reality:

"and then Jim spots real trouble in very fine print

THIS PARK MONITORED BY VIDEO SURVEILLANCE



Well, as this book develops its full field of experience, it becomes clear
that when you break away, when you are free even in a media-covered country
scared of its own shadows, you cannot be nailed to time. You cannot be
monitored by video surveillance because the force of life lies outside of
time. The river is to vast, too complex within its currents, too inevitable
for technology or paranoia to comprehend.



Here is America's heartbeat:

two spinning rivers writhe in circles,

charge into the watery labyrinth:

another beat, another maddened run.



Here is America's torn body,

battered as the continent.

Here tectonic plates broke the earth,

shuddered plains, shook the river

until her water ran backward.



Here in this book is a slow building power that can splinter and reshape us
in the heart of our country, where the New Madrid fault will someday
reassert itself in the heartland of our country,

as it did in 1811 and 1812 when the waters rolled backward as they will
again. This is a book well worth reading and keeping on your shelf, and an
experience well worth keeping in your mind.

BREAK TIME edited by Joe Bergin

BREAK TIME

The Carpenter Poets of Jamaica Plain

Edited By Joseph Bergin

@ 2007

www.carpenterpoets.org

Review by Lo Galluccio





“Dedicated to the men and women everywhere who practice the trade and craft of carpentry.”



This handsomely bound edition of poems by a collective of JP Carpenters contains many gems. From the sublime to the crude, the rugged to the rude, and on a level both seemingly pedestrian, but profound, it captures many facets of the thinking minds and labors of carpenter-poets. In fact what it does, is break the stereotype that there must be a division between the angelic thinkers and the industrious hands. The industrious have their muses and angels too, once they set about evoking them. For they emerge from after-hours jokes, nails and 2 x 4’s and the wily and noble task of measuring and fitting beams. Whatever the carpenter is building, his/her service is also a service to mankind and to the Earth’s maker. Certainly these poets can really sass out some poems.



In the Introduction they write:



“There’s much to be said about the parallels between writing and carpentry. There’s the act of creating something out of common supplies, fitting board to board, word to word, the beauty of the product and the pride in the craft. The house we live in, that poem that lives in us.”



In his poem, “Federalist Style” Jerry Abelow writes:



“A place for Puritans to hide.

soapstone sink, big and wide….”



“Growers of all kind.

sitting in the kitchen.

speaking their mind.

choke cherry trees

in the front yard.”



For me these lines evoke William Carlos Williams – “so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens” and New England’s wintry pride. The images here are crisp and the scene is vivid.









In “Life is Grand” Cyrus Beer writes:



“It’s hard to explain at dawn on a frigid winter morn

with boogers that are black, and fingers worn

But life is grand.”



As Joe Bergin, the chief of this project, a number of whose poems are featured, writes:



“Brave men all who face danger each day

for to create their brand of artisinal perfection

the little wisdoms on the job.

learned from repetition and countless errors elevate you.”



In addition, Joe turns in some finely attuned rhyme schemes and lyric verse on his trade. In “Carpenter Etiquette” he writes:



“Don’t block the driveway

Or leave tire marks on a wet lawn

Or arrive early Saturday morning

And start machinery at dawn

Burn offerings to the goddess of safety

And make your rig strong

Go ahead! Do it!

Climb up that 4-story staging

Just like King Kong!”





This is a worthwhile collection to read for anyone who believes in the concrete value of a real world, a natural world, put into lyrical forms.



Perhaps my favorite line of all is:



“Sing the praise of the forest loudly.”







Lo Galluccio

Ibbetson St. Press

Interview with poet, translator Clayton Eshleman: The Man Who Translated Vallejo.

Interview with poet, translator Clayton Eshleman: The Man Who Translated Vallejo

With Doug Holder


“ Cesar Vallejo is Peru's greatest poet. And Clayton Eshleman is a rare phenomenon who, as a translator, has unwaveringly dedicated five decades to making the poetry of Vallejo ring true, as evidenced by his massive “ The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition / Cesar Vallejo." One can’t ask more of a translator.” Tino Villanueva (Winner of the American Book Award)

“ There’s no one else on the contemporary scene with Eshleman’s width, depth and multiplicity, at home with ju ju bands, Yeats, Jay Leno, Byzantium abstracts, you name it, he’s inside it. He’s Mr. Synthesizer, summing up, overviewing, envisioning, always saying he’d like to be more humble and lowly, but always becoming more complex, multilingual and multicultural.” Hugh Fox( Founding member of the Pushcart Prize)

********************************************************************

Boston University professor Tino Villanueva emailed me recently to inform me that noted translator Clayton Eshleman was coming to the Boston-area in the fall. He is to read at the Brookline Booksmith and the Pierre Menard Gallery in October from a new collection of his work published by the local Black Widow Press. Villanueva asked me if I would be interested in interviewing Eshleman as he was the groundbreaking translator of Cesar Vallejo ( 1892-1938), the Peruvian poet, and one of the great innovators of 20th century. His poetry is distinct, and a step ahead of others in his day. Although in is his short lifetime he only published three collections of poetry, his work was revolutionary. Vallejo took the Spanish language to new heights of raw emotionalism. He experimented with grammatical norms, and struck at the dogma and rhetoric of the Catholic Church.

Clayton Eshleman is probably best known for being the editor and translator for his definitive work: “The Complete Poetry /A Bilingual Edition/Cesar Vallejo” ( Univ. of California Press). Eshleman has published numerous collections of poetry, birthed two noted small press magazines, was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, received grants from the NEA , was the winner of the Landon Translation Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was the recipient of a National Book Award, to name a few honors.

Eshleman will read from “Grindstone of Rapport: A Clayton Eshleman Reader” ( Black Widow Press) Oct 16th 7PM at the Brookline Booksmith, and Oct 17th 7PM at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Mass.







**************************************************************************









Doug Holder: For some reason back in the late 50’s you were adrift. After taking some American poetry courses, and creative writing workshops—poetry took its hold on you. What attracted you to this genre as opposed to fiction etc…?


Clayton Eshelman: While I was a student at Indiana University in the late 1950s, I not only took a course in 20th century American poetry, but met at more or less the same time two poets: Jack Hirschman, who introduced me to 20th century European poetry, and Mary Ellen Solt, who knew William Carlos Williams, and brought back to Bloomington after a visit to Rutherford, books by Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson, which she immediately showed me. Also in this period, via Colin Wilson’s 1956 book, The Outsider, I discovered the writings of Blake, Lawrence, Kafka, and the paintings of van Gogh—and was offered the editorship of the English Department literary journal, Folio. Up to that point, the magazine had only published student and faculty writing. I wrote to Duncan, Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Allen Ginsberg, and asked them for poems. All were interested that something seemed to be happening at Indiana University and sent Folio work. Then I hitchhiked to Mexico the summer of 1959, having also discovered the poetry of Pablo Neruda. Curiously I did not meet any people writing fiction at Indiana University. On one occasion I worked on a short story but as soon as I finished it I put it aside and forgot about it. Something was simmering right under the surface of me in those days and poetry heated it into a boil. Overnight, as it were, I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

DH: You wrote in the afterword of in “The Complete Poetry: Cesar Vallejo,” that Vallejo’s poetry is:”…the imaginative expression of the inability to resolve contradictions of man as an animal, divorced from nature as well as from sustaining faith and caught in the trivia of socialized life.”

I can see elements of that in Whitman’s and Eliot’s poetry and the list goes on. What is unique about Vallejo’s take other than the fact he was writing in Soanish?

CE: I believe what I wrote about Vallejo that you quote is unique to him, especially in the way that he expresses it, not only through his own suffering but through a compassionate identification with the suffering of humankind.

