Ibbetson Street 24 Reading Nov. 8, 2008 Out of the Blue Art Gallery

"Ibbetson Street" Somerville's independent literary magazine has been around since 1998, and was founded by Doug Holder, Dianne Robitaille and Richard Wilhelm. We will be celebrating the release of our 24th Issue with poetry from Gary Metras ( founder of Adastra Press),Linda Larson,Mignon Ariel King,Mary Buchinger, Linda Haviland Conte, Ed Galing and many others. Artwork both front and back covers by renowned poet Tino Villanueva. The reading will take place at the Out of the Blue Art Gallery 106 Prospect St. Cambridge, Mass 3 to 5PM Open mic after features

http://ibbetsonpress.com
http://ibbetsonpress.blogspot.com

. *****All past and present contributors are invited to read

Review of Louis McKee’s chapbook, Still Life, 2008, FootHills Publishing

Review of Louis McKee’s chapbook, Still Life, 2008, FootHills Publishing
by Tam Lin Neville

Louis McKee’s heart is often breaking, at age fifty and a bachelor, (if I can trust a poet to tell the truth.). But he looks at heartache from the vantage point of age, with understanding, with pain, but without self-pity. As the poet looks back on his life we are given instead wonder at the way his experience has grown richer and more layered over time.
Perhaps the book’s title is meant ironically, but if not, Still Life seems a mis-nomer. Nothing stays still in this graceful book. Memory keeps diving down into the past with the fluidity of a mind grown both dreamier and more honest with age.
Turning, diving – the poet’s sense of motion is expressed in a style so seamless, you forget it’s there. Only someone long practiced in the craft of poetry could write the following spare, yet evocative, poem.

HER HAND

How small, her hand
minus the rings.

They’re back in her room
rolled up in her heavy socks

just in case
someone should go rummaging

through her things.
Her hand, on the table top

in a roadside restaurant,
fidgets with the silver –

the spoon isn’t clean;
she waits for the coffee

she hopes will give her
something to hold on to.

Before the waitress can return,
I lay my own hand

on hers; how small hers is,
and her fingers, so bare, cold.

The rhymes and slant rhymes of “rings,” “rummaging,” “things,” and “clean” slide me effortlessly into the poem. Almost before I know it, I’m concerned about this women I know so little, and so much, about. I feel her fragility, paranoia, the way her sensitivity searches out the smallest disturbing detail, the unclean spoon in the roadside restaurant.
McKee writes often of women and with real yearning – always gentle, inquiring, never rapacious.

AT FIFTY

At fifty he is still unable
to forget about the sixteen year old girl
he thought he loved when he was eighteen.
He thinks he loves her now,
and every day he considers telling his wife
about this girl who is not sixteen at all,
but nearly fifty, although she looks sixteen still,
at least to him, the way he sees her.
He wants to crack through the silence
of the dinner table, and unpack the bag
he’s been carrying up the steps each night;
he is paused at that step, now, so near the top,
because he is tired, and it would go easier
if he were to lighten his load, get ride of
the bag that is weighing him down,
making every step hard won.
He wants to tell his wife about the girl,
about the life that might have been,
the thirty years he’s missed, thirty years
that she thinks she knows, but
which are not the ones he was meant to live,
and he knows it is the difference
in those thirty years that he loves,
more even than he loves the girl,
the sweet pretty sixteen year old, the woman,
now near fifty, more than her.


When you are alone with this book it becomes a welcome partner, someone to spend time with on a Sunday afternoon, sitting in a café surrounded by twenty and thirty year olds. For myself, soon to be 64, I can’t help feeling there is so much these young ones can’t see. Reading Louis MeKee, I feel that my age has given me an advantage – there is so much I can see.
To read this small elegant chapbook, hand-sewn with poems well-set on the page, is to experience again that buoyancy, that sense of release from time and space constraints, that only poetry can give.

Bicycles, Canoes, Drums by Dan Sklar

Bicycles, Canoes, Drums.
By Dan Sklar
2008; 190 pp;Ibbetson Street Press,
25 School St., Somerville, MA
02143.
To order: http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress

The refreshing thing about Sklar’s poetry is that it’s not that carefully worked-over, avant-garde, conundrum, riddle-twisted work that is less interested in getting across ideas and emotions than puzzling and impressing the reader. Sklar is Mr. Tell-It-As-It-Is. Which he himself is very aware of: “My poems/do not win/poetry awards/because/they are/not poems/at all.” (“Wanted,” p.54).

Which is not to say that they don’t move, touch you, communicate. By getting rid of all the technique games and getting to the human heart of things, Sklar is one of the most successful communicators around: “I just want to clear off my desk,/listen to jazz and write and write/and type and type about things/that are important to me at this/moment like the fact that my son is 17 and in Catamarca,/Argentina for a year learning/tango and violin and...” (“Poetry is Just Not that Important to Me Now,” p. 126).

