Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English

Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English
Eva Salzman and Amy Wack, Eds.
Seren Books
www.seren-books.com or http://amazon.com
ISBN 978-1-85411-431-0


A review by Mignon Ariel King


The editors of Women’s Work intend to counteract the “glaring gender imbalance” in anthologies of modern poets, incorporating both famous and lesser-known women poets from the US, UK, and Ireland. This admirable and complex goal is combined with a reluctance to detract from the poetry itself by reducing the poets to political pawns in a radical, separatist feminism. In a fair world, Salzman’s introduction assesses, “the writing is all that should count,” but in the absence of such fairness the scales must occasionally be tipped in the direction of “positive discrimination” (8).



These editors are an American whose bio is as vibrant as her poetry and a classic British poet-scholar, both of whom have been working with words for their entire lives. The reader is in very good hands with this pair. Salzman points out that editors who are charged with judging the importance of poets generally know too little about modern women poets to have an informed opinion about which women poets have earned the term “important.” The highly learnéd yet extremely entertaining introduction explains that the purpose of the anthology is not to “take gender politics as [its] main subject” (17); however, the fact that anger and resistance still confront the mere discussion of gender inequalities in canonizing literature hammers home the need for this work.



Separated into fourteen themed sections—rather than being arranged in chronological order—this is no gloomy tome. Remember compare and contrast papers from high school English class? Here the editors make such connections for the reader, helpfully placing compatible poems for the reader’s true enjoyment as well as understanding. This format allows the non-scholar to simply enjoy the poems at will. That is, read from the “Culture…” section at night and save “History…War” for daylight hours, if you please. Read according to your current mood. The diversity of voices represented roots this collection in the 21st Century. It is all quite good poetry, no low-quality work appearing because of a poet’s demographics. Here is a sample of the 283 pages of poetry, spanning one-hundred-plus years and three major English-language locales:



“Please can I have a man…Who when I come trotting in…
opens his arms like a trough for me to dive into.”
—Selima Hill, “Please can I have a man”


“Now, when he and I meet, after all these years,/
I say to the bitch inside me, don’t start growling.”
—Carolyn Kizer, “Bitch”


“What does she do with them all?/They warm her throat like pearls/
They fasten her dress, stud her shoes….”
—Amy Wack, “Tooth Fairy”


“In my dream I take the white man/slap him til he loves me.”
—Diane Glancy, “Kemo Sabe”


“When I am old…I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves/
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.”
—Jenny Joseph, “Warning”

“Here comes another alpha male--,/a man’s man, a dealmaker,/
holds tanks of liquor,/charms them pantsless at lunch….”
--Deborah Garrison, “Please Fire Me”


“…What would we have called each other laughing/
joking into our beer? Where are my gangs,/
my teams, my mislaid sisters?”
--Lucille Clifton, “The Lost Women”


The anthology is an excellent read, a sourcebook for writers and students, and a formal scholar’s delight(with outstanding front and back matter, brief but relevant bios, an index, and flawless organization.


English teachers from secondary to college level could not ask for a better text. It is also good for men who have a clue about modern women’s poetry or for those who would like to get one from experts. Impatient readers who could not be paid to read an intro can crack the book open anywhere and be absorbed. Read it because you are in love, or doing your laundry, or lonely, or truly annoyed. It weighs comparatively little, a fine companion on the train at 8am. For women poets there is almost the urge to be discouraged. Instead, be humbled. Be inspired. Be prepared to throw an “it’s about time” party when this anthology becomes required reading in modern poetry courses. Women’s Work has just begun.

--available on amazon.com




Mignon Ariel King is an alumna of the Graduate Program in English at Simmons College, a former adjunct professor of English, and a multicultural woman poet

Falling Forward by Rebecca Schumejda

Falling Forward by Rebecca Schumejda

Copyright 2008

sunnyoutside

PO Box 911

Buffalo, NY 14207



ISBN: 978-1-935613-12-5



Rebecca Schumejda’s titular poem is also the last one in the collection, set off by its own section heading and center justified. It’s a special poem that acts as a sort of afterword and comments, in a fairly direct manner, on the collection as a whole. The image one gets is of a prayer, but not just any prayer—a prayer of supplication in the face of adversity.



Indeed, the collection as a whole works on that level. The section titles are all lines or images from the title poem, “The Truth Is Too Heavy,” “Folded Like Two Hands in Prayer,” “Overgrown with Weeds and Regrets,” and “Falling Forward.”



The first poem begins “This afternoon / I buried your cat / while you were at work.” It is economical language broken into clauses, but the enjambed first line lends a sense of tension, which is borne out through the rest of the poem. The narrator dreads the idea of relating this event when her significant other returns home from a day at work.


Other poems follow a similar theme—two characters with distance between them, avoiding topics that need to be addressed and fumbling through crumbling or crumbled relationships, all in an attempt to maintain grip on the ungrippable.



This tension between the things that ought to be said and things that are not said creates a space of broken relationships and cross-purpose discussions. It’s similar to a Pinter play in that the space between spoken thoughts is as much a character as the actual characters within the poems.



