Poet Jason Tandon: From High School English Teacher to Charles Simic and The Paris Review.

Poet Jason Tandon: From High School English Teacher to Charles Simic and The Paris Review.



Jason Tandon was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1975. He is the author of Give Over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt, and the winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press. He is also the author of two chapbooks, Rumble Strip (also from sunnyoutside) and Flight, both of which were nominated for the 2008 Massachusetts Book Award. His poems were twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2007 and have appeared in many journals, including New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Columbia Poetry Review, The Laurel Review, Poetry International, Poet Lore, and Fugue. Tandon holds a BA and MA in English from Middlebury College and an MFA from the University of New Hampshire. His recently released the poetry collection: “Wee Hour Martyrdom” (sunnyoutside). I spoke with Tandon on my Somerville Community Access TV show: “ Poet to Poet Writer to Writer”

Doug Holder: You studied with Charles Simic, the former U.S. Poet Laureate at the University of New Hampshire. Describe that experience?

Jason Tandon: Simic was a wealth of information. He’s been around forever. He’s met everyone, every contemporary American poet that you can think of. One thing that he always stressed about the lyrical poem was economy. He wanted you to write something that could be read forty or fifty times, and have it still give you something back each time you read it.

I was very, very excited to work with him, naturally. He was “the poet,” if I could have chosen a poet, to have worked with. He certainly delivered. He was very forthcoming with his time. He is such a global figure in poetry. I was worried that he wouldn’t be approachable or reachable. But his office was always open. He responded to emails very quickly. He had a very distinct style of leading a workshop. He was very critical and very forthcoming—he didn’t hold back. He told me what he liked and what he didn’t like. I really appreciated it.

DH: Was he brutal?

JT: He was brutal for all intents and purposes. But I thought it was great. It balanced well with the other professor there who took a very different approach.

I love Simic’s poetry… I love his style, so for me it worked out very well. I love his economy and compression.

DH: In your poem from your recent collection: “ The Room of Absence,” dedicated to Simic, absence speaks very loudly. Why?

JT: The funny thing is I was reading an interview with Simic from the 70’s. He was talking about absence in his poetry. It was a very complicated passage. He was trying to explain how he felt present in the poem but at the same time absent. I really didn’t understand what he was talking about. So I brought it to him in his office and asked him to explain it to me. He reread it and said, “What the bleep does that mean?” He playfully just cast this passage aside. So this was something he talked about in an interview and he had no idea what it meant. “The Room of Absence” was a phrase he used and the rest I suppose is poetry history. I am not sure what the poem means, but they were a series of images that were kicking around in me.



DH: You have published with “sunnyoutside” a small press headed by Dave McNamara, that was once located in Somerville, but now is located in Buffalo, NY. How did you hook up?

JT: I knew one of Dave’s writers at the University of New Hampshire, Nate Graziano. He is a fiction writer and a poet who publishes with sunnyoutside. I gave Nate a few of my poems. He seemed to like them. When I got my first chapbook manuscript together, I was thinking of how to get it published. I was thinking of sunnyoutside. I wrote them a big, long query letter. I told Dave McNamara what I liked about his authors and how my work might fit in. He told me at the time that he was booked up (which is the case with most publishers), and told me to give him a query back in six months. I wrote down the date and sent him the manuscript. Three months later he said he would do it. I started with a chapbook “Rumble Strip,” later my collection “Wee Hour Martyrdom” came out. I couldn’t be happier with the work David does. He is a great editor too.

DH: You had a stint at “The Paris Review” right?

JT: As soon as Charles Simic became editor, (which was in the summer of 2005), he called me up and asked me if I wanted to be an intern reading through the slush pile. We had a little office in the basement of the English Dept. I read through literally thousands of submissions per issue.

DH: Out of those thousands of poems how many were selected?

JT: Maybe 10 to 15 poems…total. But I submit to journals so I know what it is like to be on the other side. And of course I was reading for The Paris Review that has a significant history and standards. Of course it was not the New York office of The Paris Review. It wasn’t glamorous. The office had a desk, chair, a computer, and a phone that didn’t work.

DH: You grew up in Hartford; Conn. Has that city influenced your work at all?

JT: Actually most of what’s in “Wee Hour…” comes from my time living in Malden and Medford. “Rumble Strip,” was taken from living in rural areas like Vermont. Still, I am very influenced by place and people. I don’t know that Hartford influenced me.

DH: You have a minimalist style. Are you of the school of thought that less says more?

JT: Yes. Absolutely. If you have a phrase or image—if you have a few lines that just open up a variety of doors for the reader, you are doing a good thing. I want people to come in contact with my work with their own ideas. I like this better than narrative…I am trying to trigger the imagination of the reader. If you do too much you overdo it.

DH: You presently teach at Boston University. How does that fit with your writing?

JT: I have always enjoyed teaching. I taught before I really decided to write. I taught junior high right after college. I went back to get my MFA. I teach Contemporary American Poetry so I am constantly thinking about and discussing American poets. The students are great.



Breakfast in My Twenties




I'd brew coffee from a can of TV blend,
pull my radio from the wall as far
as it could go, and tune in blues or strings
with luck, that luminous refrain and echo.
Crawl onto my roof, light a smoke and sit
for five or ten to watch a violet cannon or
a carpet gray unroll, while Baba prepared
for the lunch rush in his deli below.
Grilled tahini chicken, falafel and kebob,
I'd bury my nose in my clothes—
O smoke that poured from the vent!
My lungs breathed blood, raw, fresh, my teeth gleamed white.
I could've run five miles each day,
but there was too much to do and see at night.

--Jason Tandon

Container Gardening. Ellen Steinbaum.

Container Gardening. Ellen Steinbaum. ( Custom Words PO BOX 541106 Cincinnati, Ohio 45254) http://www.custom-words.com)

Ellen Steinbaum’s poetry collection “Container Gardening” infuses meaning into all the things we carry in this life. It is a long and lyrical grocery list that evokes a late, beloved aunt, the seminal years of the poet’s mother, and the way time creeps up on a person with a flick of an eye. In her poem “Time Travel” Steinbaum weeds through the trappings of the Philadelphia apartment of a recently deceased aunt, and in turn weeds through her own history:

“I am leaving Philadelphia behind:
an apartment closed, silent,
empty, some furniture
given to Goodwill: the last
chairs from the last apartment
of the last of my three aunts.
I am the owner now
Of paintings I know by heart,
china from family dinners in old photographs.
Scarves that fill my drawers
once dressed my dolls.”

And in the poem “Order” Steinbaum compares the painstaking order of her current life—to the wild and joyous disorder of a life with a husband and kids in close proximity:

“I always know where
the tape measure is now,
a pen, a safety pin, my keys.
Not like the years when
shoes tumbled uncoupled
on the floor and every closet
could spill secrets.

Now each day is folded,
neatly stacked in silent drawers
and nothing moves an inch
to left or right.
in an instant I can find
the tape measure.”

Ellen Steinbaum writes a popular column about writers and the writing life in The Boston Globe. In this book she is the subject, and her life yields rich rewards.

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update

Don Winter Reviews "The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel" by Doug Holder

( This Review appears in the current issue of "Fight These Bastards" literary magazine founded by Don Winter)






THE MAN IN THE BOOTH IN THE MIDTOWN TUNNEL. By Doug Holder. 2008. 63 pages. $13 Cervena Barva Press. POBOX 440357 W. Somerville, Mass. 02144-3222 http://www.cervenabarvapress.com


Reviewed by Don Winter

Rather than puzzle poems the reader must pick to find meaning, Doug Holder presents crystal portraits filled with small details that resonate more and more with repeated readings:


Postal Worker

The supervisor
Counts the seconds
As you wipe
The Crumbs from your
Face and return
To your post.

Your hands
Anonymous
Callused, pedestrian
You feed
A rapid
Stream of letters
To a ravenous federal machine.

Your eyes dimmed
For years
From the sea of manila
The bland white face
Of the mail
Faces scarred
With zips.

You feel
Ready to
Be returned to
Your sender.

Holder often aligns himself with those emblematic and beneath notice, voicing experience as a tollbooth attendant, a heroin addict, and a psychiatric patient. And often the poetry is the response to the desolation and the ominous surroundings that engulf characters. When characters aren’t anticipating some form of anxiety (“You felt/It press/Again/In your/Stomach”), they are displaced, or home retreats. “She could never run that way again,” a voice admits in “For Sarah,” and in “The Family Portrait” we are told, “Nothing will last.”

But while this is book is about loss and anguish and darkness, it is also about hope:
“A daily ritual
Of decrepit defiance
Walking the ground
That will own them.”