His topics include the inner Thoreau, horses, funerals, war, bicycles, rain, aging,sex, opera, canoes (and the Iroquois), truck accidents....and there’s not a poem in this book that you can stop reading once you’ve read the first line. Unreadable poets should take a course in Sklar, get readable, read Bicycles, Canoes, Drums.

Hugh Fox/Sept 2008

Mario Barrios: Humor from Havana to Somerville.

Mario Barros: Humor from Havana to Somerville.

Mario Barros was born in Cuba in 1953. Mr. Barros co-wrote the college textbook “The Literature of the United States” while he was a history professor in Cuba. He founded the comedy “Lenguaviva” (Living Language) that was a presence on theatre, radio and TV. He wrote more than 70 songs and skits for his repertory, and won two Cuban national comedy awards. In Somerville, he has directed the Somerville High Drama Club and has produced a number of plays including his own “Five Insomniac Plays.” I interviewed him on my Somerville Community Access TV Show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: You were born in Cuba. I will ask you what Senator Joe McCarthy asked many U.S. citizens: “ Are you now or ever been a member of the Communist party?
Mario Barros: I was never a member of the Communist Party. When I was young I belonged to the juvenile organization of the party. That was a must for every youngster. I practically grew up with the revolution. Around 1985 or 6—during Perestroika in the Soviet Union, a lot of people like me started to question the way they approached the whole process. I thought there was nothing for me here anymore. I started to write humor, as an avenue to criticize society. I was forced to come to America in a way by my humor.

DH: You were an academic in Cuba, teaching at the University. You co-wrote the text “The Literature of the United States” Who did you include? Did the government censor any of the material?

MB: It was a text for college courses so we had a certain leeway. I was a professor for the Institutes of Foreign Languages in Havana. I was one of the three people who wrote the text. The text included everyone from James Fenimore Cooper to Washington Irving. Anything that was written far in the past was fine. When you came to 20th Century literature you had to pick and choose more carefully. You would not pick an author who would glorify capitalism for instance. We included Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Upton Sinclair, and others. I loved including Mark Twain, because, of course, he was a master humorist.

DH: Your comedy troupe “Living Language” was a celebrated performance group in Cuba. It won national wards. Now, if it won awards in Communist Cuba, did the group have to tow the party line?
MB: In the mid-1980’s a number of comedy groups sprung from the college level. Not just comedy, the arts in general. It was a moment in time that the government would tolerate a certain amount of rebellion. In the festivals we took part in there was always a censor in the background. You could say things, but there was not total openness. You couldn’t say” “Fidel is stupid,” for instance.

DH: You were the head of the Somerville High School Drama Program for 7 years. What plays did you produce?

MB: The first play I produced was Ionesco’s: “The Bald Soprano” My idea was to have a program to promote original writing. There were misunderstandings about it but I ran it for a while. I wanted the kids to produce their own original work. There were a couple of our plays produced in a Mass. Theatre Festival sponsored by The Boston Globe.

DH: You worked with some controversial material—how was this work received?

MB: I had a very good reception. We did a play “Removing the Glove,” that dealt with homosexuality. It was a very sensitive subject. It was very well received. My own plays usually involve some surreal aspects.

DH: In your latest collection of short stories “The Color Does Not Fall From The Sky”, the setting is a suburban train. Why?

MB: This is a story about an immigrant. He was a storyteller in his country. He was well loved, until one day he told a story about dictatorship, and some people didn’t like it. From that moment on he was ostracized, so he went to a northern country. He couldn’t find a job as a storyteller, but he realizes he still needs an audience. So he gets in a suburban train everyday, the second coach, with the same people every day. He tells them a story every day, and so it goes…

Assorted Fictions by Carson Cistulli, etc...

Assorted Fictions by Carson Cistulli

Suppository Writing by Loren Goodman

Cindi's Fur Coat by Michael Casey

The Chuckwagon

146 College Hwy. #18

Southampton Ma 01073

casey.st@comcast.net

valleyarts.blogspot.com


Review by Mike Amado





I’ve recently read that the town of Southampton, MA. won the Great American Water Taste Test and has the best tasting water in the whole country, according to the National Rural Water Association. Now, to add to the list of credits is a new small press, the Chuckwagon which specializes in D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) poetry and fiction. Or so I assess from the books I am reviewing.

Assorted Fictions by Carson Cistulli plays the grad. School humor card like a philosophy major playing poker with Johann Gottfried Herder and Georg Wilhelm Hegel for beer money. The major stumbling home from the bar, which shows how the tournament went.