Whitman’s sense of self-discovery, probably via a mystical sexual encounter (addressed in Section 5 of the 1855 “Song of Myself”) was tied into an idealism (in spite of The Civil War) that protected—deflected—him from facing the real human condition.
Eliot simply could not write about his own life in any direct and honest way. Ezra Pound’s editorial involvement in what “The Wasteland” became is so formidable as to make him co-author of the poem. And while the spiritual emptiness of life, according to Eliot, is certainly present in the poem, such only indirectly evokes his lived life.

DH: You wrote that while translating Vallejo you were struggling with the old “Clayton” who was resisting change. Vallejo was forcing you to break out of the “ Presbyterian world of light,” that you were born to. If you hadn’t discovered this poet how might your life be different?

CE : My life would be less rich than it is today. However, I was also reading all of Blake while I was translating the Poemas humanos in Kyoto, as well as Charles Olson, Charles Baudelaire, and Walt Whitman, and I think I could have found my way under their charge. Your question makes me recall: I once passed out while reading Blake. Years later, Gary Snyder who was also living in Kyoto in the early 1960s told me that he had dropped by for an unexpected visit, seen me sprawled on the tatami next to a copy of Blake’s The Book of Urizen, and, assuming I was napping, went away.

DH: To translate a body of work it seems you have to live with it 24/7; to you really have to merge with the artist. Is there a certain kind of madness attached to this?

CE: No more madness in translating, and probably much less, that there is at the heart of poetry itself. Or let’s call it visionary madness, the desire to pull the literal world inside out and turn it into an imaginative world. Translating is very scholarly activity and the translator, if he is to do good work in my sense of it, has to set fantasy and his own poetics aside while he is at work.

DH: Can you talk about the two small literary magazines you founded: Caterpillar and Sulfur?

CE: In New York City, in 1967, I realized that I was part of a very interesting new generation coming into poetry, and that we had no journal to support our work. Caterpillar, which ran from 1967 to 1973 (20 issues), besides including artwork, commentary, and translations, published the poetry of Robert Kelly, Frank Samperi, Jerome Rothenberg, Diane Wakoski, Jack Hirschman, Gary Snyder, David Antin, Adrienne Rich, Larry Eigner, the very young Rae Armantrout and Ron Silliman, as well as older poets such as Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Lorine Neidecker. Sulfur, which ran from 1981 to 2000 (46 issues) was, in essence, an expansion of Caterpillar.
Besides contemporary poetry, artwork, commentary (negative as well as positive), and a lot of translations, Sulfur also published a lot of archival material—writing by the great dead (otherwise moldering in special collections libraries), such as Olson, Antonin Artaud, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, and Hart Crane. My idea with Sulfur was to keep several generations “alive” in a modernist/postmodernist context that was international.
Your readers may be interested in reading an three-way conversation about our magazines between me, Paul Hoover, and Maxine Chernoff, in the current issue of the on line magazine, Jacket.



DH: You have been published by Black Sparrow and New Directions. Do you have any anecdotes about James Laughlin of New Directions or John Martin of Black Sparrow? How important is the small press for translators?

CE: New Directions published me in a couple of their Annuals, but they have never published any of my books. I had only the slightest acquaintance with James Laughlin. Black Sparrow, on the other hand, published fifteen of my books and my wife Caryl and I were close friends of John and Barbara Martin for many years. We all had some great times together. Caryl and I moved in almost next door to the Martins in West Los Angeles in 1974, and after they moved to Santa Barbara and then to Santa Rosa we were invited for many weekend visits. Barbara and I liked to cook together. While John’s heart belonged to Bukowski (a poet I have never had a drop of interest in) he published all the poetry I sent him for some thirty years in handsome, responsibly-produced editions. And he did the same thing for Kelly and Wakoski. I once pushed him clothed into his swimming pool in Santa Barbara to show him how much I cared about him.

I would say that small or alternative presses have been as important for the translation of poetry as university presses—or that has been my experience, having had translations published by Exact Change and Soft Skull as well as University of California Press and Wesleyan University Press.

DH: Can you talk about your latest collection from Boston’s Black Widow Press “Grindstone of Rapport: A Clayton Eshleman Reader?” Is this what you would consider the definitive collection of your work? Can you talk about your association with the Black Widow Press/

CE: The Grindstone of Rapport, due out this October from Black Widow Press in Boston is in no way a definitive collection of my work—thanks to the generosity of Joe Phillips, the publisher of Black Widow Press, it is an ample Eshleman Reader, 630 pages of poetry, prose, and translations, spanning over 40 years of publications. It is, so far, the most accurate overview of what I have been up to since the early 1960s.

At the point that John Martin retired (and ended Black Sparrow Press as I knew it), I had to find a new publisher. I asked the Breton translator/scholar Mark Polizzotti, who lives in Boston, if he had any ideas. He wrote me that there was a new press in the city publishing French Surrealist poetry in translation, and that he thought they might be interested in my work. So I sent the manuscript of what became An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire (2006) to Joe, and he accepted it several days later. In 2007, he brought out a collection of prose poems, essays, notes, and interviews, called Archaic Design. I consider myself very lucky to have connected with Black Widow Press.




DH: Noted poet and translator Hugh Fox said told me you are the signature example of the American poet success story? How do you respond to that?




CE: I feel that I have been moderately successful as a poet. I have always had a publisher, and I have been invited to read at hundreds of universities (and had a decent teaching gig at Eastern Michigan University for 17 years—1986-2003). However, I am not successful in the way that John Ashbery or Adrienne Rich are. My work has always been published by small/alternative presses, I have never been invited to read at, say, the 92nd Street Y in NYC, or at the Dodge Festival, and have never received any of the big grants or prizes, like a MacArthur, Lilly, or Griffin. While it is too complex to go into here, I find it disappointing that my work, along with that of Robert Kelly and Jerome Rothenberg, has never been the subject of much study or scholarship. We seem to be part of a ghost generation, eclipsed between the peaking of the Olson/Duncan generation (right before us) and the Language Poets who, in the 1970s and 1980s, were taken by many to be the new innovative kids on the block. I feel that Robert, Jerry, and myself have made a formidable contribution to American poetry, one that has hardly, really, been considered so far.



Paris, October 1936

From all of this I am the only one who leaves.
From this bench I go away, from my pants,
from my great situation, from my actions,
from my number split side to side,
from all of this I am the only one who leaves.

From the Champs Elysées or as the strange
alley of the Moon makes a turn,
my death goes away, my cradle leaves,
and, surrounded by people, alone, cut loose,
my human resemblance turns around
and dispatches its shadows one by one.

And I move away from everything, since everything
remains to create my alibi:
my shoe, its eyelet, as well as its mud
and even the bend in the elbow
of my own buttoned shirt.

--Cesar Vallejo

Translated by Clayton Eshleman



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

N.S. Koenings takes the reader across continents from her home in Union Square….

N.S. Koenings takes the reader across continents from her home in Union Square…


Recently I was on a literary panel on the Somerville Community Access TV show “Art Matters.” One of the writers on the panel was N.S. Koenings. Koenings who lives in the Union Square section of the city, teaches at Hampshire College in Western, Mass, and is originally from East Africa. She told me that she has lived on three continents, traveled extensively, so her fiction is not situated in one particular place. This is a frightening prospect for a Somerville provincial such as myself.

Koenings said she makes her long, once-a-week trip to Hampshire College to teach writing. She chooses to live in Somerville because of its vibrant arts community. In the ‘ville she has enough distance from her job that she can let her hair down, and drop the professorial persona for a bit.

Koenings the author of “Blue Taxi,” has a new collection of short stories out “Theft.” (Little Brown and Company). Like the author, who has a decided case of wanderlust, it takes place across continents and is full of vivid detail. Koenings deals with love and loss in Belgium, in Africa, and other non-Somerville site-specific locales around the world.

In the story “ Pearls to Swine” Koenings deals with a long-married, routine- stifled, couple living on a beautiful estate nestled in the hills outside a rural Belgium village. A couple of young female visitors interrupt their routine, and place a mirror to the wife’s blindness around the limits of her life and fuel a smoldering anger in her seemingly dormant husband.