(Cambridge, Mass: Two Old Women,” p.26)

What may in fact be best about this book is the way the poetry oscillates between the chaotic and the organized, the terrifying and the peaceful. Holder’s is a voice both comfortable and uncomfortable with itself, a voice that allows both the catastrophic and beautiful to co-exist harmoniously. As the speaker in “The Last Hotdog,” suggests, bad things are happening, with worse on the way, but we can find small moments of (mitigated) joy even where hope is no longer possible:

She brought it
To his sick bed,
He bit through
The red casing
The familiar orgasm of juice
Hitting the roof
Of his mouth
In some facsimile
Of his youth.

Holder takes the grit of everyday life and transforms it into elegant, generous and personal poems, as easy to read as a pop novel, as fulfilling as a hearty meal. “The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel,” is the type of book that might bridge the aesthetic gap between popular culture, which often does not acknowledge the existence of the fine arts, and the usually snobbish intelligentsia, which rarely acknowledges the existence of popular culture.

----Don Winter’s work has appeared in the: New York Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, 5 AM, Passages North, Slipstream, Portland Review, Chiron Review, Sycamore Review, Pearl, and close to 500 other journals in the U.S., Canada, England, Australia, Switzerland, Scotland and Ireland. His work has been nominated for twelve Pushcarts. His first collection, Things About to Disappear, is the best seller at Bone World Publishing and in New York Quarterly’s on-line store. He is co-founder of Platonic 3Way Press, home of Fight These Bastards

Memories of a Love Song A La Kerouac: MassPoetryFestival

Memories of a Love Song
A La Kerouac
at the
MassPoetryFestival



By Portia Brockway


It all began with my visit to see Julian Agyeman, to talk about Just Sustainability, Social Justice and Environmental Sustainability joining forces, at The Diesel, in Davis. Upon entering, my first hopeful encounter of the morning was with two fellow writers, we who necessarily swim upstream through layers and swells of emotional portent. Well, Timothy Gager was looking fresh and youthful, sitting tall in his stiff parlor chair by the freebie bar, sheet on sheets of piled papers, purposefully organized.

As I stood by with the poets, Julian reared his black plaits at the crowd-out. I touched base before entering my queue in to the Nexus for Sencha with lemon, joked how coming to The Diesel fulfills my dyke tendencies; he mentioned the wonderful cappuccino folds he finds here.

Timothy was going to read that night at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival out in Lowell, MA, that wide-slung, bug-shuttered photogenic art capital of a canal city. Hinged water flats made of governors’ wishes and men’s hard work slow the rush of glitter through pools, reflecting up into the serene factory windows. The black waters creep the brick bank of moody bars; trot cat-hot down the steaming alley ways; dodge the industry and eateries on the cobbled Market Street. The stray poet slips back inside the soft bowl’s incline.

Timothy feared desolation, that no one would show, and that he would be reading to his beer. Instead the house brewed, bristled, snapped, e-hawed as Tom blunders through life’s knots.????

Alice and I that night enjoyed the untamed emotionality of Victoria in Barcelona (name?) at the Kendall, where Woody, tastefully for once, engages us in the heart art of the guffaw, weeping craws’ uttered roars, seizing at our funny thoughts.

Lit up, we descended, numerous-countenanced, into the royal-velvet-canopied Sedan, our sturdy heave ho, JJ the Grey Spirit, 5728, Dodge, held us as I invited her to the Saturday anti-regimen, the MassPoetryOrgasm. We both wanted to hear Martin Espada and Robert Pinsky speak the truth.

I told Alice that later on at the “Evening of Poetry” we might be (fearfully) engaged to “Write (and Read It Out Loud) with Robert”, the 3x Poet Laureate, hero and local Red Sox fan, and we wanted to hear our friend Charles Coe.

The next evening, after a day of street theater at the Peace March spiraling the Boston Commons, Ben, Alice and I engaged JJ, with Markus Surrealius along at the helm, his head foaming with ideas, then, just as quickly, it dropped to the side, silent, in the passenger seat.

We emerged onto a bobbling studio center, a tilted egg hollowing the Earth, under a net of paths. We followed a sign pointing in toward the yolk, for the Poetry Art Galleries, ending at 5 pm.We found a kiosk with a glossy flyer pasted inside. There were no addresses listed for the noted Feature events. So we meandered around, searching on foot for directions, or a full program.

We enjoyed crossing the wide boulevards and peopled plazas, conferring as to which residents might actually know about the missing Massachusetts Poetry Festival. A Program Guide was procured at a restaurant/bar where they looked at us as though we were strangers in town - we quickly found the reading at the High School where we finally arrived 1-hour-and-40 minutes late.

Robert Pinsky was delivering his last Feature poem “Canto de Paradiso”: truth, complete, and curious.

So, we stayed on, found ourselves out over at the joint consuming smooth sounds from the Jeff Robinson Trio. I especially enjoyed the visiting bass player from Lowell, Rakalam Bob Moses; they sound gustatory, something satisfying.


Poetry encounters came up with the souls of two young women on view, h’ordeuvres, pearl oysters opening, two Venuses, each smoothly beautiful women.

One’s urban, urbane, mild in countenance and accoutrements’ words went up without a trace; perhaps I was overly concerned with her neat prettiness and did not pay attention to what was inside.

The second affair up there had a tribal air to her long neck. She slinked purposefully yet elastically in her indigenous wear; she spoke of mis-placed powers as though the Queen of Sheeba. There was substance in her telling performance.

Charles Coe deserves his own paragraph. As I listen to him my brain halves bond as ether in a warm dark cloud chamber, void at the beginning of the Universe, Now. Charles is never so graphic that we have to leave our own bodies out of the fear of the artist’s moment, that acute, astute, lucid observation that confronts and affronts audience sensibilities. I am not for that, no matter how much I would not argue the point.

Yet, even small mishaps jolt us sometimes, just as Charles’ echo chamber sounded his own cantos, now off, the Organizer spins, hands leading into the crowd, to be congratulated, to congratulate, to find one lost eye turned inward and slightly to the side, I, Portia, the hypnogog, awe shocked.

The rat-a-tat-tat of the next act clattered tight across my bones; I chose to retreat from my prized seat cross-legged under the window, with People’s leather pouch and Tahitian bamboo cape moving largely unprovoked at the back of the large, lovely wooden room ready to revive my senses; perhaps Regie would enjoy a few Yoga classes somewhere safe.

I spoke with the also-waiting Robert Pinsky and wondered if he would laugh at my telling of our “Writing (and Reading It Aloud) with Robert” fear dilemma. I didn’t dare tell the poetry guru, originator of the “Favorite Poems” anthology (project?), friend to all, my story, for fear it would flop.

So, now it is our turn to wait for Pinsky to give forth the voice he has gained, waiting for Pinsky, we grew very tired of still waiting for Pinsky so that we could Ride with Robert’s fertile crest of an imagination for a while. Was it worth it? We began to wonder. We found ourselves returning to the car to find that Ben had lost the ignition key.

With Pinsky finally free to leave we four again arrived at the Hall, just in time for Robert to bid “Portia and Ben Good Night”, in itself a poetic expression coming from his personal power and grace. Charles Coe, a 2008 Massachusetts Poetry Festival Master Mind, with his habitual Metta (kindness), charioteered us back to Cambridge, slung up snug in his silver sedan to dream deep that night.

Lawrence Kessenich: Behind the Scenes at Houghton Mifflin.

Lawrence Kessenich: Behind the Scenes at Houghton Mifflin.

With Doug Holder


Lawrence Kessenich was an editor at the prestigious Boston publishing house Houghton Mifflin. Kessenich, 58, attended the MFA program at U/Mass Amherst, lived near Emily Dickinson’s house, and encountered such poets as: Joe Langland, Donald Junkins, and James Tate. When he didn’t secure a teaching assistant position he was forced to drop out and applied to the Radcliff Publishing Seminar, attending in the summer of 1978. During his time at Houghton Mifflin, Kessenich recruited W. P. Kinsella author of “Shoeless Joe,” Rick Boyer’s “Billingsgate Shoal”, a mystery that won an Edgar Award for best mystery novel of the year, “Confessions of Taoist on Wall Street,”by David Payne, and “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton,” edited by Diane Middlebrook,. Kessenich was the editor for Terry McMillan’s first book “Mama,” as well. I spoke with him on my Somerville Community Access TV Show: “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: After you graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1974, you told me you “meandered” throughout your twenties. What did you do? Is meandering a good thing?