Cistulli’s cerebral jaunts present the voice of a standup intellectual on a stage all his own.

Making deep thinking fun, or making fun of deep thinking. You decide.
No new revelations here, or any drastic lightbulbs the size of the National Grid, however,but Cistulli wields irony and maintains it throughout these clever quips.
English novelist P. G. Wodehouse is in the afterlife giggling and sorting ale? Maybe.

Here’s a few from Assorted Fictions:

During Little League, the coaches always told us to “look alive.” “How else can we
look?” I asked one time. So it was, on my behalf, a stroke of cleverness and
bravery.
Remarkably, this was some ten years before my first drink.


Just because a girl says “Hi Sheena” into her phone, do I really think that’s who’s
on the other side? The answer’s no, and I’ll tell you why: Shenna’s only the 80th
most popular girl’s name, while, for example, Amber’s 20th and Sarah’s 5th . Most
probably, the other girl’s name is Jennifer, and Sheena’s just a funny nickname
or something.




1


Suppository Writing by Loren Goodman begins with an intended zeal of bringing
university-level studies of literature to highschool students over a period of one summer to prepare them for “intellectual life”. “Our goals included learning to read closely and to write clearly and concisely, with attention to rhetorical strategies, organization . . .and revision.”

The entries in Suppository Writing are assessment reports of each student in the course.

While these evaluations provide humor at the expense academia, that humor explicates
the imagination of a young teacher and that teacher’s inevitable unraveling.
As the reader studies Suppository Writing, it is clear that the group of diverse
students have inherent flaws despite their backgrounds.

Such as Ivan Angerson who, “. . .proved himself to be an excellent moron . . .”
“Ivan’s absence from the last week of classes (he notified me of his absence via
Morse Code and turned in all required work engraved in silver) was hardly missed.”
There’s Jeremiah Tang who, “ . . .has excellent polymorphous perversion.”
And Arturo Salivavetti who, “ . . . drooled inconsistently on his written work
for this course, except for his final essay, which was uniformly soggy.”
I’m assuming names have been changed to protect the innocent?

To its credit, I found Suppository Writing to take “poetic licence” to the edge of
reason and imaginativeness with its hyper-hyperbole.
The descriptions of the students are beyond accurate and need not be taken as such,
however, they are amusing. The report for student Maxine Jaw yields:

“Maxine stood out. She was one of the tallest and most enigmatic.
With her speech impediment and incredible underbite, Maxine distinguished
herself early on, prompting me to remove the illustration of Cro-Magnon Man from
above the blackboard.” . . . “She has excellent mandibles.”















2


Cindi’s Fur Coat by Michael Casey begins with poems that read like the thoughts
of a bored office-worker ogling female co-workers and metaphorically slapping
their rear-ends with anemic voyeurism. Much like real-life office autotypes, the
characters are one-dimensional pencil lines like the so-called “Art work” of
Philip Larkin and John Lennon, (which is no compliment),
and the voice is disenchanted; which complements the overall tone of despair.

I’m assuming that a corporate office setting is (or was) Michael Casey’s
work milieu in real life. If so, he should fully peruse a new career in
writing because as a writer at least you’ll have a product after you totally
crackup. Though, much like a business job, your insanity will crystalize,
or so I’ve heard. That crystallization come to a head in “crises toujous”:

“that is the way he is
here it is:
the management style of the bopper
he sends out probation letters left right
and last year the probation letters went out
for poor productivity and this year
the supervisors after beating on us
to produce all the supervisors
get probation letters for poor quality
of produced work the crisis du jour.”

By the loose description of the manager, calling him “Bopper”, I guess means he’s a golfer
and by his probation letter overkill, he’s not the employer of the month.

One poem I found involving was “the people do not need modern art”, which transcends
the cubicle and presents an interesting scene:

“How art influences people though
the stature attracts only a few tourists a day
and at the same time it attracts Felix
who tries to get into the photos
the background anyway
dropping his pants before the window
and processing his but against the pane
if only a wish could break the glass.”

We have a winner here.



3


Providing book-ends to “Cindi’s Fur Coat” are the poems “terminator” and “terminator II”.
“Terminator” sets the scene of a woman who’s job is “ . . . firing people/ letting go terminating”
complete with the accompaniment of a security guard out of the building. Her job was basically
to fire employees “for offices too chicken shit to do it themselves.”
“Terminator II” brings her back for an ironic twist to befall the speaker:

“she walked right over to my desk
and I said to her right away
gee what are you doing here in my building in my office
before my desk??

Yes, the speaker gets the ax, and the come-up-ence of the firing adds a bit of
pathos to his situation. The last line:

“oh the security guard behind her
he was a piece of work.”