If the devil is in the detail, then Koenings has flushed the bugger out. The author does paint a lovely picture. Here are the early morning hours as described by the wife: I wish I had this arrangement at my corner in the Sherman café:


“ You know I am always up at five to make the bread. For those first three days I made cramique, with raisins and lump sugar…and I’d set the table with clothes we got in Egypt. And arrange the fruit jars in the center of the table: gooseberry, blackberry, and my favorite, a clever marmalade I do with winter oranges from Spain. Then I’d pull the heavy curtains so I could feel the light change. I love this place best at dawn, when the sky gets keen with that strange blue that comes between the sunset and the night.”

The title story “Theft” tells a tale of a young East African bus tout, and a young woman tourist from Philadelphia. Both are very lost in their own ways. This story takes us on a cross-cultural existential journey in a heady exotic locale.

Koenings tells me she is thrilled getting this book published, and is also looking forward to be more involved with the writing community in Somerville. All I can say is: “Welcome Aboard!”

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update

Review of the Ed Galing Propaganda Press Series by Pam Rosenblatt

(Ed Galing)



Diner (Propaganda Press, Alternating Current, P.O. Box 398058, Cambridge, MA 02139) alt-current.com

By Ed Galing


Bargain Basement and other selected poems (Propaganda Press, Alternating Current, P.O. Box 398058, Cambridge, MA 02139) alt-current.com

By Ed Galing


Out On A Limb (Propaganda Press, Alternating Current, P.O. Box 398058, Cambridge, MA 02139) alt-current.com

By Ed Galing


Shadows on the Wall (Propaganda Press, Alternating Current, P.O. Box 398058, Cambridge, MA 02139) alt-current.com

By Ed Galing


Chasing The World never catching up (Propaganda Press, Alternating Current, P.O. Box 398058, Cambridge, MA 02139) alt-current.com

By Ed Galing



Five of Ed Galing chapbooks have been reprinted by Propaganda Press in 2008: Diner (Peerless Press, 1999), Bargain Basement (Peerless Press, 2001), Out On A Limb (Peerless Press, 2002), and Shadows on the Wall (Peerless Press, 2006) and Chasing The World never catching up (Propaganda Press, 2008).

In each of these chapbooks, Ed Galing reveals poetry that is down-to-earth, concrete, and filled with wit. The typical reader probably thinks he can create poems just as wonderful as Galing writes. But, most likely, the reader turned poet is wrong. Galing’s poetry isn’t easy to recreate. Galing makes everything he writes look easy. Even the designs of his five chapbooks are plain and simple: 8 ½” x 11” standard white paper with a muted colored covers folded in half and held together with two regular sized staples along with no tables of contents pages or page numbers. Even the chapbooks’ titles are down to earth. Each title is developed from a poem within each of the chapbook, except for Chasing The World never catching up, a collection of poems first published by Spare Change. The titles’ simplicity make the reader wonder why Galing has chosen these particular titles, these particular poems. While Chasing The World never catching up, is a more complicated title to go with a more difficult read, Shadows on the Wall really has some controversial, difficult poems. Yet, Galing is an ordinary, no-show-off type of person. What you read is what you get. Or is it?

In life, Ed Galing is not your everyday type of guy writer, though he writes about life’s everyday happenings and progressions. He is a renowned 91 year old poet who was Poet Laureate of Hatboro, Pennsylvania in 1978; was nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice; has written over 23 books; published his works in over 400 magazines including RATTLE, POESY, MAIN STREET, QUERCUS, and IBBETSON STREET. He loves to play the harmonica and enjoys dining out, especially at diners. He was married for over sixty years, and has two sons, two grandchildren, and a great-grandchild.

In the chapbooks, Galing discusses things like diners, diner employees and customers who frequent diners, Pennsylvania, poverty, homelessness, home, mental illness, the Jewish holocaust, Jewish lifestyles and customs, old age and it’s implications, the ‘simple’ life, music and musicians and burlesque, dancing, the Twin Towers bombing, and family.

A lot of different themes run throughout Galing’s chapbooks, but the one we will write about today is Galing’s “home”, as in where home is, and how he keeps finding home in the various places he frequents. Many of the poems seem to be autobiographical.

In Diner, Galing writes about “diners, and those who work them”, the “restrooms”, the “counter work”, the “cashier”, “customer blues”, and a “diner”. After reading these poems, the reader gets the sense that diners are a friendly, surrogate family world to the speaker. Galing mentions the word “home” in “diner”, which is the title poem of this chapbook, and the reader understands that the diner is a place where the speaker feels comfortable enough to call “home”, a place where he has laid down roots, in a sense.


diner


it’s only a diner.

i eat there a lot.

people are nice here…

friendly…

waitresses smile

and make you feel

at home…

it’s only a diner…

yeah… but it’s more than

that…

it’s the place where

i feel like i’m with a family

feel less lonely

feel happier

knowing that other people

eating in their own little

booths

feel the same way too…

it’s only a diner…

but the men and women who

work here spend almost all their

lives

doing a hard day’s work and night’s work

and some of them call it

home, too…

just the way i do…


it’s only a diner…

it’s only a diner…


Through simple description, sentence structure, word usage, and repetition, Galing has conveyed his philosophy that home isn’t necessarily found in a square building structure with four walls, windows, a front door, a doorbell, and green lawn in the suburbs, but it is simply where you feel like you fit in, as Galing writes, “it’s the place where/i feel like i’m with a family/feel less lonely/feel happier/knowing that other people/eating in their own little/booths/feel the same way too…”

Galing’s chapbook, Bargain Basement, deals a lot with “home” and where home is, as can be viewed in the first poem, which is once again the chapbooks title poem, “Bargain Basement”:



bargain basement


one of the best things

about Horn and Hardarts

was the way they

treated me;

like a gentleman,


even when i was down

and out, not

a nickel in my pocket…

i could always get a cup

of hot water,

and help myself

to the ketchup…

made the best tomato soup in town…


and even the napkins

were free.


In “bargain basement”, again, Galing has journeyed outside the traditional view that

a real house is what a person should call home. Here Galing describes a restaurant, which is in a “bargain basement”, to be like “home” to the speaker who is probably homeless and receives “a cup/of hot water”, “ketchup”, “the best tomato soup in town” free of charge. The speaker says, “Horn and Hardarts/…treated me:/like a gentleman,” Such a warm and friendly environment makes the speaker, who may be Galing himself, feel at “home”.

Galing actually writes about a disruption in his family home life in the poem, “farewell to paradise”, also found in Bargain Basement:


farewell to paradise


the day my father

left and didn’t

come back

i was sixteen


i remember

walking into

a room as quiet

as a tomb,


my mother sober

faced standing near

the mantle

told me she had

news for me,


and when she told me,

i listened but

felt like dying,


and inside my heart

drummed a death song

and i watched my

mother dying too,


and i wanted to

take her in my arms

and tell her that

everything would still

be all right,


but i didn’t do it…

instead i walked out the door,

went across the street

to the small park


and it was cold and

i sat down on a bench

and i cried my


fucking eyes out


In a progressively sad and then suddenly angry tone, Galing writes about a very personal experience, an experience that had a traumatic affect on him. He was so distraught that he “…sat down on a bench/and (he) cried (his)//fucking eyes out” His once perfect family structure had broken. In “farewell to paradise”, Galing’s speaker says goodbye to the home life he once knew.

Through lower case the entire poem, including the first person, “i”, Galing has gently eased the reader into his life, though the ending line, “fucking eyes out” reveals

the speaker is not happy. Galing tells the reader things as they are. Simply put. No jargon attached. And it’s a relief for the reader to understand concretely where the poet is coming from.