Lawrence Kessenich: It was good for me. At the end of college I was interested in the theatre. I started doing amateur theatre. I basically spent my twenties applying to graduate schools. I was accepted into a theatre program, but at the last minute decided it wasn’t for me. I was starting to write a lot at that point. I put together some short stories that I had written, and applied to 5 or 6 programs. I didn’t get into any of them. At that time I started writing more poetry and so the next time I applied, I applied in poetry. I got into three different programs and chose the one at U/Mass Amherst. I have always been attracted to Massachusetts. They had a very good program at U/Mass. Donald Junkins, was the head of the writing program at that time. But I ran out of money, and I didn’t get a teaching assistantship. So I had to leave.

DH: How did you support yourself in your twenties?

LK: I had all sorts of odd jobs. I worked in a hospital and assisted in autopsies—that was an interesting experience. I worked at an art supply store, a U Haul dealership, etc…

DH: You attended the Radcliffe Publishing Course in the 70’s. Was it sort of like a boot camp for getting into the publishing industry?

LK: That’s a pretty good description. It’s six weeks and it is very intense. I went 25 years ago, I think it has been around for sixty years now. They bring in a lot of people from the publishing business, it is just not theoretical. You hear from people who do it on a day-to-day basis. They do some recruiting. It does give you contacts in the publishing industry. I almost got a job in New York but I decided I couldn’t live in New York on the salary they offered. I eventually got the job at Houghton Mifflin from someone I met at the course.

DH: But you originally wanted to be a writer and now you found yourself on the road to being an editor.

LK: I sort of had an epiphany when I left U/Mass. I thought maybe I was more suited to be the helper than the person who actually creates the stuff. I thought maybe I was more suited to be in the background. It turned out I was pretty good at it…it was a good role for me. But eventually I did want to become a writer myself. I did a little, but it is hard when you are an editor. There are only a handful of people who do it.

DH: William Maxwell of The New Yorker did it.

LK: Yeah and Toni Morrison, Michael Korda.

DH: Did the famous editor of Hemingway and Thomas Wolff, Maxwell Perkins, write?

LK: Absolutely not. He was a pure editor. He was sort of my idol.

DH: Your first job at Houghton Mifflin was editorial assistant to Robie Macauley, a well-known name in the literary world. He was the first serious fiction editor at Playboy. He must have had a few stories from the Mansion, right?

LK: He was there in the 60’s and was able to pay writers $2,000 a short story. In that era you could live on $6,000 a year. He literally supported, sometimes well-known writers, by publishing two or three of their stories in Playboy. So it was a tremendously powerful position, and he got to know a lot of writers very well.

At one time he decided to take a trip to Europe with his wife. The boss asked: “ Well, what are you going to do?” He replied: “Well we are going here and there. While I am there I am going to visit Nabokov, etc…” He knew all these writers abroad. His boss said” Oh, well, we will pay for that.” They wanted him to maintain contacts with these writers.

DH: You say you had to “acquire” novels in order to get ahead. How does one go about doing that?

LK: Well, for novels or nonfiction—you basically read articles. When you are starting out agents won’t talk to you. So you talk to other people, read literary magazines, the smaller magazines, where the authors aren’t necessarily well known. There is a magazine in the publishing trade called: “Publisher’s Weekly.” I discovered the author W.P. Kinsella who wrote “Shoeless Joe” there. The reviews appear in PW before the book is even out. So I happened to read this review of a Canadian anthology of short stories. There was a one sentence description of Kinsella’s story: “ An Iowa farmer builds a playing field in his cornfield in order to invoke his baseball hero Shoeless Joe Jackson.” It sounded wonderful. I’m from the Midwest, and I like sports. I was young and naïve and I didn’t know much about publishing. I figured that fourteen editors would write to him as soon as they saw it. So I decided I was going to write him right away. I asked him if he ever had written a novel. Nobody wants to start with short stories. It happens once in a while but it’s rare.

The Canadian anthology was going to be in the store. And this will give you an idea how little money you make in publishing: I was so poor I didn’t feel I could buy the book, so I went into a bookstore in Harvard Square and read the story. I was just thrilled. He wrote back and said: “ I’d love to write a novel. I tried several times but I didn’t have any luck. I told him to send me everything he had ever written, which at that time were two books of short stories, a beginning novel, etc… I read all of it, but I pretty much came back to the original short story. This was the story that became “Shoeless Joe,” and the subsequent movie “Field of Dreams.” He had an idea about baseball stories. I said that it was great, but that he should start with the first short story and go from there. He responded: “ No, I don’t want to do that.” He had another way he wanted to write it. So about three months later I get about ninety pages of the novel. And honestly, it was terrible. It felt like it wasn’t even the same writer. I worked up my courage and said: “ Look, I don’t think it is working this way. I think you should start with that short story and go from there.” And once he did that it took off. I never told him I was just an assistant editor.

DH: Nan Talese promoted you to editor. She had the misfortune to publish James Frey’s ill-fated memoir. How can an editor guard against phony memoirs, etc…?

LK: What can you do? You’d have to know the person’s life. People usually have some form of credentials…so there is an element of trust.

DH: You were Terry McMillan’s editor for her first book “Mama.” It was chose from the slush pile. Are slush piles extinct today?

LK: Yeah. Pretty much. It has to come through an editor or an agent. It’s a matter of time an expense. It was a fulltime job. I think publishers want to use interns for other things. Publishing houses run on a pretty small margin, so when they do get interns they use them on things that have to be done. The slush pile is a problem because it is huge; anything can get in there. If you get it through an editor or an agent the file is much smaller.

I think it is now shifted to the agents. They now get the slush pile.

DH: Do agents seek quality work or just work that will sell?

LK: They have the same problems as publishing houses. They can’t invest a lot of time in things that won’t sell. I think there are a lot more agents out there that are more idealistic than people realize. If there is something they love, but are not sure if people are going to buy it, they probably will go to bat for it.

DH: You worked with Diane Middlebrook on the “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton.” What role did you plav—did you select any of the poems?

LK: No. I wish I could of because she was one of my favorite poets. I was there as a representative in the publishing house. I made sure that when the manuscript was turned in they did the right things with it: like cover design, inside design, and I was the intermediary between anyone else they had to deal with.

DH: In an interview with Lois Ames, Sexton’s and Sylvia Plath’s social worker, and author of the intro to Plath’s “Bell Jar,” Ames told me she tried to do a biography of Plath but ran into a lot of trouble with the family. Did this happen to Middlebrook?

LK: It took years for Diane to write “Anne Sexton: A Biography.” But during that time she called me up and said: “You are never going to believe what I have--- the tapes of Sexton’s sessions with her therapist.” “Well” I said. “This will guarantee that the book will be controversial if nothing else." And it certainly was and the family was very upset. This fact didn’t come out until the book was published.



--- Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

Digging Dinosaur Dignity in Ardortown by Lynn Savitt

(Lynn Savitt)



Digging Dinosaur Dignity in Ardortown Lynn Savitt (Myshkin Press, Long Island, NY)



“Kvetchmeister” is the term that continually came to mind as I read the seamless knit of jubilation and kvetching, self-mockery and celebration which is the fabric of Lynn Savitt’s ruefully lyrical poems.

It’s a complex knit, struck in her first poem – “The 5,298th Poet’s Poem For A 60th Birthday” - which never flags through all her stanzas, and, surprisingly, never tires the reader. At least not that special reader who commits to standing beside the poet and spading up the layers of irony which cover the dignified strata of a hard-lived life, the life we all inherit by doing what comes naturally and abiding with the results.

“My children settled with spouses/houses near the ocean what/more could a mother want/surf sounds of contentment” is the way the second stanza of Lynn’s above-titled poem sounds the ambivalent contentment which comes to the mother whose brood is all settled and settled well enough, thank you.

In the penultimate stanza we hear the succinctly worded regret which comes with the territory of breeding and raising a new generation by and through the expense our own limited, human vitality: “wake up & smell melting/decades of lovers lost/to cancer & cross country/moves younger pussy/memory burns me to/them & them to me”.

The language is that informal, rushed argot we might pin to our refrigerator door with a magnet as we hurry out to shop or pick up the kids from sports and school. It’s the language of daily life, crowded with details of the next task to accomplish, but also with that poignant longing for relationships and sentiments never quite finished no matter how long our day or our life stretches.






The winning note in Lynn’s triumphs and kvetching is that her longing for the ultimate , which she embraces so ardently in her crowded, enjambed lines, is also experienced complexly, as if she is at once the lone human being experiencing her brief, naïve ardors and also the distanced eye of the poet stretching the ego’s perspective to include both the long leveling hallway of time as well as a crowd of “others”.