The Chuckwagon is a purveyor of writing for the people, evidencing that there are
still writers who think, (and thinkers who are writing) out there in the world.
I hope the Chuckwagon will continue to be a counter-balance to the likes of academia.




























4

Rubber Side Down- The Biker Poet Anthology Edited by Joe Gouveia

( Joe Gouveia second from right)


Rubber Side Down- The Biker Poet Anthology
Archer Books, Los Angeles, 2008
195 pages
ISBN: 978-1-931122-19-1

Review by Stephan Delbos ( Prague Review)

Rumbling straight from the back roads of literature comes this energetic collection of biker poetry, edited by Massachusetts biker poet Jose “JoeGo” Gouveia. Featuring photos by Michael Lichter, biographical essays, retrospectives and 73 poems from 43 poets from North America, the Netherlands, China, Russia and South Africa, “Rubber Side Down” is both all-inclusive and exclusive; the poets are born of diverse backgrounds, from highwaymen to professors, but all are passionately united by their love of leather, motorcycles and the open road.

And it is passion that comes through most undeniably in the poems of this anthology, passion as clear as the rumbling of straightpipes down Main Street. And this is fitting, for, as MarySusan Williams-Migneault writes in her poem “Biker Poetry is more…:” Biker Poetry is the engine firing up/ blasting across the horizon/ stretching out before you waiting.” It is motion and emotion these poets are most concerned with, and at times the desire for speed seems more important than impeccable craft.

Though the poems vary in form, featuring loose free verse, rhyming ballads, and even “Baiku,” a clever twist on traditional haiku, the constant is a desire to relate a story, be it a memory, a biker legend, or a moment of intense or comical perception. The latter are presented most clearly in the aforementioned “Baiku,” which vary from the comic: “Laconia run/ to the strip to see the show/ bikes and boobs abound!,” to the meditative: steel rubber and chrome/ roaring through concrete jungles/ thunder storms roll in.” These Baiku by Jose Gouveia show just two of the multiple variations on the theme of Biker poetry.

It is clear that these poets are united in their subject matter, just as it is clear that they have little or no desire to be accepted by the academy. But this anthology represents not just a ramshackle collection of poems by men and women on motorcycles. Rather, this anthology, the first of its kind, is both a roadmap and a road: an historical record of Biker Poetry and a path toward a more organized and represented movement.

According to essays in the anthology, The Biker Poetry movement has its roots in the late sixties and early seventies, when The Hell’s Angels reached their highest point of notoriety. At this time, cultural representatives such as Allen Ginsberg and Hunter S. Thompson, to whom the anthology is dedicated, produced representative texts on bikers and biker poets. Since then, the movement has literally cruised the great American highways, coming to fruition at various times in magazines and readings. Not until “Rubber Side Down,” however, has the movement had such inclusive and organized representation. There can be little doubt that the movement will continue to gather strength and that this anthology will serve as a touchstone for future publishers.

Though the themes and presentation of biker poetry may not be for everyone, these poets are undeniably active, even if until now their activity has mostly been within their own circles. “Rubber Side Down’ is an infectious collection of passionate, energetic poems, a must-read for anyone who rides and writes, or anyone who wants to keep abreast of burgeoning underground movements in American poetry. It is wise to remember the words of the late Thom Gunn, whose “On the Move ‘Man You Gotta Go’” is the first poem in the anthology: “One is always nearer by not keeping still.”

TRACY STRAUSS: AN IBBETSON POET AT BREAD LOAF

Tracy Strauss, is an Emerson College Professor, a former resident of Somerville--she defected to Cambridge a little while ago--I forgive her. I had the pleasure to publish her in the LYRICAL SOMERVILLE and IBBETSON STREET. Recently she attended the prestigious writers retreat BREAD LOAF and lived to write about the experience. She sent me the article on the Mass. Arts Council Blog:

Tracy Strauss
August 27th, 2008


Tracy Strauss, a poet, prose writer, educator, and past recipient of a Somerville Arts Council Artist Fellowship, recently attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, set in Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest. We asked Tracy about her thoughts on the conference, and she passed along this terrific description of her particular experiences, ranging from the view (stunning), to the road (harrowing), to the writing (refocused).

Diary of a Bread Loafer
by Tracy L. Strauss

I just returned from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Ripton, VT, where 200 writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry gathered for twelve days of literary exploration. As I reflect upon my first-time attendance, I can say that my experience atop “The Mountain” was challenging, exhilarating, and inspiring.

Each day was filled with a lineup of lectures and readings by great writers, panel discussions on acquiring an agent and approaching book and magazine editors, craft classes, and writing workshops. A familiar face, Chris Castellani, of Boston’s Grub Street, was also present on the mountain to talk about writing centers, colonies, and other professional development opportunities.