Galing reveals more about his early home years in “GOOD DAYS AND BAD”:


GOOD DAYS AND BAD


we had our good days

and our

bad days

just like

anyone else…

people think when

you live in

south philly

you’re bound to

be different

cause maybe you

don’t have a

lot of money

and you live in

a row house

in a small

street

and sometimes

the garbage

and rubbish

is all mixed up

and scattered

everywhere

and the cars get

snowed in so

deep in the

winter

sometimes you’re

wishing you were a

million miles away…

but hey,

when you live in

south philly

you’re special


Obviously, Galing’s speaker identifies “south philly” with the place where Galing himself lived, the place where “we had our good days/and our/bad days”. Galing seems to write autobiographically about his poverty as a child living in South Philadelphia, as when the speaker explains, “cause maybe you/don’t have a/lot of money/and you live in/a row house/in a small/street/and sometimes/the garbage/and rubbish/is all mixed up/and scattered/everywhere”.

The speaker has been subjected to South Philly’s poverty, which isn’t such a pleasant memory, but Galing ends the poem on a positive note, writing that “when you live in/south philly/you’re special”. The speaker may have lived in the impoverished city of South Philly, but he knew it was his home, the place where he had roots.

In Galing’s “FAREWELL, SOUTH PHILLY”, the speaker again autobiographically talks about his mother. The whole poem is about “home” and identity, and about how


….These are the real south Philadelphians…

my mother was one of those.

long after I had left the old neighborhood

to get married

she remained behind

living poor in the third floor front apartment

where I had left her


taking care of the outside marble steps,

sweeping the street;

always cheerful and happy,

hardly any money, being on welfare.

she loved her surroundings at fourth and

Tasker,

and always looked out the third floor window

waiting for my return visit…


Galing writes how the speaker’s mother has found “home”, especially revealed

when he describes her “taking care of the outside marble steps,/sweeping the street,/

always cheerful and happy, hardly any money, being on welfare./she loved her surroundings at fourth and Tasker,…” She had found permanence, while Galing’s speaker has left this solid place for somewhere else. The speaker returns to the building site after a long time, long after his mother’s death. The speaker admits, “And I never cried so long, or so hard, in all my life.” The speaker has closure on the place where he was raised, where his mother was “at the window where my mother used to wave to me so many times/when I returned to see her…/I could swear that I saw her face looking down/at me, now, and waving,/and suddenly I smiled and waved back,/and whispered, goodbye, Mom…” Again, Galing has revealed a sense of “home” in Bargain Basement. Although his mother has died, the speaker still has a sense of belonging to a place which holds many memories for him.

Galing writes about “home” quite often in the five chapbooks mentioned in this review. But the strongest sense of “home” and permanence that Galing conveys is in “Because You Asked” in Chasing The World never catching up when writing about his relationship with his wife:


Because You Asked

For my wife, R.I.P.


are we dead?

she asks me


no, i say

we are still

alive,

but we are

old, she says,

we have to die

some day, i tell

her gently,

not yet…

but when you’re

old you die

my wife says,

don’t you know that?

we all die, i agree,

but even the very young

die,

the rich die,

the poor die,

the homeless die,

the soldiers die, too;

unless an accident happens

when we will die,

let’s not rush it,

it will come soon enough…

do we live here?

she ask again, as

if she forgot we have

lived in our home for

fifty years,

of course we live here,

i reassure her softly,

you and me… we live here,

where are our children?

she wants to know

they have long gone away,

i reply,

it’s just you and me.

we hug each other

eighty-eight isn’t

easy.

neither is alzheimers.


Galing has composed a wonderful poem about his wife and his kind, and gentle caring for one another. The poem flows from line to line, enjambment after enjambment. And, once again, the concept of “home” is discussed, this time Galing uses the words, “our home”, to show that the speaker, Ed Galing, knows what a strength there is in having a real home, family, and wife, as read when he writes, “do we live here?/she asks again, as/if she forgot we have/lived in our home for fifty years/of course we live here, i reassure her softly,/you and me…we live here,…”

Galing has written about the different stages and kinds of “homes” he as speaker

has encountered throughout his life, ranging from diners to bargain basements to south philly to the home his mother and he lived in during his early years to the home he and his wife raised their family in.

Diner, Bargain Basement , Out On A Limb, and Shadows on the Wall , and Chasing The World never catching up all poetically describe Galing’s journey to find “home” whenever and wherever he can.

These short and sweet chapbooks are excellent reads for people who want a down-to-earth, gentle, often humorous, and sometimes eye-opening as well as mind-opening, reading experience.

Hopefully, these chapbooks will make the permanent move to a shelf in your bookcase.

Pam Rosenblatt/ Ibbetson Update



###

Ries Reviews : Mindock, Sonnenfield, Witte

BLOOD SOAKED DRESSES

By: Gloria Mindock

Ibbetson Street Press

25 School Street

Somerville, MA 02143

Price: $13.50 / 62 Pages / 45 Poems



IBSN: 978-4303-1034-1



Review By: Charles P. Ries
Word Count: 270



In her third book of poetry, “Blood Soaked Dresses” Gloria Mindock raises horror to transcendent allegory. With language that has a lyrical soft quality to it, her new book of poetry becomes the perfect vehicle to express moments (sad, horrific, and glorious) that are set in El Salvador during its civil war from 1980 to 1992. When we see the massacre of innocents continuing in Kenya, Somalia, Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan – the list becomes painfully endless. Her book becomes a timeless poetic prayer for peace.



Her book of poetry is about the most painful of subjects. Through Mindock’s love of this culture, its people, words, and many flavors, she creates transcendent metaphor after transcendent metaphor. Here are a few cherry-picked from her poem, “Seeing Is Only a Flawed Secret”: “A long shadow filling my body”, “I have conversation with the abyss”; "My weary mind is just a symbol.” “The sky is gray today. / healing itself back to blue.” Jesus, rearrange your schedule. / Go, show me your lips. Make your kiss / a compass so I know where to go.” “I look out the window and feel / like a fool. / Everyone carries on with no ears. / Such motionless supervision – a crime!” Amazing - and these lines and phrases are taken from just one of her 45 poems.



Mindock’s success with “Blood Soaked Dresses” is all the more remarkable given how very hard it is to write about horror. If a poet can enter into this world, speak to this blackness and create a wisp of hope, then the poet is by demonstration is a great writer indeed.



_______________________________



typewriter art

By: Mark Sonnenfeld

Marymark Press

45-08 Old Millstone Drive

East Windsor, NJ 08520

Price: $4 / 16 Pages



ISBN: 978-0-9798819-9-2


Review By: Charles P. Ries
Word Count: 308



Mark Sonnenfeld is a unique creature in the small press. His world is one that lives at the intersection of poetry, word, and visual art. Many times his use of language has nothing to do with complete thought or meaning, but rather the splattering of words in a random cascade. We might call his work “experimental”, but for the fact that poetry, as one of writings shortest forms, lends itself to constant variation and experimentation. His new book, “typewriter art” is no different. Dedicated to small press pioneer and all around good-guy Joseph Verrilli, he takes words, or rather the ink-on-paper-image of words, and collides them with a phrase. On page 8 we find word the word “Mark” in 68 point type face and below it the phrase, “Magazines from the stack”. On page 5 we find the phrase “I woke to head pressure” in 14 point type laid onto a page that has a series of letters extracted from words in 68 point bold black type face. His work is so conceptual that it is even hard to clearly describe – it must be both seen and read.



So what is one to make of this? Is it poetry or is it visual art? Certainly it is experimental, and in each art form there is a mad scientist who will push the medium’s relevance toward the absurd, toward meaninglessness, through the trap door of context, and perhaps, toward yet new meanings. Will this become the rage? Will thousands of writers try to do what Sonnenfeld has done? I doubt it, but the highest form of flattery isn’t always imitation, sometimes it is our acknowledgement to artists like Sonnenfield that we have experienced their creation and encourage their continued exploration. The great literary unknown will be a richer friendlier planet because we have pioneers like Sonnenfeld orbiting the “word”.