Ultimately, the reader is left with the last poem as an answer to all the problems within. “Falling Forward” is an apt description of the lives of Schumejda’s characters. They don’t so much move through time as stumble, trying to keep their feet in an uneven world. But “[w]hen the truth is too heavy…[t]here’s no way to avoid failure,” says the narrator. This is the very essence, the underlying motif of each poem, that the only thing you can do is “just lean forward / let your knees cushion your fall.”



Very much recommended.



Review by Cameron Mount

Blue Collar Poet. G. Emil Reutter.

Blue Collar Poet. G. Emil Reutter. ( Stone Garden Net Publishing 3851 Cottonwood Dr. Danville, Ca. 94506) http://www.stonegarden.net

Poet G. Emil Reutter has worked in factories, steel mills, and other hard knock type of jobs across the Mid Atlantic region of the U.S. He makes no bones that he is mostly self-taught. He is not a product of an MFA mill, maybe a steel mill. So when he was dubbed with the title “Blue Collar Poet” he stuck with this designation with pride.

And the poems in “Blue Collar Poet” are solid, tight, workman like pieces that leave you thinking. The poem “sweet inside” has a delicious innuendo,

“sweet center
surrounded by fruit
tongue glides along
slowly entering
tasting sweetness
of all
that is inside
ah
nothing is quite
like
a creamsicle
on a hot summer day.”

And in the poem “Moment” Reutter captures it and reels it in:

“she sits
on edge of bed
long wavy hair
covering frame
silhouetted by
early morning sun
i sit up
our bodies meet
her head rests
upon my shoulders
a moment frozen
in time
a moment
that will always
be in my mind.”

Recommended.

Here Comes a-ha’s Biggest Fan!

Here Comes a-ha’s Biggest Fan!

The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow Touches Down in Boston/Chicago

Boston - Yes, here comes a-ha’s biggest fan – or at least, that’s how Hobo Highbrow, the main character of Pål H. Christiansen's novel The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow, sees himself.

People from as many as 24 countries have already ordered their copies of the English edition of this light and entertaining novel first published in Norwegian in 2002. The book is finally available to readers in the Boston and Chicago areas through several local bookstores*. It is far from necessary to be an a-ha fan to be captivated by the endearing Thurber-like character of Hobo Highbrow.

Hobo, a newspaper copywriter who writes on the side and dreams of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, believes he is the only one able to fully understand the three band members of a-ha (particularly Paul Waaktaar-Savoy), who hit the top of the U.S. and many other countries’ music charts back in 1985 with their unforgettable hit Take On Me. On his way to revealing his inner self to the genius he believes Paul Waaktaar-Savoy to be, the struggling writer Hobo loses his job, almost loses his girlfriend, and most definitely loses his grip on reality!

The real Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, who today lives in New York with wife Lauren (formerly of Boston) and their son, Auggie, says he enjoyed reading this “funny and charming” book, and even stands by Hobo, saying, “I’m like that, too” when it comes to being obsessed with someone. “I can latch onto people for their energy or inspiration to get me going. And it works a lot of times, too. There’s rarely a time when I’m not obsessed about some amazing musician, painter, or writer, and then I have to know every little thing about them and see if it somehow relates to me.”

The author, Pål H. Christiansen, also has Norwegian-American roots, as his grandmother, Margaret Nannestad, was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois.

Several American book-bloggers have already enjoyed reading The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow. In his review, Michael Lundin of Bent Bindings Book Blog says: “And sometimes characters you love to read about might not necessarily be people you’d like to hang out with . . .. Throughout this book, Hobo Highbrow reminded me of Ignatius J. Reilly from John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.”

German magazine Der Spiegel wrote of the German edition published in 2007: “Pål H. Christiansen has created a wonderful, grumpy hero - a tedious but friendly chap. Christiansen contemplates with empathy how difficult it can be to find one’s place in this big, wide world while the character you are carrying around inside of you is taking up all of your attention.”

When published in Norway in 2002, Drømmer om storhet received considerable attention from the reviewing press. The British translator and writer Jon Buscall did the English translation and gave the book the new title of The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow, which refers to a-ha’s second album of 1986, Scoundrel Days. (Text: schwindt-pr, Ingerid White)
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
*Bookstores with The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow in stock:
Schoenhof’s Foreign Books, 76A Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 / Harvard Book Store, 256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138 / Porter Square Books, 25 White Street, Cambridge, MA 02140 / Out of the Blue Gallery, 106 Prospect Street, Cambridge, MA 02139 / Trident Booksellers & Café, 338 Newbury Street, Boston, MA 02115 / Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, Brookline, MA 02446 / New England Mobile Book Fair, 82-84 Needham Street, Newton Highlands, MA 02461 / Back Pages Books, 289 Moody Street, Waltham, MA 02453 / Europa Books, 832 N. State Street, Chicago, IL 60610

A printable jpg file of the book cover can be downloaded for free use from the author’s virtual press center at www.phc.no/press.