Evenings brought the chance for us Bread Loafers to read our work in the Blue Parlor, where we cheered each other on and shared our latest pieces of poetry and prose. (Each day’s itinerary was delivered to us via The Crumb, Bread Loaf’s daily dose).



Studying with Patricia Hampl, I had the opportunity to share a chapter of my memoir-in-progress with faculty and fellow writers for critical response. A discussion about metaphor and structure brought my project into rack focus within my inner eye, and sent me off with keener vision, motivation, and direction.

During breaks in the action, I would take some time for a little solitude, sitting in one of Bread Loaf’s many Appalachian chairs, looking out at the contemplative majesty of the Green Mountains. The sun glowed over parts of it, casting shadows over others. My journey to Bread Loaf, as in the writer’s life, seemed to be pictured in those mountains – in the darkness and light, in the peaks and valleys, standing tall, reaching for the heavens.



The stars were amazing at Bread Loaf. The sky was like a planetarium, with perfectly lit constellations and even the distinct appearance of the Milky Way. Many times I found myself standing in the middle of a field with fellow Bread Loafers, our heads craned back as we stared up at the stars, unable to tear ourselves away.

Before my trip to Bread Loaf Mountain, I had heard about a sense of elitism that some said pervades the Conference. What I did witness was easy to simply tune out. Many attendees, myself included, chose rather to tune in the camaraderie between newfound friends, and, in doing so, unnecessary competitiveness disappeared from the radar.

With no cell phone access and limited internet, many Bread Loafers went a little batty over the course of twelve days in literary seclusion, but the Conference scheduled two fun-filled barn dances to provide an outlet for such energy. Imagine a bunch of writers at a dance – the kind of social situation most of us dreaded in junior high. Then imagine us in our own skins, dancing to “Thriller” and “Crazy,” and having the time of our lives.



Meals were a time for us to share stories about ourselves, and, in many instances to make further connections with agents and editors and writing consultants who sat alongside us at the dining hall tables. Midway through the Conference, we took a 1.5 mile hike to the Robert Frost Farm, where we enjoyed a picnic lunch, toured Frost’s cabin, and listened to a lecture by Jay Parini, who spoke about Frost’s inspiration in nature. Bread Loaf also continued its tradition of the Poets and Prosers Pig Roast one evening, with vegetarian options available.

My trip to Bread Loaf began with some bumps in the road: literally, recent floods washed out the road to Ripton, forcing me to take a detour, which meant a steering-wheel gripping forty-five minute drive through an unpaved ditch-ridden “road” that wound through the woods. At one point the path split in two, and I did not know which one was the path to Bread Loaf. I wondered if I was re-living Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” (Frost, who shared his craft at Bread Loaf from 1939 until his death in 1963, is legacy at this Conference.) I chose right, however, as a half hour later I came upon a small sign that read “To Bread Loaf” and included an arrow outlined in yellow “Caution” tape.



My time away from Massachusetts seemed to isolate me from my life yet it simultaneously brought me back to it. The road I traveled home was smooth – repaired and open – and filled with a renewed sense of clarity, and the drive to write.

POET HARRIS GARDNER BIRTHS A NEW POETRY SERIES AT THE BOSTON OMNI PARKER HOUSE!

POET HARRIS GARDNER BIRTHS A NEW POETRY SERIES AT THE BOSTON OMNI PARKER HOUSE!

By Doug Holder



Harris Gardner will be hosting a new Tapestry of Voices Poetry Reading Series that will continue the long literary tradition of the Omni Parker House Hotel in Boston, Mass. Gardner, a Beacon Hill Resident, co-founder of the literary organization the Bagel Bards , co-founder of Tapestry of Voices and the Boston National Poetry Festival (with Laine Senechal), widely published poet and real estate broker, is moving his poetry series to the Omni Parker House from Borders Books in Boston. The first reading will be held in the historic Gardner Room (named after Isabella, not Harris!) Thursday, Sept 11 at 6:30PM. The featured readers will be David Surette, and Victoria Murray Bosch. There will be an open mic that follows the features. Food and beverage menus are available in the Hotel. The reading is free and open to the public.