___________________________________________



THE WIND TWIRLS EVERYTHING

By: Francine Witte

Muscle Head Press Chapbooks

Boneworld Publishing

3700 County Road 24

Russell, New York 13684

Price: $7 / 40 Pages / 25 Stories



Review By: Charles P. Ries

Word Count: 366



Francine Witte’s book of flash fiction/prose poems gives us two wonderful things. The first is her nimble and effortless use of story, form, and technique. This collection of 25 short form vignettes shows us how quickly a skilled writer can create place, character, conflict, and move a story to a stratifying conclusion. Witte who is also a poet and a playwright applies these two forms into interesting, fast moving short stories. Her technique is effortless and invisible, but central to making these stories move forward.



The second gift of “The Wind Twirls Everything” is her reflection on love, clueless good hearted men, place, and family. The men who populate her stories “try” to do the right thing, they are not without heart and soul, but still they do manage to stumble. Into this mix are the women who love, long for, or try to stay away from them. This collision of interests and abilities gives the stories in this collection their strong core. She is quick and nimble as she riffs around a variety of topics: a chair, a love, a city, a time, a man, a woman.



There are many great stories in this collection: Jake Is A Forgotten Place, Someone Keeps Calling, My Husband’s Mistress, Joe and Sue Get In The Car, to name a few. The open paragraph of her story, “The Romance Of Sadness” gives us a taste of how well and how quickly Witte invites us into her world, “One day, she fell in love with the sadness. Unlike the man who had given it to her, the sadness would stay with her long into the night and never leave. If the sadness did leave, there would more sadness. And that was good.” And again her opening paragraph of “Someone Keeps Calling”: “A faraway voice. Like a voice underwater. He says hello. Nothing more. He hangs up. Calls back. His breath is angry, inviting, sexual. He’s distant, but intimate. Saying nothing. Saying everything.”



What a treat to see Witte bob and weave structure, pacing, and story with such alacrity. How wonderful to read stories that run no more than 350 words in length contain so much heart, humor, yearning and meaning.



________________________________________________________



Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over two hundred print and electronic publications. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory and five books of poetry — the most recent entitled, The Last Time which was released by The Moon Press & Publishing. He is the poetry editor for Word Riot (www.wordriot.org). He is on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore (www.woodlandpattern.org) and a member of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. But most of all he is a founding member of the Lake Shore Surf Club, the oldest fresh water surfing club on the Great Lakes (http://www.visitsheboygan.com/dairyland/). You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literati.net/Ries/

Nancy Milnor: The New Director of The Somerville Public Library

Nancy Milnor: The New Director of The Somerville Public Library
Library

The last thing you expect to encounter is a lilting Southern accent when you walk into the Director’s office at the Central Branch of the Somerville Public Library. But that’s part of the package you get with the new Director Nancy Milnor. Milnor is a native of Tennessee and has run libraries in Galveston, Texas, St. Louis Missouri, to name just a few locales. Milnor’s last job was the relatively “genteel” position of director of the Connecticut Historical Library. She left those tony environs to work in the milieu that is her first love: the public library system.

Milnor said: “I came to Somerville because I wanted a change. I love the rich cultural life in the Boston-area and Somerville is the most active, and participatory community that I ever worked in.” She finds Somervillians, young and old, interested in the library and the community-at-large.

Milnor has several projects she is pushing including: the continuation of free English as a Second Language classes, and the improvement and preservation of the Historical Archive. She said librarian Kevin O’Kelly is the head of this department and will be working on a survey with an outside agency concerning the needs of this valuable depository.

Milnor has an eye on the future, and is aware that libraries are rapidly changing with the high tech world. Many older residents and lower income folks use the library for computer access, often because they can’t afford to have a computer at home. The Young Urban Professionals among us use all the collections that the library has to offer according to the Director. Milnor said: “ We use product technology, databases, but we use books, and books are and will still be read. I don’t see the disappearance of the physical book.”

The library, according to Milnor, still orders reference books, magazines, fiction, nonfiction, —the whole range of literature.

The modern library, Milnor said, has a broader role as an educator and as a community center in which people can search for job opportunities for instance. She said that the Swedish retailer IKEA is going to have an online application station for Somerville residents at the Central Branch soon.

The Central Library is in the midst of renovation, and our interview was often punctuated with the sound of workmen, and the scuttle of painters and carpenters outside Milnor’s open door. Milnor said that the plaster is being repaired, new carpets are being appointed, and she expects all this to be done by the fall.

Milnor said she is an “amateur poet”, and that one of her advanced degrees from the University of Tennessee is in English. She lists her favorite bards as Eliot, and Plath, among others. She said she may even sample the poetic fare of Somerville’s literary group the “Bagel Bards” that meets every Saturday morning at the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square.

Milnor is a dyed-in-the-wool archivist, and realizes the importance of preserving Somerville’s newspapers not only on microfilm but also in hard copy. Unlike the writer Nicholson Baker she doesn’t feel that there is a systematic plan to destroy books and newspapers by university or public libraries.

Milnor said she is dedicated to making the library “Even better.” As I left her office she was already on the phone -- undoubtedly making that vision happen.

This is where you go when you are gone by Tim Gager

This is where you go when you are gone
by Timothy Gager
http://www.timgager.com
Cervena Barva Press, $7.00
www.cervenabarvapress.com

A review by Mignon Ariel King

One might expect less poetry from a natural-born fiction writer than appears in Tim Gager's "this is where you go when you are gone (2008)." The collection is indeed narrative, and the poet rarely jumps through linguistic hoops to display metaphoric magic. Yet, the emotion is raw and unapologetic, much like the Blues. There is no introduction to this distinctively masculine tale-like delivery. Instead, in the first poem "Moving Boxes" simply "sit like office furniture/like martyrs,/[...]full of contained memories"(11). Ouch.

Be prepared for the narrator to just barely contain himself as he observes and records the details of his "once great relationship"(11) as if merely talking to himself. He pretty much is talking to himself--walking, sitting, standing, drinking, drinking, and drinking some more--in a daze in an empty room. There is an overabundant supply of bitter break-up poetry to be had, so much so that this narrator is actually a refreshing change. What rescues the brokenhearted voice from boring the reader is his consistent questioning and lack of focus on himself. His longing is enticing. There is no disembodied "she" plaguing him. There is always only "you."

Oddly, poems in the collection that are not about the dissolution of a marriage have greater literary complexity, are darker, and can be harsh. When the narrator discovers that a baseball bat from his grandfather's barn belonged to "no silver slugger/he never hit a lick"(13) he sounds pretty ticked off about it. He even chastises his younger self for asking a stupid question after his uncle loses a limb in the war. He seems furious with everyone except "you" and booze. Halfway through the collection, a sarcastic and annoyed voice is at full volume. "I've Drunk the Holidays" sums up major avoidance and complete self-awareness rolled into one. The narrator drinks everything he encounters in twelve stanzas: "the sea...the limestone of Mount Rushmore...the sun always rising...the last slice of apple pie...the car payments...."(18-19).

Gager's "reply to someone who said my poems are all sad" is hilarious. The first line is "fluffy white cotton tail bunnies"(29). You'll have to go read the rest. Certainly, "sad" does not do the poet justice. A narrator who makes gritty references to Tom Waits, carries cash and no cell phone, so must "[drive] miles in dust/to find this pay phone/to whisper in your ear/i love you baby" is much deeper than "sad." He is pure melancholy, and in these poems, melancholy is a beautiful thing.

To truly appreciate the collection: turn off the overheads, skip the tea, and read like a man, dammit, for Gager is best in a dimly-lit room accompanied by an ice-cold beer. This poetry might break your heart, but you will survive, and learn, and ultimately want more...

FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH: A Memoir by Danielle Trussoni

FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH
A Memoir by Danielle Trussoni
Henry Holt and Company, LLC
New York, NY 10010
Copyright 2006
Pages = 240


“Memoir is, for better and often for worse, the genre of our times…..there is no faster way to smother the core meaning of a life, its elusive threads and connections, than with the heavy blanket of narrated event…..”
Sven Birkits
The Art of Time in Memoir
Then, Again


Birkits is only suggesting that we now have a compulsion to write about the events of our own lives, seemingly like never before, and that a straight linear narrative of these events is rather bland and pointless. I happen to agree, drawn myself to memoir as a way of trying to expiate, redeem and capture something about what I’ve moved through and what’s moved through me. So it was that I encountered this extraordinary memoir by a young Italian-American woman from Wisconsin called, “Falling through the Earth.” Relieved that it wasn’t a story about drug rehab, or serial killing or a shop-a-holic chick, I was eager to dive into a memoir about a father-daughter bond overshadowed, or even pre-determined in this case, by his participation in the Vietnam War. In one sense it is a “coming of age” story, but unusual because it’s the father-daughter, not the mother-daughter alliance/wound reckoned with.

Danielle Trussoni is practically my contemporary, growing up in the 1970’s, after her father has returned from active duty in Vietnam. After an incredibly tough childhood, spent mostly with her Dad in a dive bar in the boonies of the mid-west called Roscoe’s, she manages to graduate from the University of Wisconsin and then to attend the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Through it all, her father’s ghost haunts her – his toughness, his broken heart, his humor and his mad denial of what the war actually did to him and his family. Danielle, who her father Dan calls, “Danielle-my-belle” as they find bar stools next to each other, remains under his spell through a divorce, through many abusive and neglectful emotional episodes, and finally through an adolescent stint living with him in a shack-like house on the shady South Side of her town, La Crosse. She hones her brilliant mind, which remains a bedrock of sanity and observation, toward flashing light on the wreckage through which she grew, like the Japanese root Kudzu, up through rock to sweeten the earth with her wisdom and generosity and story-telling.

Rather than give us the David Copperfield version of life, the, And then, and then that Birkits rather dislikes, she refracts our attention, leaping from turning point to turning point, with a parallel story of herself visiting Vietnam to understand her father’s journey for perspective on “the other side” and the present there. We have the young Danielle’s growing up in a quickly disintegrating childhood nuclear family where once a stalwart and loving father planted three trees on a place called, “Trussoni Court” for his three children, two girls and a boy. The mother is loving, practical and seemingly capable of dealing with all her husband’s bravado and alcohol abuse. One day Danielle finds a notebook in which her mother has marked, like a bar graph, how much she feels she’s loved by her husband and three children. While her son Matt and daughter Kelly score high marks, Danielle is chagrined to find that she and her father share a mediocre 4 on the scale. Gradually, her father’s womanizing and temper drive her mother to simply edge away from the family and seek autonomy by getting a job and a college degree. The house falls into disrepair and disorganization as Dad is incapable of much but working as a laborer and then hiding away at his local bar. Danielle’s mother divorces him and marries another man-- safer, more prosperous and more “normal.”

Danielle is the daughter who serves as her father’s protective shield, his charm. She is also his main confidante about what happened in Vietnam, where he was drafted after an angry ex-girlfriend turned his name into the draft-board. One day Danielle finds a skull that her father has brought home as a talisman or prize for his own dubious valor in carrying out the bloody agenda of the U.S. government. A stocky and hard-headed Italian from a big family of boys, with a handsome face and devil-may-care attitude, Trussoni falls in with a platoon whose main soldier-leader chooses to be what’s known as a tunnel rat. This gig involves braving the Viet Cong constructed underworld of tunnels and rooms where they go ingeniously to escape U.S. bombing raids and Agent Orange. Obviously, there’s not much to cover your back when you’re many feet under the earth. As it happens, Trussoni’s best buddy and partner in this undertaking is a man named Goodman, who ultimately, takes an AK-40 bullet explosion to his head, instead of Trussoni whose turn it was to flash a light and go down himself. He will later pay a visit to Goodman’s family and explain what happened. They are grateful. He begins to see what the brutality of the war meant. It is almost too late, as he has cancer of the esophagus and his daughter has finally told him what he did by his denial to the family.
For this, she is granted no mercy but her own realization is worth her father’s punishing silence.

The book never falls to melodrama and it moves with an unusually humane love-bond which takes Danielle through many changes but keeps her a fair and honest witness to the family’s and her own story.

In one comically black humor scene, Danielle, finds herself alone with her traumatized, lonely father, even though custody after the divorce was given to the mother. Danielle still feels she’s the outsider with Dad. He stocks the pantry with his cold-cuts and beer. She takes to wearing fishnets and an old trench coat, finally finding a lover in another Italian high schooler who likes high-speed sledding and seems super-cool. When caught in the love-making act, her father is with his new girlfriend Debbie, an alcoholic ditz who winds up pouring tequila shots for the four of them, while Danielle offers biting responses to her father’s intrusive questions. He’s been balling every trashy middle-aged woman from Roscoe’s since the divorce and Danielle’s been left alone most of the time to fend for herself. The dialogue goes something like this:

“Dad sized up Tony. He said, ‘You sit down too, Romeo.”

Tony said, “I really have to get going.”

“What?” Dad said, pretending to be offended. Can’t have a drink with your girlfriends’ old man?”

In the end, the two lovers are separated, not by this busting, but because Danielle’s father puts her to work under-age at as dishwasher/ busboy, which eventually leads to her economic independence. It is, in fact, her mother’s Deus ex machine like return to teach Danielle to drive at 16, that finally makes her realize the real value of her mother and the love they share. It actually gives her back a lost piece of her own feminine sanity.

While visiting Vietnam, in her mid-20s, Danielle falls in with a married couple from the same hotel. She is strangely shadowed by an American in dark sunglasses who seems to know who she is, or who her father was, but this is never clearly resolved – a small weakness in the book. Though the tunnels have become museum pieces, Danielle still goes down into one, kissing the earth and insects of her father’s captivity. She tries to dig up some earth and the tour guide stops her. In another turning point, after her hotel room is almost broken into by the mysterious stalker, Danielle walks out of her zone into another part of Saigon where she finds a Buddhist temple and winds up praying for the spirits of the dead. It is the one time that she seems to find a sanctuary for reconciliation and forgiveness in a country still showcasing their victory over America, but also still impoverished and strangely based on a tourist principle of luring Americans back to see the war-sites.

This is an engrossing and masterfully composed account of a young woman’s tough love for a half-mad Dad whose fate has been irrevocably twisted by the Vietnam War and his own stalwart and addictive bent. It manages to jump-cut in time while etching vivid details in dialogue and description of what really happened, how it unravels, and then sort of ravels back together in a new way.

As Shawn Colvin sings on “Steady On:” “China gets broken, and it will never be the same. Boats on the ocean, find a way back again.”

So it is with Danielle Trussoni, who like Marguerite Duras, escapes a collapsed family to become a brilliant writer, using old ghosts to meet her own destiny with light and hope.

Lo Galluccio’s prose-poem memoir “Sarasota VII” will be released on Cervena Barva Press in the fall of 2008. She is also a vocal artist and poet.

Poetry Workshop with Doug Holder--September (2008)

Call to register 617- 559-6999









Course ID: W1022

Course Name: Demystifying Poetry Writing & Publishing (Writing & Speaking)
Description: Doug Holder is a widely published poet and founder of the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville, which has produced books of poetry and journals since 1998. Join Doug as he demystifies the poetry writing and publishing process. We'll develop our poems in a supportive atmosphere, and provide tips for getting your work published. Many students in this class have gone on to publish their poetry in small literary magazines, and some have even started their own magazines. This course is perfect for the novice poet or the poet who has been away from the "scene" for a while. Please bring three poems to the first session (six copies of each). There will be a field trip to the Newton Free Library Poetry series where students will have a chance to read from their work.



Instructor: Douglas Holder
Time: 6:45pm to 8:45pm on Tuesday
Location: Newton SOUTH HS in Room 2105
Tuition: $116
No Class Dates: (No class Sept 30)
Classes are from 9/23/2008 to 11/4/2008. There will be 6 sessions.