In “Gloomy Sunday” this complex perspective is illustrated in the first two stanzas: “a couple celebrates a wedding/anniversary in the rain at beach/gingham tablecloth damp with/wine & love limp as linguine”

This ramble of unpunctuated, but crisply detailed longing, could well be the poet’s own, as she celebrates yet another anniversary in a mature career of anniversaries, this one in not ideal weather and with a possible double-entendre in the “love limp as linguine” . The implicit suggestion of maybe an umbrella and a dose of Viagra hangs comically over this “damp” scene.

But just as her regret could soup into the maudlin, the poet’s eye takes a bitter, bracing turn to the war-torn “gaza strip” and a housewife prodded by war into “packing/hope and photos in pale gray boxes”. Then, in the third stanza a couple who could be the poet’s or anyone’s parents experience the rigors of age together: “an elderly husband & wife try/tying shoelaces together arthritic/fingers can’t lace sneakers loose/ memory trips them up like ropes”.

In both her individual poems as well as in this collection, the poet doesn’t move away from her own hardships to those of others in order to forget, but to enrich her own perspective and return to the personal with a deeper and more humane stance – a Kvetchmeister who holds her “bouquet” close to her heart while giving away single blooms to every passing stranger, including the reader, in need.

J. C. Foritano

Review of Greatest Uncommon Denominator (GUD)

Review of Greatest Uncommon Denominator (GUD)
Issue 3, Autumn 2008
Editors: Julia Bernd
Sal Coraccio
Kaolin Fire
Sue Miller
Debbie Moorhouse
Pages = 204


by Lo Galluccio

If I had to sum up a theme or idea running through this issue, I’d say, “clockwork” or “clockwork gone awry.” What does the word really mean? Clockwork (from the Dictionary) s a mechanism with wheels and springs, like that of a clock. Or, “like clockwork” – with perfect regularity and precision. The other strong association we have to the word derives from the 1971 Sci-Fi film, A Clockwork Orange.” The very name juxtaposes two totally different things – we have precision and timing colliding with a color that is in-between, brash and rather rare. Orange is not primary. Orange is rather like an emergency flare or a scream. So it is that this word, and this idea of strange and telling juxtapositions, crop up in Issue 3 of GUD magazine, Autumn 2008.

From a magazine that began several issues ago with brilliant fictional stories that ran the gamut from surreal to supernatural to Sci-fi, this avant-garde journal has now created a collection that leans more toward something whose work is abstract, mystical and very futuristic. But there is also a strong through-line in format and tone, a variety of moods and styles, which makes the journal a very engaging, albeit, challenging read. There is also a good deal of wry humor. As per the usual formula, Issue 3, interlaces fascinating fiction, with other-worldly graphics and beautiful poems.

In “Poetry’s Yellow Warbler,” a poem by Beverly Jackson, in which she holds a “downy chick” in her palm and detects its “tiny clockwork tick,” we find an alternating progression of natural and mechanistic images and ideas. In combining these elements, Jackson introduces a volume that both deconstructs and re-constructs things, people, places. In the end of the poem she invokes “Yeats, God” and writes “and you may ponder toys while I gape that pigs, bird and planes lift off the ground at all.” p. 1

The first story, “A Song, A Prayer, an Empty Space.” By Darja Malcolm-Clarke is an epic tale of a pseudo-Arabic kingdom whose God machine – a euphomifier – has been corrupted by a “many tongued daemon.” Its maker and guru returns from exile to slay the daemon and restore the source for prayer and contact with God, only to find himself doubting that the euchoi, or coins that are fed the machine as prayer, can really transmit divinity. In fact it is a girl in the village who he finds playing an odd stringed instrument and singing like an angel who arrests his mind. In the end, he decides that singing is actually the better way to pray. “Teach me to sing,” he pleads at the end, to his female colleague and fellow priestess. One still marvels at the economic and religious concept of the euphomifier, how it unified the kingdom with a system of prayer currency. One also realizes the kind of effect a beautiful voice can have. Will he learn to sing? Will he go back to his machine? Will the daemons be outmaneuvered? Well, it’s his epiphany about song that turns the tale.

There is later in the volume, a magical illustration called, “Clockwork Wings” where an angel is bound to the gears of a clock. Her wings are immobile and down-flatten Ned. Her face has seemingly become the clock’s face, which is absent. It seems the martyrdom of the divine to technology.

As always, dark outlandish humor runs through GUD. For example, the fable-like story “Hunt of the I-Don’t-Knows” in which Bryce the Scribe and a penguin-like man are hunted down by creatures that only respond to questions with “I don’t know.” Like a dark Dr. Seuss battalion, these creatures, called, “Low Heads”: begin to suspect that this duo they’ve encountered do have the knowledge they lack:

“Now there are twenty. Now there are thirty. They begin quick-filtering out of the darkness. Their pale faces come ghost-like into moonlight. All in nervous panic-huddle, “I don’t know!” “Do you know?” “I don’t know!” “I don’t know!” p. 54

Bryce the Scribe and his strange partner are targeted for possibly “knowing something” by the Low Heads and they are pursued in a staccato intensity race of short punch sentences and compound words. It’s a battle of coveted, imagined knowledge, of what, in a very existential way, we don’t know.

And as the two scramble through the mud of the forest, the Low Heads upon them the story ends:

“Drowsy. Slow-enchantment distant stretching shout, “You know. You know.” P 56

This, the final almost pitiful recriminating accusation.

Instead of anthropomorphy – the attribution of human form or personality to a god or animal or object. – many texts and images in this issue attribute the human or animal to machines. It’s a post-modern twist.

In the photo “Mustang,” by Jon Radlett, a cadet-like man in jumpsuit fidgets with an old model helicopter in an open field. The silver sheen of the copter is set against the grey tones of a big sky. Its wings are the dark angular propeller which the human is trying to engage and make whirr. By title, the photographer compares a wild horse to a flying machine.

There are some remarkable other poems in this volume. One is “American History” by Jean Paul Ferro, an elegant and still modern ode to beauty and love. In it 5th Avenue in New York City is juxtaposed with the depths of the turquoise ocean; the former a place to float above, the latter,
“a love in a renaissance in the middle of life.” The opening line is stunning:
“You and I – we were made of glass.”

In a poem dedicated to the women and children of Darfur, “How to Fetch Firewood” by Michelle Tandoc-Pichereau, the writer instructs a child to survive the war in an almost psalm-like series of five stanzas. She writes:

“So we look, Abidseum. Because crows feed on those who want, and mouths, in asking, end up dry.”

She admonishes him then to be patient, to bide time even when answers are not present, when a path has not formed. Then,

“Abidseum. That is the time to close your eyes.”

And she promises to be there for him, “breath sharp as memory, praying for history to forget itself.” P. 103

There is far too much good stuff to review thoroughly in this volume but it is a must read. GUD continues to live up to its name and provide readers with work that is far above the base line of modern (or post-modern) literature.

AC KEMP: BRINGS THE ART OF INSULT TO THE SOMERVILLE NEWS WRITERS FESTIVAL

A.C. KEMP: BRINGS THE ART OF INSULT TO THE SOMERVILLE NEWS WRITERS FESTIVAL

On Nov, 22 at 6:30PM at the Somerville News Writers Festival, author A.C.Kemp will bring her bag of barbs to the stage. A. C. Kemp is a Lecturer in English Language Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her book "The Perfect Insult for Every Occasion" came out in March, 2008. I caught up to her recently for an interview. I am happy to report that she didn’t insult me.






Who, in your opinion, are the great insulters of the literati, be it authors or their characters? I can think of Dorothy Parker offhand...probably a lot of the guys and gals at the Roundtable for instance....

Most definitely Dorothy Parker! People get excited about Shakespearian insults, but they make you sound more pretentious than funny. In Hamlet, you’ve got lines like “it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters” about bad actors. Parker’s critique of Katherine Hepburn--“She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B”--has more punch. Plus, Parker shared many of Lady Snark’s favorite hobbies, like drinking and sleeping with married men.

Miss Snark, seen on the front cover of your book, your alter ego, seems like the perfect purveyor of your perspective. I wonder -- is "snark" a slang word? Is she a sort of a cold roast Brahmin, who is having a bad hair day?

Definitely not a Brahmin. Lady Snark was born in Gackle, North Dakota. She ran away from home as a teenager, worked as an exotic dancer, then moved to Paris to start the long, slow process of marrying up. As for snark, it’s not slang. It seems like a newish word, but it’s well over a hundred years old and was even used before Lewis Carroll’s “Hunting of the Snark” poem. It comes from the even better word snork, meaning to grunt or snort. I think we should reintroduce that one, because I’d love to say, “stop being so snorky!”

How is the quality of insults in Somerville, Mass?