The Parker House is a perfect setting for Gardner’s venue. In an article in the Christian Science Monitor it reports that Boston’s Literary Trail begins at this august hotel and for good reason:

“The Literary Trail begins at Tremont and School Streets in the Omni Parker House Hotel, America's oldest continuously operated hotel, home of Parker House rolls and Boston cream pie.
It was here that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Nathaniel Hawthorne started the Saturday Club: On the last Saturday of each month, they would meet for readings, political discussions, fun, and food. Other members included John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Atlantic Monthly editor James Russell Lowell. Charles Dickens was an honorary member who attended when he visited Boston.
However, when Henry David Thoreau was invited to become a member, he declined, saying: "I would rather sit on a horsehair couch with my peers than on a velvet one."
It was at the Parker House that Longfellow drafted "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" and where Dickens gave his first reading of "A Christmas Carol." In the upstairs hall are the mirror and mantel Dickens used while practicing his speaking techniques.”
(Frances J. Folsom, April / 2002)

The Omni Parker House
Boston Omni Parker House Hotel
60 School St
Boston, MA 02108
Phone: (617) 227-8600


Contact: Harris Gardner tapestryofvoices@yahoo.com
617-306-9484

Poet Afaa Michael Weaver: From the Factories of Baltimore to the Literary Milieu of Boston

(Photo by Lynda Koolish)



Poet Afaa Michael Weaver: From the Factories of Baltimore to the Literary Milieu of Boston

By Doug Holder

When Poet Afaa Michael Weaver walked into the editorial offices of The Somerville News his presence seemed to require a hush. He is a large, distinguished-looking, African-American man in his late 50’s who has made considerable contributions to the contemporary poetry world. This is not a poet who went straight from a top shelf college to an MFA mill. He is from the streets of Baltimore, a working class kid who wrote for The Baltimore Sun, and started his own small press while he toiled in the less than academic settings of a tin mill, and a Procter & Gamble factory. He was a member in good standing with the International Oil and Chemical Workers Union, and his hands were callused from hard physical labor, not pampered with a pen. Things changed for Weaver when he won a NEA grant. He quit his blue-collar job (much to his father’s chagrin) and went to Brown University to study poetry and playwriting. Later he went on to publish several critically acclaimed poetry collections, (his most recent “Plum Flower Dance”), had his work anthologized, his papers archived at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, and won the 2008 Pushcart Award for his poem: “American Income.”

Weaver said he was a very odd duck at Procter&Gamble in Baltimore. Few if any workers penned poetry while working with tin, and certainly no one was writing book reviews and articles for The Baltimore Sun. His fellow workers used to joke with Weaver saying: “You’ll die here with the rest of us.” But Weaver was determined to escape the pounding anonymity of the factory floor.

Weaver was fortunate to make the literary scene in the early 80’s when Baltimore’s literary renaissance was in full flower. Weaver met the famed avant-garde poet Andrei Codrescu (founder of the magazine Exquisite Corpse) and others who proved influential in his trajectory as a writer. Weaver said a lot of great writers passed through town to lecture and or read at the John Hopkins Writing Center. Weaver started the small press magazine “Blind Alleys” with Melvin Brown around this time as well.

Weaver laughed at the memory of himself as a sometimes-brash young critic. He remembers panning a poetry collection by Alice Walker writing: “A great novelist doesn’t always make a great poet.”

One thing lead to another and Weaver penned the poetry collection “Water Song,” that lead to his NEA, and his journey to the groves of the academy at Brown University in 1985. At Brown, Weaver intended to study poetry but he wound up studying playwriting with the noted playwright and director Paula Vogel. He was befriended and studied with such poets as Keith Waldron (Burning Deck Press), and George H. Bass, the literary executor of the Langston Hughes estate.

After Brown Weaver taught at Rutgers University, and other colleges. Along the way he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and founded the Zorra Neale Hurston Literary Center and the International Chinese Poetry Conference at Simmons College in Boston, where he is a tenured professor of English.

This year’s conference will be held at Simmons Oct 4 and 5. The press release states:

“ More than two dozen well-known poets from China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the U.S. as well as academic scholars and translators, will meet to explore ways to improve communications between the cultures through the exchange and translation of poetry…The gathering will also focus on women and their role in contemporary Chinese poetry.”

Talking about his Pushcart Award-winning poem “American Income” Weaver said it was birthed when he a read a survey in a newspaper about how weight loss improves income prospects for the general population except for black men. The poem explores the lineage of the African-American experience and the heavy weight it carries.

Weaver has been through a number of marriages, was close to death from congestive heart failure, suffered the black dogs of depression, but now seems to be the picture of health and is enjoying his prime. He says he sees the trend of “careerism” in poetry shifting back to the importance of the poem as art and having something to add to our ongoing conversation with the world and ourselves.

Weaver loves living in Somerville, Mass. and remembers renting his current apartment (that he refers affectionately to as the “cave”) from Norton Real Estate, which the editorial offices of The Somerville News now occupy. He regularly attends meeting of the “Bagel Bards” in Davis Square whenever he is in town. Weaver may travel the world, and break bread with the big literary wigs across the country, but he feels most comfortable with his family and grandkids in Baltimore, and perhaps walking the unpretentious streets of our city.