About Doug Holder:





Doug Holder was born in Manhattan, N.Y. on July 5, 1955. A small press activist, he founded the Ibbetson Street Press in the winter of 1998 in Somerville, Mass. He has published over 40 books of poetry of local and national poets and over 20 issues of the literary journal Ibbetson Street. Holder is the arts/editor for The Somerville News, a co-founder of "The Somerville News Writers Festival," and is the curator of the "Newton Free Library Poetry Series" in Newton, Mass. His interviews with contemporary poets are archived at the Harvard and Buffalo University libraries, as well as Poet's House in NYC. Holder's own articles and poetry have appeared in several anthologies including: Inside the Outside: An Anthology of Avant-Garde American Poets (Presa Press) Greatest Hits: twelve years of Compost Magazine (Zephyr Press) and America's Favorite Poems edited by Robert Pinsky. His work has also appeared in such magazines as: Rattle, Doubletake, Hazmat, The Boston Globe Magazine, Caesura, Sahara, Linden Lane, Poesy, Small Press Review, Artword Quarterly, Manifold (U.K.), The Café Review, the new renaissance and many others. His two most recent poetry collections are: "Of All The Meals I Had Before..." ( Cervena Barva- 2007)) and "No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain" ( sunyoutside-2007). He expects his collection "THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MIDTOWN TUNNEL" to be out in 2008. ( Cervena Barva Press) He holds an M.A. in Literature from Harvard UniversityDoug Holder was born in Manhattan, N.Y. on July 5, 1955. A small press activist, he founded the Ibbetson Street Press in the winter of 1998 in Somerville, Mass. He has published over 40 books of poetry of local and national poets and over 20 issues of the literary journal Ibbetson Street. Holder is the arts/editor for The Somerville News, a co-founder of "The Somerville News Writers Festival," and is the curator of the "Newton Free Library Poetry Series" in Newton, Mass. His interviews with contemporary poets are archived at the Harvard and Buffalo University libraries, as well as Poet's House in NYC. Holder's own articles and poetry have appeared in several anthologies including: Inside the Outside: An Anthology of Avant-Garde American Poets (Presa Press) Greatest Hits: twelve years of Compost Magazine (Zephyr Press) and America's Favorite Poems edited by Robert Pinsky. His work has also appeared in such magazines as: Rattle, Doubletake, Hazmat, The Boston Globe Magazine, Caesura, Sahara, Linden Lane, Poesy, Small Press Review, Artword Quarterly, Manifold (U.K.), The Café Review, the new renaissance and many others. His two most recent poetry collections are: "Of All The Meals I Had Before..." ( Cervena Barva- 2007)) and "No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain" ( sunyoutside-2007). He expects his collection "THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE MIDTOWN TUNNEL" to be out in 2008. ( Cervena Barva Press) He holds an M.A. in Literature from Harvard University.

Jacob Wirth: Boston, Mass.

Jacob Wirth is a historic old tavern in Boston that I have been eating and drinking in since I was a snot-nosed Boston University undergrad. I have an old poster from Wirth's in which they quote a waiter Fredrick Fritz Furth (1875-1951):

" Yesterday it was the fathers who were my friends. Today, it is the sons. Yesterday, a man came in and brought his boy. Today, that boy's son came in and calls me Fritz...

I look at the young man and see the father, and my memory goes back to many things when I should be thinking of frankfurters and pumpernickel bread.."

JACOB WIRTH ( Boston, Mass. 1868 to? )



The sawdust

on the floor

has gone the way

of all dust.



But it is the hard slap

of the house dark

on the dark, mahogany bar

that sustains me.



Yes ,

they have made

concessions

to a high

definition TV

but the ancient

beaten ivories

of the piano

still hold its torch songs

on Friday nights.





It seems

there is still a wholesome, yellow statement

of cornbread,

and a saucer of

baked beans.



The long dining room

has stretched over 100 years

and in the rear

there is a pay phone

in its battered booth

before you hit the head.



And that din of laughter--

(and I admit

I miss the cigar smoke)

and the bright red--

sheaves of corned beef

sprouting from dark bread.





What was once alive in this city

is still

not quite

dead.

Poet Elizabeth Quinlan revisits a troubled childhood with her poetry collection “Promise Supermarket.”

Poet Elizabeth Quinlan revisits a troubled childhood with her poetry collection “Promise Supermarket.”




"We climbed the fence,
picked through the garbage from the high rise.
Among the vegetable peelings,
rotting chicken, we found
parts of broken toys and pieces
of jewelry, gems and chains.”

(“Treeless Yard”—“Promise Supermarket”)

Elizabeth Quinlan has been a member of the Writers Workshop at the William Joiner Center at UMass Boston for the past ten years. She was an honor student in the Creative Writing Program at UMass and is a graduate of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where she specialized in Book Art. She is the author of the poetry collection “Promise Supermarket” from Somerville’s Ibbetson Street Press. It deals with hardscrabble childhood in Chelsea, Mass, a city on the outskirts of Boston.


Doug Holder: Elizabeth you told me the writer, poet and political activist, Grace Paley made you realize that a woman can write about even the everyday occurrences in her life. It was all right for you to write about being a single mother, your kids, and even your period.

Elizabeth Quinlan: I was first exposed to Grace Paley at UMass Boston. I believe it was in the late Ron Schreiber’s class. He was a wonderful teacher. I think it was ENGLISH 101 in the early 70’s. We read her stories, and at the same time we read Tillie Olsen. Two amazing writers that wrote a lot about mothering, bathing children, all the things that I thought wouldn’t make for good poetry. I was at the time a young mother.

DH: You have been a student at the William Joiner Workshop for the last 10 years at the U/Mass Harbor Campus in Boston. Tell us about the program, your involvement, and how it has helped your development as a writer?

EQ: It’s remarkable. People come from all over the world to study at the Joiner. The have had a playwright from Rwanda, women from Bosnia, filmmakers, incredible. They have poetry, nonfiction, fiction and memoir. Grace Paley was there every year. She was a very down to earth woman. She focused on stories that were hard to write.

When I came to the Joiner I had already been writing poetry. The workshops were always high quality. Teachers were very open. I had a memorable workshop with Michael Casey in publishing, as well as others.

DH: You have studied Book Art. What does that entail?

EQ: At the Fine Arts School I studied drawing, printmaking, and techniques like mono printing which I use in my Book Art. I do special books for people. I recently did one for a woman who was dying of cancer. I have been making books for kids for a while. I learned papermaking and marbling techniques. I have developed my own techniques for kids that are non-toxic that I can use with children starting around age 3.

DH: The acclaimed poet Martha Collins, the author of “Blue Front,” wrote the forward to your collection “ Promise Supermarket.” Could you talk about your relationship with her?

EQ: When I cam back to UMass in the 80’s I worked with Collins in the Honors Program. Later I worked one on one with her. She has always been such a great friend. I came to the workshop with a early version of the manuscript of “Promise Supermarket.” It is nothing like I have now. She helped me edit the manuscript. It is cleaner and stronger as a result. I never felt she changed my voice. She pointed out the poems that were weaker and they were taken out.

DH: “Promise Supermarket” is a hard book to read. It deals with a very troubled childhood, and a very troubled and abusive father. Why did you choose to relive this painful time through poetry?

EQ: When I was in art school in 1975 I started painting images of violence and abuse. I kept journals. Images were coming out in my dreams. I was recording these images. I was in denial about this shadow that was following me around. It was a great source of shame and fear. I started to write bits of things over the years. I wanted to figure out where I came from—how did I get to this place?

DH: Why did you use the Promise Supermarket as your focal point?

EQ: There is a promise in food. There is a lot of hunger in this world. Food is evocative and sensual. Whether it is the smell of it, the taste, the touch, the memory of it. The promise is one of hope. I think there is a sense of hope in this collection. There is the child’s spirit throughout.