Average, but of course, I’m limited to the sample of people who have insulted me. There may be very creative insulters outside my circle of enemies.

Do you think McCain and Obama are good at this art of mudslinging?

Not really. “Palling around with terrorists” is pretty lame. I was kind of hoping for some snaps in the debates, like “Your mama is so dumb she flunked out of the Electoral College”—that sort of thing.

You are a scholar of slang and you founded the website slangcity.com. This developed from a course you taught ESL students. Do you think when we are taught foreign languages in school; slang should be an important component as well? I remember only being taught in language labs stuff like: "In the evening we dress in our colorful native costumes and dance and sing with other idealistic youth." Real people don't talk that away...

I definitely think language students need more slang if they plan to spend any time in a country where the language is spoken. That’s why I started teaching the slang class. If you don’t know slang or even idioms, it’s very hard to fit in, and you can get yourself in trouble by not understanding that you’re being propositioned, threatened or invited to do something illegal. I had a straight student once who didn’t realize, because of language and culture differences, that he was being hit on by a guy until he was at the guy’s house.


You teach at MIT. Across the hall is Junot Diaz. He is our featured reader in The Somerville News Writers Festival that you are a part of. What slang verbiage might you use to congratulate him on his Pulitzer?


Actually, Junot is upstairs from me, but I’d just say “Congratulations!” I’m much more creative at being mean than nice.

Ibbetson 24 Reading: Nov. 8, 2008 Out of the Blue Art Gallery Cambridge, Mass.

( Group Shot)

( Back Gloria Mindock, Irene Koronas)

( Jack Scully)

(Larwrence Kessenich L Doug Holder R

( Lo Galluccio)

( Mike Amado)

Dan Tobin Delves into his Poetry

Dan Tobin Delves into his Poetry

By Cathleen Twardzik

Dan Tobin sits at his desk, amid his books, which are piled high upon it --- with some space for writing. Behind him, Starry Night watches over the Emerson professor’s two bookshelves, sporting volumes, bound of every color of the rainbow.

When it comes to what makes writing work for Tobin, who has brown hair and glasses, and wears a black vest with medium-wash jeans, drawing the reader in is paramount.

According to Tobin, Chair of Writing Literature and Publishing at Emerson College, and author of four poetry books, “John Gardner said that a good piece of fiction draws the reader into a continuous fictional dream, a completely believable alternate reality. A poem that “works” accomplishes the same, though perhaps in a somewhat more multivalent way, since poems by the simple fact of being written in lines establish a vertical dimension to the writing. That means a poem needs to satisfy musically and formally, in a way that is not as urgently required of prose.”

On November 22 at 7 p.m., Tobin will give a poetry reading at The Somerville News Writers’ Festival VI at 371 Summer Street in Davis Square.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Tobin’s mother worked as a bank clerk, and his father on the docks in New York.

Never having been encouraged to write by his parents, the teenager started writing poetry in a notebook, with topics, about which Tobin currently writes, ranging from History to Mythology to love poems --- “like every adolescent,” says Tobin. “I liked playing with the sounds of language.”

“They [Tobin’s parents] were not particularly inclined to poetry. So, there wasn’t a particularly educational foothold in the house,” says Tobin, with a laugh. “They didn’t have any background, in the area that I grew inclined to pursue, myself.”

However, “[My parents] didn’t discourage me either. They pretty much went with what I wanted to do,” Tobin continues.

The poet earned his higher education at the following institutions: “B.A., Iona College; M.T.S., Harvard University; M.F.A., Warren Wilson College; Ph.D., University of Virginia.”

Where did Tobin snatch his first job? He was a Term Faculty Member at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

For Tobin, the writing process fluctuates. “I try to draft a poem as quickly as possible, with as great intensity as I can. Then, I just keep going back and going back,” says Tobin. “Others, go through many drafts to get where they’re going.”

The length of time Tobin requires for the composition of each poem varies considerably. “I will come back to a poem after years and revise it again. I’ve had poems that went through a minimal number of drafts and I was satisfied with them,” says Tobin. “Usually, things have to go through quite a number of drafts, and who knows how many hours of me mulling.”

In case Tobin feels stuck at any given time, he simply directs his attention to another poem-in-progress --- for he has a list of topics --- with any of which he could begin to tinker.

However, “I try to work on things as well as I can, even when I don’t feel inclined to make a poem,” says Tobin.

According to Tobin, it is always difficult for him to simply begin scribbling away, with his pen, on a new masterpiece. Of course, the poet wishes beginning the writing process came more effortlessly to him.

Tobin prefers to write in a standard-size, bound notebook in his study at home or his office at Emerson. When the opportunity arises, he enjoys writing in mid-morning, and continuing for a large chunk of the day.

“I’ve written just about anywhere. I have also jotted ideas or lines down, on the “T”, coming into work and going back from work,” says Tobin. “If I have to write on a napkin, or a piece of tissue, I’ll do that, too,” he says, with a hearty laugh.

Obviously, finding a poem’s tone and voice is not an instant wave of a wand. Instead, “A poem really doesn’t find its proper voice until it finds the proper cadence of its lines. And that’s a matter of discovery and revision and reworking,” says Tobin.

A poem must grab a reader from the first line. Conversely, “An ending, in a way, has to choose you,” Tobin says, with a laugh. “It needs to evolve from the experience of writing the poem. Good endings don’t close the poem down.”

Tobin has composed countless Free Verse poems. “I don’t see myself in any particular camp, or any particular school,” he says.

“I did write one short story in my life, which I have thrown away,” says Tobin. However, he enjoys writing critical and personal essays.

Surprisingly, “at one point, I did feel like I had to make a choice between poetry and visual art. I wanted to draw and paint, for a long time, but I didn’t think I could do both,” says Tobin. Currently, Tobin is still interested in both poetry and painting.

After Tobin believes that enough poems have been compiled, he “just spread[s] them all out on the floor. Gradually, I try to find the shape of the thing.”

Besides writing, Tobin reveals his other interests. “I’m interested, recently, in Physics. I continue to be interested in history, and music…and baseball,” says Tobin, with enthusiasm.

Poetry brings Tobin much joy. “The most rewarding part is probably eventually producing a piece that you believe in and are satisfied with,” says Tobin.

To date, Tobin has four published books of poems, which are entitled, Where the World is Made (1999), Double Life (2004), The Narrows (2005) and Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008). His fifth book of poetry, Belated Heavens, will hit the shelves in 2010.

Tobin advises writers who are just starting out to, “Read, read, read. Read everything and read deeply. The most important thing is to find those poets to whom you have a seemingly innate connection.”

Tobin looks to the future with the intent to continue writing poetry. “I would like to be like Yeats, in the sense that Yates kept writing, pretty much until the day he died.”

* Catherine Twardzik is a student at Emerson College in Boston and a reporter for The Somerville News.

GARY METRAS: FOUNDER OF THE ADASTRA PRESS

( a very young Gary Metras)


GARY METRAS: FOUNDER OF THE ADASTRA PRESS

BY DOUG HOLDER



Gary Metras is the editor, publisher, and printer of the Adastra Press which specializes in handcrafted chapbooks of poetry. The American Book Review said of Adastra: “As long as fine literary presses continue to handcraft handsome books like these from Adastra, serious readers can rest assured that the book is alive and well.” Metras has worked with such renowned poets as: Thomas Lux and Ed Ochester, but has published many debut collections as well.

Metras is a well-regarded poet in his own right. Recently the Pudding House Press released his collection “Greatest Hits: 1980-2006.” He has been widely published in the small press, and is a featured poet in current issue of the literary magazine: “Ibbetson Street.” Metras has read at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and he teaches writing at Springfield College in Springfield, Mass. I talked with him on my Somerville Community Access TV show: “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer”



Doug Holder: You specialize in chapbooks. Why chaps as opposed to perfect bound books?

Gary Metras: I guess because my first two books were chapbooks done by small presses during the Mimeograph Revolution. One of the books was published by the Samizdat Press and the other was self published. The production quality was so shoddy; I thought there had to be a better way to do it. I thought poetry deserves to look better on the page. But still, I was very happy to have them out there in print. When the opportunity came about I took a night course at a local vocational school in printing and graphic arts. I wanted to learn letterpress printing.


DH: Define letterpress printing.

GM: It is relief type. The actual type is pressed against the paper to be printed—it leaves the image, as opposed to offset—the printing plate never touches the paper. The printed plate transfers the image to a rubber roller and the roller touches the paper. Letterpress goes back to Gutenberg.

DH: And what is a chapbook? Where does the name derive from?