American Income
by Afaa Michael Weaver

The survey says all groups can make more money
if they lose weight except black men...men of other colors
and women of all colors have more gold, but black men
are the summary of weight, a lead thick thing on the scales,
meters spinning until they ring off the end of the numbering
of accumulation, how things grow heavy, fish on the
ends of lines that become whales, then prehistoric sea life
beyond all memories, the billion days of human hands
working, doing all the labor one can imagine, hands
now the population of cactus leaves on a papyrus moon
waiting for the fire, the notes from all their singing gone
up into the salt breath of tears of children that dry, rise
up to be the crystalline canopy of promises, the infinite
gone fishing days with the apologies for not being able to love
anymore, gone down inside earth somewhere where
women make no demands, have fewer dreams of forever,
these feet that marched and ran and got cut off, these hearts
torn out of chests by nameless thieves, this thrashing
until the chaff is gone out and black men know the gold
of being the dead center of things, where pain is the gateway
to Jerusalem’s, Bodhi trees, places for meditation and howling,
keeping the weeping heads of gods in their eyes.

( from “Poetry”)


* To find out more about the Chinese Poetry Conference go to: http://www.chinesepoetryconference.com


--- Doug Holder

Reviews of poetry collections by Taylor Altman and Alan Catlin

(Alan Catlin)


( Taylor Altman)




POETRY BOOKS PUBLISHED AND WRITTEN BY FORMER SOMERVILLE RESIDENTS


Over the years I have seen many poets, writers, and publishers come and go in the city of Somerville. In my mailbox at the office of The Somerville News I found two new titles from publisher Dave McNamara of the “sunnyoutside” press. Now “sunnyoutside” and McNamara used to happily reside in our environs, but McNamara shuffled off to Buffalo, NY, a year or so ago. And as it happens McNamara has published a poetry collection by Taylor Altman, who was a member of the Somerville-based literary organization the “ Bagel Bards.” During her years in the Boston-area she finished her MFA at Boston University, and now teaches English at the College of Southern Nevada. McNamara also sent me a new collection of poetry from a well-known and respected small press poet Alan Catlin.

Taylor Altman’s collection is titled: “Swimming Back.” The poems are set in the broad lawns and narrow minds of surburbia, ( perhaps Long Island, NY where the poet spent her early years). Altman writes of trying to make sense of her world after the early loss of her Dad. Much of the work takes place around or in water. A good conceit I guess since we are mostly made up of this ubquitious fluid. Having grown up in Long Island in the late 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, I was intrigued to find the poem “Point Lookout,” a Long Island beach of my sun-blistered youth. Here the young Altman gets a taste of the allure and danger of looming adulthood represented by the oceanic call of the sea:

“Our skins slick with oil, we lay
side by side on candy-striped towels that day,
the only thing that mattered was his number,
written on the back of my hand. Jealous,
weren’t you—that I, never the pretty one,
was noticed first at the hamburger stand?
And the sea was always there, hissing,
and roiling in the background,
calling to me in a language only I could understand. “Come closer, come closer,
it said, let me pull you under.”

Altman has written a lovely first book of verse. I expect that we will see a lot more from her in the future.


Now Alan Catlin is no graduate of an MFA school. He is a retired bartender from upstate New York, and he has been published in more journals than most anyone I know, save Lyn Lifshin, A.D. Winans, and perhaps Ed Galing.
“sunnyoutside” had the good sense to publish Catlin’s poetry collection: “Bus Stop.” This takes place in the less than tony setting of Albany, NY, and if you ever been there you’d know what I mean. It is a generally down-at-the heels city, that Catlin has spent most of his working life tending bar. Like the novelist William Kennedy Catlin knows the town, its dark underbelly, the stumblebums, the dandies, the psychos, the grifters, the poseurs, and politicians, who are denizens of this city. In his poem “Only the Dead Know Albany,” Catlin captures the subversive soul—the poetry of the “Other America,” a term and book title the writer Michael Harrington coined years ago.

“ and the side-alley, cock fought
streets, high-stakes crap games
decided by blade and a motorcycle
chain, brass knuckles and steel-toed
boots, row-housed tenement blocks
long,Clinton Avenue to Arbor Hill,
where no trees bloomed, buildings in
full flame, cops and robbers….
The Black Maria and a banshee
wail long summer nights before
Urban Renewal razed the earth
and only the dead knew Albany.”

Highly Recommended.