Doug Holder/Ibbetson Street Press/ July, 2008

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

Break Time. Edited by Joseph Bergin. www.carpenterpoets.org

Break Time. Edited by Joseph Bergin. http://carpenterpoets.org


In the Boston area, like many other enlightened urban areas, we have poets of all stripes living and reading in close proximity. Off hand I can think of the SLAM poets at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge, the STONE SOUP POETS at the Out of the Blue Art Gallery in the same city, the Bagel Bards who bake in the summer sun at the Au Bon Pain in the Davis Square section of Somerville, the high-toned, and rarefied academic crowd who congregate at the Blacksmith House in Harvard Square, and the list goes on… Well, a few years back, a group of carpenters was working on a mansion on Fisher Hill in Brookline, Mass, when they came across some poems from “Hammer,” by poet and carpenter Mark Turpin. Basically these blue-collar bards were up to the challenge and they started to write poems about carpentry. They had a poetry night and nineteen men and women read their work, and so the “ Carpenter Poets” of Jamaica Plain were born. In the introduction to this volume it is written:

“There’s much to be said about parallels between writing and carpentry. There’s the act of creating something out of common supplies, fitting board-to-board, word-to-word, the beauty of the product and pride in the craft. The house we live in, the poem that lives in us.”


Many of the poems in this collection marry many of the varied props of the carpentry life to the life- at- large, and the life of the poem. The poems are fleshed with the unexpectedly beautiful objects and moments that these men and women encounter in their day’s work.

In the poem “Machine,” by Noah H. Gordon an old carpenter and bard evokes his carnal younger life inspired by a dusty lumber room:

“With Honey flow through lumber room dust
as my mind harkens back to that younger time
I wish a miscut was my only crime
Lord, let me at long last be free lust…

Now as I pass my hands along the wood
It is as though your warm flesh I caress
We merged for a moment in the darkness
And then we were swept along in life’s flood

I’ve learned to drill out love in the machine
Drifting in the world like I’m in a dream.”


Recommended.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

A Short Film"Bagel Bards" produced by Chad Parenteau

THE BAGEL BARDS

A group of poets and writers that meet every Saturday morning at the Au Bon Pain in Davis Sq, Somerville at 9AM

Adam's Ribs by Terry Adams

Adam’s Ribs
Poems by Terry Adams
Off the Grid Press
P.O. Box 84
Weld, Maine 04285
www.offthegridpress.net
ISBN: 978-0-9778429-2-6
Copyright © 2008 Terry Adams


At first take, I tried to shape a thought-link between the book title and the author’s name.
An assumption that “Adam’s Ribs” was a word-play alluding to the author himself,
(the author, of course named Terry Adams, with an “s”). Or that this collection poses
poetical claim to the fated “first man”, also known in the Kabala as the “Primal Man”.
The title poem could be read as an allegory for the poetic process where the actual ribs of Adam are ornaments of earthly understanding:

“The toil of all my days will live me again.” . . .
My children will crawl upon the earth
and nest on the earth; will increase themselves
out of their skins and give their old masks to the earth,”

Not a rejoicing in death, but a theme of returning and conclusion gives spine to Adams’ work.
“Adam’s Ribs” examines and exhumes the realm of mortality as it diffuses its chalky hand through the mundane-everyday.Terry Adams’ images are colorful, his subject matter is often risky,(the poem “Balls” for instance), and his style is anecdotal. The poems flux between short and long,the latter being at-odds with the current literary climate.

A high level of searching and reflection prods the speaker’s voice throughout.
A literal holding up of details, to both reveal and revel in.
The poem, “After the Laying-On of Hands” holds a sad tone. The act of laying-on-of-handsretains its metaphysical nature and purpose while at the same time, the poem takes on a Tibetan “Book of the Dead”- ish feel:

“He is an embryo feeling the vague drama
of his mother’s life though
a scrim of stretched flesh,
before the forces beyond itself deliver it out against any will.
I dream I would heal him by touching him,
because I contain an excess of the battles with many deaths.
I would rest my hand on his tumor,
make it glow hot and golden
in the shape of his diaphragm,
dissolve the cancer cells into
a little Eucharist of waste, an abortion
of the fore life, but he will not finish
as a living man.”



In “Forgiveness”, Adams arrives through a round-about way to acknowledging an undisclosed person who committed a crime that almost escaped going unnoticed. Or is the speaker forgiving himself forfinding what he found? The speaker finds a mother dog and six puppies all shot through the head in a clearing by the interstate,“skeletons lined up neatly / like bodybags in the news from a minor nation.”

The speaker announces, to either themself, the reader of the killer of the
dogs that this poem is a wish poem and that:

. . . “I wished for / the impossible. I wished
something other than insanity or cruelty
did the killing, and my wish
is a crime against understanding.”
Finally resolving:
“I can’t stop thinking
of all the possible excuses
for the killer, all the kinds os desperation
living out there with a gun
and no face.”

In the final poem, “I Want to See”, Adams wants to see every thought he ever thought
written down; a bold statement, a tough task and totally scarey for anyone to dare see.
He intends:
“I want worded the echoing caves where I first understood,
and each sensation of singular time expanded to a phrase.”

“The Dump” is a catalogue of the old remnants of life that get “plowed under”
for real in the dump after serving their purpose. The speaker “lofts” and throws these
“components of every whole / thing no longer a whole” while ruminating:
“The Apache have a word Alaya, that means
‘Changes while flying through air’.”

“Adam’s Ribs” brings an amalgam of worldly details to the surface and leaves them
unsheathed in celebration.

Mike Amado is a reviewer for the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scense
and the author of "stunted Inner Child Shot the TV" ( Cervena Barva Press).

From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers

I am currently working on a collection of my interviews that for the most part appeared in The Somerville News. Caitlin Jackson, an intern from the Connectitut College, is currently editing the collection. This book hopefully will be out in the fall through my own press the "Ibbetson Street Press." Mike Basinski, curator the Poetry and Rare Book Collection at the University of Buffalo has agreed to write the introduction. This will be volume 1 ... I plan to to do a second volume in late 2009...if the god lord is willing and the creek don't rise...



--Doug Holder





Below is the title and the list of interviews....













From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers








With Doug Holder











Author’s Note



Publications where these interviews have appeared:



The Somerville News

Hunger Magazine

Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene (online)

Middlesex Beat

Poesy

Spare Change News

Some Other Magazine (online)















Special Thanks To:



Donald and Jamie Norton, Biil Tauro (The Somerville News) Wendy Blom (Somerville Community Access TV), Steve Gilnes (ISCS Press), Caitlin Jackson, Mike Basinki (Buffalo University Libraries).







Table of Contents
Eva Salzman…………………………………………………………………7

Mike Basinski………………………………………………………………...10

Errol Uys…………………………………………………………………….13

Lan Samantha Chang………………………………………………………..16

Louisa Solano………………………………………………………………..18

Miriam Levine……………………………………………………………….20

Mark Doty…………………………………………………………………...23

Claire Messud………………………………………………………………..28

Lisa Beatman…………………………………………………………………30

Martha Collins………………………………………………………………..32

Dick Lourie…………………………………………………………………35

Robert Creeley…………………………………………………………………38

Afaa Michael Weaver…………………………………………………………40

Jack Powers………………………………………………………………...42

Ed Sanders…………………………………………………………………..45

Tom Perrotta…………………………………………………………………48

Diana Der-Hovanessian………………………………………………………50

Luke Salisbury…………………………………………………………………52

Sarah Hannah…………………………………………………………………55

Hugh Fox……………………………………………………………………...57



Lo Galluccio…………………………………………………………………60



Timothy Gager……………………………………………………………….63



Gloria Mindock…………………………………………………………66



Marc Widershien…………………………………………………………67



Deborah M. Priestly………………………………………………………71



Steve Almond…………………………………………………………….73



Pagan Kennedy


Robert K.Johnson

Harris Gardner