GM: The chapbook comes from the pushcart salesman in old London. That is where the name of the small press literary award the Pushcart Prize comes from. So the pushcart street vendors used to carry these little tracts. They were cheaply done on paper with a soft cover. They were all paperback formats. They were all sewn back then because stapling wasn’t around and neither was glue binding. They were cheap books, or chapbooks—they mean the same thing.



The length of a chapbook can vary according to the publisher. The standard length is 24 pages. Most chapbooks don’t have a spine, they are stapled or sewn. I do mine with a spine, it looks more elegant. And it is a better marketing tool in bookstores. The spine makes a huge difference. My chapbooks look like real books, just slimmer. I know the American Poetry Society is publishing four poetry chapbooks a year now.


DH: Did you apprentice with any printers?

GM: No. I am self-taught. But I use a couple of other publishers as my models. I have taken books apart to see how they are put together. I read the old texts like Blumenthal’s “The Art of Printing.”

DH: You have a number of poetry collections to your credit. Do you hold your poetry to the same standards as your publishing?

GM: This is something that I began to realize. I was subconsciously writing my own poems, based on the poems I accepted to publish. I found similar techniques: line breaks, use of metaphor, etc… And I was finding, and I don’t mean to be immodest, that I was better than most of the poets I was publishing, at least during the early years. I have been well published, so I use my own poetry as the standard.

DH: You said in an interview that a manuscript has to present a “graphic challenge”

GM: As a book publisher, as a person who uses metal type, when I am reading a manuscript of poems, I have to find something that challenges me to extend my own skills. This is in terms of designing and laying out the pages in a book.
For instance: I want to know if the title interacts with the body of the poem, or the stanza formats. It took me years to realize that to be challenged graphically was part of my selection process. Two years ago I did a book from the poet Leonard Cirino from Oregon. He had submitted to me for 10 years in a row. He came close and finally I picked a long poem of his. The reason I chose it was that individual lines of his poem presented visual images of what they looked like on the page. Since I can only publish one or two titles a year, I want the books to make a graphic statement as well.

GM: Name some of your favorite small press poets?

DH: Alan Catlin, Michael Casey (from Lowell, Mass.), D.W. Earhart, and others. They all have a tremendous working class sensibility.

GM: You are a son of a bricklayer. What did your father think of your poetry publishing?

DH: He thought it was wonderful. I worked with him on weekends when I was growing up. He admired the sensibilities of working with your hands. We used to drive around Western, Mass. and he would point out buildings and projects he worked on. That impressed me as a young boy. Partly it was my desire to do it with books. The writer who wrote my profile in Poets and Writers magazine was amazed at my bookshelf—three feet of Adastra Press books, representing over 29 years.

DH: How big are your press runs?

GM: We average 250 books per press run.

DH: It is a badge of honor to be published by Adastra.

GM: A young woman, a graduate student at Emerson College in Boston, asked her professor Bill Knott, about having a book done by Adastra. Knott said: “If you want to publish a book do it with Adastra.” She did. It is very satisfying to help young poets. You know yourself, as writers, we work really hard in our loneliness to get our poems down.

DH: You were an English teacher for many years. Why the need for a press?

GM: Teaching is a mental job. I just felt a lack in my life because I wasn’t working with my hands. It was my heritage.

DH: You published Tom Sexton’s “Clock with No Hands,” It deals with the city of Lowell, Mass. Lowell has a rich literary heritage. It is the birthplace of Kerouac; Anne Sexton attended school there, etc… Why did this down-at-the heels- old mill city inspire the literary imagination?

GM: I think the idea of physical sweat when you work for someone else to make a product, accumulates, and steals from the soul. And because it can be so draining of the human spirit, those who have the sensibility to write about it—write about it.


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

Why The Long Face? Stories by Ron MacLean

Why The Long Face? Stories by Ron MacLean (Swank Books POBOX 30016 Jamaica Plain, Ma. 02130) $15.

Somerville writer Pagan Kennedy emailed me about a new book "Why The Long Face?" of short stories by local writer Ron MacLean, who used to direct Grub Street. (A writing school now located in Boston). MacLean reminds me of the well-regarded fiction writer Timothy Gager, whose work deals with the ying and yang of relationships, existential crises of men in their early middle age, with liberal use of the Boston-area environs for a backdrop for his fiction.

The lead story “Aerialist” deals with a man who recently lost his wife due to illness, and how he and his young daughter deal with this tragedy. The daughter takes to walking a tightrope, much to her dad’s bemusement. The father learns from the girl’s aerial alchemy to let go of the past and move on, and to let his daughter stand on her own two small feet:

“Kate, turned, her back to me. Took three steps away and hurled her herself backward, into air, into sky, legs gently propelling, upside down, floating, above the rope, my body resisting the urge to leap forward, to catch her, her feet spinning back to earth…Katie’s face a big, blurry grin. In her element. Where did this come from? Where will it lead? I can’t answer these questions. What I can do is wait for Katie land, and hold her while she’s here.”

There is a lot of local color in this book. Characters drink at Bukowski’s, a watering hole in Inman Square. They hang in my favorite barbecue joint Redbone’s, in Davis Square, etc… In this selection, we have a right on description of Bukowski’s, a bar whose patrons might have driven “the dirty old man” of letters to even more libations:

“The bar is called Bukowski’s, which is unfortunate, and it is populated by young men—late twenties—early thirties. You wouldn’t believe the goatees. Excuse me, Van Dykes. Most of these guys are in advertising and already lost.”

As in most collections, some stories are strong and others less so. MacLean can obviously spin a story. You may have the nagging feeling you have read stuff like this before—but, hey—a little more won’t hurt you.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

Afaa Michael Weaver to be Awarded Ibbetson Street Lifetime Achievement Award Nov. 22

Afaa Michael Weaver, winner of this year's PUSHCART PRIZE for POETRY will be awarded the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement Award Nov 22, 2008, at The Somerville News Writers Festival. Previous winners have been Robert Pinsky, Robert K. Johnson, Jack Powers, Louisa Solano, and David Godine, Jr. for more info go to:


http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com





For full Interview with Weaver go to: http://poesy.org/mags/37/interviews.html or click on title above....

From Mist to Shadow and Flowering Weeds by Robert K. Johnson

(Robert K. Johnson)


Unfathomable Life



Robert K. Johnson's From Mist to Shadow (Ibbetson Street Press, 2006) & Flowering Weeds (Cervena Barva Press, 2008).



Review by Fred Marchant

fjmarchant@aol.com





In West of Your City (1961), William Stafford's first book, there is a poem to keep in mind when reading Robert K. Johnson's two most recent books of poetry. The Stafford poem is “The Well Rising.” In three short-lined quatrains it offers the reader a mini-catalogue of quotidian miracles occurring all around us: a well rising without sound, a spring bubbling on a hillside, the swerving swallows, their decision-making as they bank. These are “thunderous examples,” writes Stafford, and he ends the poem by saying “I place my feet / with care in such a world.” Robert K. Johnson's new poems also step with care in his world, and by implication and experience they teach us the kind of attention such care requires.

Let us begin with Johnson's poetic line. It is invariably short, often enjambed, and always ceremonial. The line breaks never seem to hurry us along. Instead each line functions almost like an act of perception unto itself. Of course there are lines to follow, and as we move through them the poem grows by accretion and lamination. Here, as an example, is “Older,” from Flowering Weeds:



You listen to a concert's

swirl of melody

or to the silent hum

of sunlight on your face



and what rises deep inside you

like surge of June-warm surf

climbing a sand-dune's slope



is a new nameless feeling

that, somehow, includes



the press of love,

the dogged grip of regret,

catapulting joy

and even merciless pain



and leads you to accept,

as calmly as willow leaves

accept a stir of wind,



everything past and present

in your unfathomable life.



The deliberative pacing of this poem is one significant source of its beauty. The deliberation going on here, however, is filled with an almost subliminal tension. Something there is that moves this poem along, even as each line tries to slow it down, tries to isolate and name each stage of feeling, thought, or perception. It is that mini-drama at the end of each line that keeps us in the poem, wondering, and yet ready, open to the surprise of the places the poem takes us.

Johnson is also devoted to the sentence. In the curve and forward motion of his syntax is another significant source of beauty. A number of poems, for instance, consist of a single highly wrought sentence stretched out over the tenterhooks of lineation and stanza. “Four Hours After The Stroke,” for instance, startles us each step of the way:



For a moment it is as if

by standing on tiptoe

I'm able to gain a peek

above a windowsill

see someone who must be

a nurse her dress is so white

walking toward a bed

I'm lying propped up in

and she starts to speak to me

but my tired toes give way

my body sags below

the sill and I'm once again

staring at thick fog

grey as a prison cell.