To order go to http://sunnyoutside.com

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

Love, its Wrath And Others by Jane Chakravarthy

Love, its Wrath

And Others

A Collection of Poetry

and Artwork

by Jane Chakravarthy

Self-published in hardback

$10.00


A Review by Lo Galluccio



The cover of her book is the painting that perhaps held me most spell-bound: a swirling mass of flame-colored scarves, ensconsing the round earthy tones of an eye. It’s a magical eye – Kohl black with one black pupil at its center. Also on exhibit at the Lilypad opening this Saturday in Inman Square were other cosmic collages of bold, saturated colors, and floating or embedded objects, all framed rather regally.in thick gold or silver. There was a girl with black shoulder-length hair, a simple sweet face, a magnetic portrait. There was a trilogy of paintings depicting the migration or amalgamation of souls. I saw thick white crosses, but made no assumptions of their being Christian. Sufi, Pagan. These are the words that crossed my mind as I breathed in the aura of Jane’s work. I asked the artist if the crosses signified anything. “Souls,” she said to me. “I’m not religious.” I forget the word she used. Was it “constraint?”


What can I tell you about Jane? From the U.K, originally. Avid smoker. A socialite of sorts. Not afraid to get in your face and hold you with her eyes. Married to a mysterious Indian man we’re all wondering about. A Taurus – sturdy and generous, with water and fire signs in the ascendant nonetheless. It seemed somewhat comical to me that when my boyfriend wanted to buy her painting, entitled, “Birthing” – a dark blue and purple mass with tiny eyes peering out – he was blocked. Later he confided to me that Jane told him the source of the painting had been a suicide attempt. Well, I offered, maybe she felt too emotionally close to the work. Or, maybe you…needed to wait a few days to make an offer. Jane’s fun and intense. Jane’s generous. Jane’s a talented, I’d even say, visionary painter. There’s something that is Sufistic about her work. There are elemental forces of darkness and light. There are eyes, hearts, fire and earth, a yearning upward and inward to the heart. Then, also, a kind of mysterious darkness that carves out its own space. A kind of purging to get to the core, a backing away from the concrete transactional or the “real.” You won’t find a street address or a contemporary cliché in her work. Of the imagination and the third-eye. Of dreams, they mostly are. I’m not in love with it all, but some in this collection are really special.


I’ve also hankered to buy her book now for a few months and went to the opening knowing it would be on sale. There was an open mic. I missed it and yet Jane led me to the piano and I played and sang without too much fanfare. Funny, I would say the song did capture some attention but and it was a kind of Sufi song about a child whose love is God. A loose phase in the four hour event, I was followed by Ian Thal’s bravely hilarious shtick as Harlequino, the Commedia character My beau bought “Love, its Wrath And Others” for me and Jane scrawled something in a drunken magenta pen as a dedication. All I can make out is “Take care” - Jane. Tonight, I had the chance to read her poetry through. The book is handsomely produced on glossy paper and pages juxtaposing her art with her poems.


Next to a photo of orange fall leaves in a forest, Jane writes in Atonement,


“but you only learn

when you can discern

the actions

and change your way


someday, someday

you will start to pay

for you forgot what sins you chose

but remember the pigs and the firefly too


remember

because they will not forget you”


And further on, next to a molting galaxy of red, yellow and deep blues, she writes in Pattern Of Life:


“blindness of winter

our senses lose track

white blankets surround us

cleansing our souls


another journey we have made

shooting stars explode;

our sleeping friends awaken.”


In her artist’s statement on her website, Jane explains her impulse or compulsion ot create art thusly:


I rarely have a preconceived notion of what I will write or paint, my creativity comes from my life or vicariously from other people. I focus my energy to create images or scenes which guide me to purge and create a tangible expression; something I feel.


Given this deeply intuitive mode of creation, I must then overlook some of the details of grammar and punctuation askew that irk me. Why can’t an ellipse have three dots to be consistent in the course of two lines? Why confuse “too” and “two”? Isn’t it a bit strained to say, “I have been the down-pour of a hailstone on a hot spring day.”? Nevertheless, I’d rather not quibble the weaker details. Her poems strike with a strong emotional force and have an organic logic, for the most part, that holds sway. If she were purely Goth, there would be no tension between dark and light, because the glamour of the night would always win. We’d have her fangs and not her broken heart. She gives us both. In Prince, it’s written:


“the freeness of your mind

the odd way you behave

so different from my constraints

you take my mind and blow it away.


you say that i’m protected

if i follow my path of choice

with or without you, you say

we must never forget our voice”



And this last line is profound for all beings who are striving for authenticity and expression. Obviously, she lets others affect her and there is a value and a cost to this open stance. Yet, I see, also, the Jane that can turn down a buyer, and not bother with what she simply doesn’t like. That’s an artist’s ego. In Crystal she writes:


“i drink the water

afforded me

claw by claw i rise

to the translucent corner


now I see through

the glass of contempt

i know I have arrived”



Check out Jane’ s website at www.janechakravarthy.com and her Myspace page.

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



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