This sentence verges on the edge of collapse, just as the speaker himself struggles not to fall. Almost falling into a run-on more than once, the sentence somehow holds itself together syntactically as we move along with it slowly, carefully, and at the end, sadly.

But if Johnson's verse is ceremonial, what ceremony is being enacted? If his poems consist of steady, step-by-careful steps, what is the nature of the journey? Sometimes it is a journey toward discovery, but his poems tend not to culminate or rest easy in sheer epiphany. From Mist to Shadow, the very title itself, hints that a life, like a day, is a journey from one darkness to the next, not an arriving at or dwelling long in a place where we see the light. His world and ours is utterly ephemeral. Our day can be studded with menace or near-madness, and there may be secret, eruptive threats moving underneath the surface. But in these poems there also is an overall affirmation. For all their stern realism, the central event in Johnson's poetry is his attention to tenderness, to our capacity to touch and be touched, to be moved by the marvelous, and to have our existence affirmed by what passes for ordinary life, which in these poems is never simply ordinary.

As Simone Weil said, prayer consists of attention. There is no theology hiding behind Johnson's poems, but his rhythms and images, and his careful attention to both, add up to prayer in a secular key. “Inside A Church in Rome,” from Flowering Weeds presents us, for example, with the poet watching an elderly woman at prayer. Ordinarily he says he accepts “the sky as empty,” but for that instant, as he watched, the poet is “wrapped inside the swirl // of a measureless longing / to share the faith that feeds / this woman's life.” It is longing of this almost vertiginous sort that Robert K. Johnson's work embodies, enacts, and records. Yes, by the end of the poem, the feeling has passed, and that ephemerality too is real and felt. But for that moment, the poet has been touched by what he has seen. We encounter such moments throughout Johnson's poetry: especially in the natural world, where ducks might paddle smoothly across a moonlit pond, and above all in the world of our close relations, when one might be touched by a beloved's lips. In childhood memory and adult perplexity, in beauty and loss, in pleasure and pain, in mist and shadow, these poems chart one person's way as he moves through, is touched and touches his “unfathomable life.”



*Fred Marchant is the author of Tipping Point, which won the Washington Prize in poetry. He is a professor of English and the director of creative writing at Suffolk University in Boston, and he is a teaching affiliate of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Documentary based on "I Refused to Die" Ibbetson Street Press--2005 to premiere: Nov. 10

For immediate releaseOctober 26, 2008 "The Holocaust: Memory and Legacy" to premiere Nov. 10 with "The Morgenthau Story" (documentary films)

Contacts: Susie Davidson617-566-7557; Susie_d@yahoo.comApo Torosyan978-535-1206; apotoros@comcast.net


CONDENSED LISTING:

Monday, Nov. 10, 6:30 p.m. films with panel; 10:30 p.m.-12:30 a.m. second showing of the two films alone: Two documentary films on the subject of genocide and human rights, "The Holocaust: Memory and Legacy" narrated by WBZ's Jordan Rich and based on a book by Susie Davidson, and "The Morgenthau Story", directed by Apo Torosyan, on Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian Genocide, will premiere at the Studio Cinema, 376 Trapelo Rd., Belmont. Mid-film panel discussion, moderated by Jordan Rich, with Andrew Tarsy, Chief Institutional Advancement Officer Facing History and Ourselves; Sharistan Melkonian, Chair, Armenian National Committee of Eastern Massachusetts; Dr. Aristotle Michopoulos, Professor and Director of Greek Studies at Hellenic College, Brookline; and Elyse Rast, Holocaust Programs Coordinator, Jewish Community Relations Council and the New England Holocaust Memorial, as well as World War II veterans and concentration camp liberators Cranston Rogers and Phil Minsky; Holocaust survivors, and the films' producers,directors and writers.


$7 admission includes refreshments; theatre concessions (including U Kosher popcorn) also available (free drink and popcorn refills). Three wi-fi computer stations for patrons. Information: www.IRefusedtoDie.com, www.aramaifilms.com, Susie_d@yahoo.com, 617-566-7557; apotoros@comcast.net, 978-535-1206; or the Studio Cinema at 617-484-9751.

Bert Stern, co-founder of Off the Grid Press to read at the Somerville News Writers Festival Nov. 22, 2008

( Off the Grid author and co-founder Henry Braun)


( Off the Grid co-founders Tam Lin Neville/Bert Stern)



Off the Grid Press

By Bert Stern, PhD.


Our press had its origins in the wilds of Northern Maine. Henry Braun, our first author, cut some lumber to pay for the production costs of his new book, Loyalty. In the process of putting the book together, Henry’s wife, Joan, learned that she couldn’t buy just a single ISBN number; she had to buy ten. So, in 2005, the Brauns, along with Bert Stern and Tam Neville, current co-editors of the press, decided to found OTGP. What we most wanted was to encourage writing by elders like ourselves. So we began – a press for poets over 60.



Loyalties was widely praised, by poets like Betsy Sholl, Eleanor Wilner, Nathaniel Tarne, among others. It was also awarded The Maine Writer’s Prize for Poetry, 2008. The quality of our first book set the standards for the two that followed. We were not interested in publishing everything that came our way. In fact, out of 20 plus submissions, we have selected only two.



A Darker, Sweeter String, our second book, is by Lee Sharkey, co-editor of Beloit Poetry Journal. Francine Sterle said of the book: “These taut, truth-telling poems teach us how to ‘heft more weight than we can carry,’ how to speak the unspeakable.” The unspeakable here is the daily news of our anguished times.



Terry Adams, the author of our third book, Adam’s Ribs, became a conscientious objector while serving as Secret Control Officer at the U.S. Air Force’s Strategic Air Command Headquarters during the Vietnam era. His book features poems about emotional and spiritual flashpoints, written with a lyric honesty and fierceness. They are risky poems, often moving to a kind of jazz beat. In the words of James Reiss, “Adams has paid close attention to red-hot emotional moments frozen in time.”



We at Off the Grid are proud of our writers and their books. We are also proud that, through the expertise of our designer, Michael Alpert (head of University of Maine Press), our books are beautiful objects in themselves, printed on acid-free paper and bound with Smythe-Sewn bindings.



All three of our books deal with issues of war, some more directly than others. Though the press is not looking for political poetry per se, during the selection process, an important criteria for the editors is that the poet look beyond his or her own personal world.



Off the Grid Press is a cooperative. While poets pay production costs, editorial services are both free and pro-active. Our two editors, widely published poets and writers, provide editorial assistance described by one of our authors as “loving and insistent.” Though the press does incur some expenses, it makes no profit, and all proceeds go to the author. Today, with new submissions on our desks, we at Off the Grid Press look forward to a long and distinguished list of our titles.



Our reading period is all year long and we invite submissions. Please see our website first, ( offthegridpress.net) for guidelines and required application.


SOMERVILLE NEWS WRITERS FESTIVAL HTT://www.somervillenewswritersfestival.com

The Somerville News Writers Festival Nov. 22 2008

Click on Header for complete information. Call 617-666-4010 for tickets now!!! or pick them up at 21 A College Ave. Davis Square Somerville, Mass.

NUNCA MAIS: NEVER AGAIN PORTUGESE / ENGLISH POEMS HUGH FOX.

NUNCA MAIS: NEVER AGAIN PORTUGESE / ENGLISH POEMS HUGH FOX. (http://www.cornerstonepresstl.com St. Louis, Missouri $15)


The prolific Hugh Fox has released a new collection of poems that he wrote in Portuguese and translated into English. It concerns a recent trip he took with his wife to Brazil. As in many of his recent books it deals with the richness of life and the close proximity of death. Hugh Fox, at 76, knows the fat lady is close to her closing number, and in spite of his gourmet, and gourmand taste for the world, and his still frenzied involvement, that Mermanesque belt of a song still haunts him. Kevin Gallagher, Boston-area poet and founder of COMPOST magazine, writes an email to Fox that Fox incorporates into the poem:

“Enough talking all the time about/death that comes when it comes.”

But the reason Fox riffs so much about death is that he loves life so much. The book is chock full of signature Fox flourishes: the overflow of food, art, sex, people, more food, and much more sex. Fox inhales deeply the beguiling perfume of the world and doesn’t want to exhale. Here he describes a rather pedestrian garden in Brazil:

“ Even the most common places
(Spring—a center for gardens)
always an aura of divinity, a bunch
of super-old women, from an asylum
of the super-old orchid type
of flowers possible, the street outside,
music, what I feel more than anything a
consciousness of the whole world
I have, as frantically as the Buddha
grabbing on to the totality of the present moment.”

As Kevin Gallagher advises Fox:

“Life, think about life,/everyone has to die, it doesn’t make/ any sense to preoccupy yourself with the inevitable”

But knowing Fox, his obsessions will continue, and they will continue to obsess us all.


Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update

CD Collins: A Somerville writer with Kentucky stories

CD Collins: A Somerville writer with Kentucky stories

C.D. Collins crosses many genres. She is an accomplished short story writer, vocalist, poet and consummate performance artist. She has performed at such venues as as the Charles Playhouse, Club Passim, as well as academic institutions across the country. This Somerville resident, originally from Kentucky, has had her work published in such journals as: “Story Quarterly,” “Salamander,” “Ibbetson Street,” and many others. She has received grants from the Somerville Arts Council for music and literature. She won a Cambridge Poetry Award, and her latest CD is “Subtracting Down”, a compilation of post-modern mountain storytelling. She is a member of the “Writer’s Room” in Boston, and has a new book of poetry coming out with the Ibbetson Street Press: “Self-Portrait With A Severed Head.” I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV Show: “Poet to Poet:Writer to Writer” on Somerville Community Access TV.


Doug Holder: You are from Kentucky, but you moved to Somerville in the mid 80’s. How would your life been different if you stayed in Kentucky?

CD Collins: I probably would be dead, or really depressed. I wanted to leave Kentucky to become a writer. I needed to be in the company of other writers. When I was teaching high school in Kentucky I had a cute little student who told me:” Go, be a writer.” So I left. I moved to the Fenway section of Boston with a friend and I was mugged the first week, and my car was stolen…welcome to Boston! I now divide my time between Kentucky and Somerville. Both places compliment each other.

DH: You straddle so many genres…what do you define yourself as?

CD: Let’s say writer. And the definition of a writer is that you write. You can’t be a writer if you are not writing. I have an M.A. in English Literature.

DH: Tell me about your involvement with poetry and music?

CD:I had these friends that I met who were in a band called “Miss Bliss” They eventually wanted me to head them up. They wanted a poet up there on stage. So I started doing poetry and music. I was one of the first to do it again during its resurgence—the Jeff Robinson Trio was also doing it. The new band that came out of this was “Pin Curl.” It was an all-female chamber rock band. And now my band is called: “Rock-a-Betty.” I like to work with musicians. It puts me in front of an audience. It gives this beautiful palette of music behind it and it gets me performing. So basically I say I am a writer and a spoken word artist.

DH: You describe your cd “Subtracting Down” as “post modern mountain” storytelling. Define that.

CD: I would say it is like this. I believe we all should read the literary canon. We should know what we are so we can understand “post modern” I am taking the styles, the tropes, the Southern Gothic style, Blue Grass and Gospel and using it in my work. I am a Buddhist Baptist, and a lesbian. I take my culture and I lovingly hang it inside out, and upside down. I can write a song about gay marriage, the Gay Pride parade to a simple country tune. I am merging my thoughts and ideas from the New South.

DH: You write that as a transplanted Southerner, and long-time Somerville resident you are aware of the “cultural intersection” and “divide” of the two. Well… what are they?

CD: Well, God love ya, as a dyed-in-the-wool New Englander. I spent the summer in Kentucky—and then came back to Somerville. And I always have what I call that “Yankee moment.” It’s usually in Pennsylvania or New York State. When I am driving back to Somerville, there are more people, more traffic, everything is faster. I’ll be cut off, people are rude, I’ll smile at someone, and they won’t smile back. It hurts. And if I take someone down South they may feel a little exposed. People down there look at each other. Southerners actually look in cars. But it is a community that takes care of you. So when I come back here it is a little painful for me. So I can be offended when someone is being their natural city self. But I have all the things here that I wouldn’t have in Kentucky. I came here to be a writer, and I have a group of writers, excellent people, who are helping me.

DH: Word has it you are starting an artist retreat in Kentucky?

CD: I’m lucky. I have a farm in Kentucky, and it has 56 acres. I have a little Victorian cottage on it, and it has 4 bedrooms. After I got the hell raisers out, I took it over. I worked with this guy Ray, and we restored it. I want writers, poets, and musicians to come.

DH: You have a new book of stories coming out “Blue Land.” It deals with a lot of sexual abuse, and drug abuse. Is this to some extent autobiographical?

CD: My writing is not strictly autobiographical. It can be taken from any source including myself.

-- Doug Holder

for more info go to http:/www./cdcollins.com



YANKEE SPRING


O my New Englanders,
O You fib, you tell tall tales, you make myths.
O why do you lie about the weather?
In a way this habit is touching, like a belief in Easter Bunny or the tooth fairy, teaching grade-schoolers to depict the seasons with construction-paper cut-outs of April showers followed by May flowers as if one resided in Camelot.

Myth One:


Spring is just around the corner
As though a few green tongues slicing up through semi-frozen soil,
or iron-hard buds poking out like thumbs,
trying to hitchhike their way south,
were signs of spring.
They are not.
As though
Pasty-legged fraternity chums in Bermuda shorts
suffering from hangovers and chilblains
oohing and aahing around a single crocus
were spring itself.
It is not.


Myth Two:

(……the reason I prefer New England to Los Angeles, Reykjavik, Acapulco, etc. is that……)
We have four seasons.
This is not true.
We have two seasons.
Season One:


Winter ——
an 8 month period lasting from November through June
Followed by a raw stretch of
….morning showers tapering off to snow squalls in the afternoon,
…scattered thunderstorms moving through to make way for steady rain,
…and for the weekend a cold snap with brisk sleet showers.
this unpredictable medley is punctuated by
the blossoming of a lone weeping cherry tree,
it sweet pink confetti tumbling across the parking lot,
random 90 degree sunny days.
Call these blessings, my friends,
but do not call them spring.
Season two:
Construction ——
a concretized stretch of weeks characterized by
superheated atmospheric inversions
and jackhammer dust,
a time of desolation in the metropolis
when the students leave for Europe,
or go off sailing to the Cape & the Islands,
leaving only
those wearing hardhats and earplugs,
And scruffy, displaced artists
who have sublet apartments here
because they cannot afford summer rent in their own apartments
in Rockport and Provincetown
the Artist Colonies…
Which leads us to


Myth Three:

We have an Ocean.
Ok, technically this is true,
But it is not for sissies.
On Saturday morning you must rise at 5 a.m.
drive for two hours
for the opportunity of waiting in line
to pay $20 before the parking lot fills up,
splash on Skin So Soft
to repel vampirish green heads
And no-see-ums
which, like invisible air-borne barracudas,
gnaw chunks of exposed human flesh.
While lugging your beach chair and cooler along the sandy path,
You will read signs
admonishing you to
Stay Away
from the dunes, the grass, the trees or any living plants,
to wear long sleeved white clothing and long white pants
tucked into white socks inside white tennis shoes.
to continually scan
for moving freckles
And, obviously, to burn your clothing the moment you return home.
These signs have a scolding tone,
as do the Pollution Indexes warning us to stay inside.
Which seem to shift the blame onto us,
The breathers.


Myth four:


We have foliage.
No, that one is true.
We do have foliage and it is spectacular, but you must be quick.
because the appearance of the first flaming maple leaf in Boston,
signals that branches are bare in Vermont, Maine, & New Hampshire,
It’s all cornflakes on the ground now, my sweets,
And covered in a foot of snow.
But,
Spring is just around the corner.
When I first moved to Boston,
I waited along with you
But became enraged as each promised season failed to materialize,
I swore at leafless trees,
and heirloom furniture parked on the streets between colossal snow drifts
But now I am at peace.
Because O my New England
I have learned that the hand gestures and facial expressions
At rotaries and stop lights
the horns honking and taxi drivers jumping out of their cars.
Are native forms of celebrations,
The flipping over of out-of-state vehicles by sports’ fans
Is a type of communal theater,
Hello, I wave back, smiling.
Go Sox, Go Patriots, I yell, honking in unison.
We live in New England!
where wind fingers icily under our collars.
where the red line screeches from Central into Harvard Station.
I disembark into the acrid electric scent of subway’s back draft,
sprint up the metal stairs of the out-of-order escalator,
and stride onto the gray pavement
polka-dotted with historical chewing gum,
And I am glad.
When I hear your minor myths:
Boston wears an emerald necklace,
Boston is a very livable city,
OR
We can just hop on 93 and be there in no time…
I smile
Hope is cruel
thus I have deserted it.
So now,
I love you New England,
I love your peoples and your libraries,
I love your cappuccinos and your concerts,
Your artists and your architecture,
Your tabernacles and your theaters,
Your rowdy fans and your rivers.
Oh my New England, my Boston, my Cambridge, my Somerville, my Medford, my Worcester
You awaken spring in my Southern heart.
© CD Collins