Court Green 6

Court Green 6

Cora Jacobs, Managing Editor
Court Green
Columbia College Chicago
English Department
600 S. Michigan Ave
Chicago, IL 60605
312/369-8212



Copyright © 2009 by Columbia College Chicago

ISSN 1548-5242





Review by Zvi A. Sesling





Court Green 6 is an annual publication of Columbia College Chicago and a whopper of magazine with 65 pages of poems and another 62 pages entitled “Dossier: Letters.”



Let me begin with the poems. There were so many I liked it is difficult to highlight some. However, Charles Jensen’s poem “Barcelona, City of the Sad Divas” speaks in a language of creativity that fascinates and frightens a reader, while being exhilarating.



Here from the middle of his poem are a few lines, but I recommend you read the whole poem for its full impact:





Where men felt anxious, they offered

two bee-stung lips for company.



Where men felt abandoned, they offered

torn up pictures of forgotten parents



They provided salt for every wound, every corner

of the city was ripe with good junk.



Where they offered junk, they substituted

coffee grounds, homemade breakfasts.





Other poets in this volume include Michael Homolka, Kate Greenstreet, Ron Padgett, and

then there’s Shana Cleveland’s “Chickenfight at the old lake tonight” from I select the second of four short paragraphs:



At the place everyone goes there were

movies and loneliness. There were big pillows for

sitting and popcorn but don’t say I didn’t warn you.





This one too is worth reading in its entirety and depending on the kind of poetry you like

there is something in here for everyone.



However, the most fun I had was reading the section entitled “Dossiers: Letters.”

They are poems and prose poems opening with Rachel Loden’s “Dear Question Mark”

which is a poetic letter to the rock singer of 96 Tears. A clever ditty indeed.



Teddy Macker has several letters entitled “The Cockeyed Prayers” which live up to their names such as ‘TO EVERY PRETTY GIRL I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE,” “MARATHON FEELER” and others.



Alice Notely, wife of the late Ted Berrigan chimes in a series of letter poems, one of which she wrote with Allen Ginsberg back in ’82:



I walked past Leven’s window on Mirror Street

I knew it by the sign that said “Leven’s Window”

in wispy old-fashioned script, on a

postcard beneath the window (shade drawn)

It started snowing. When I (slowly)

turned & faced the street I would wake up:

“Come back next year.”





There are many more, most of them clever, insightful or just plain fun. You’ll find the living and the dead here including Elizabeth Savave, Kimiko Hahn, James Schuyler, Albert Goldbarth, Nicole Cooley, Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsberg (a personal favorite of mine no matter what he wrote), Trey Sager and Lynn Xu to name a few.



I recommend this issue not only for the talented writers, but also for the writing they produce, some of which is unusual yet interesting and, if you seek to learn from reading, you will receive some wonderful lessons.

The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow by Paal H. Christiansen

The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow by Paal H. Christiansen Translated by Jon Buscall (Forlaget Fabula N-1321 Stabekk Norway http://www.forlaget-fabula.no

They say, “Music has charms to soothe the savage beast.” I suppose it does, although in my case, a good shot of Dewar’s does the trick. But in Norwegian write Paal H. Christiansen’s new book “ The Scoundrel Days of Hobo Highbrow,” the music of the pop group “a-ha” provides solace, and makes the center hold, for this struggling, not that young writer, Hobo Highbrow. Frankly I was not familiar with this group, and based on what was represented in the novel, I had trouble figuring out why the protagonist was so enamored with them. But of course I love Billy Joel, and I have been vilified for that.

It seems that Hobo is in the midst of a nervous breakdown of sorts, after losing his job, later his manuscript (that involves the construction of a birdhouse) and suffering a largely imaginary slight from his girlfriend. The book follows Hobo’s confused journey through his mental maze and haze in which he eventually emerges more or less intact. In this scene the 40-year-old Hobo sees one of the a-ha members on the street, and he swoons like a hormonal teenager:

“ I sensed a strength and joy seeping through my body, through my legs, my arms, across my chest and up to my head. I had met Paul Waaktaar! I had looked straight into the eyes of Paul Waaktaar! And I felt a shock jolt through my body as if for a second I was momentarily connected to an electric network with an unknown power. The power of the massively talented. It was power of those who created art that would last for eternity.”

He later opines about pop music and its purpose—at least for him.

“As far as I am concerned the whole purpose of pop music is to drown out all the world’s misery. Music is all about keeping your dreams alive!”

The book contains interesting literary tidbits and linguistic diversions—as the character obsesses as much about his writing as his music. This short novel attempts to explore the struggle of the artist to maintain, create and stay sane in an often-insane world.

Somerville’s Lucy Holstedt and the Women Musicians Network Connection

( From left to right: Berklee Professors: Lucy Holstedt, Christina Karem, Student Leader: Jenna Hardy)


Somerville’s Lucy Holstedt and the Women Musicians Network Connection


So I am sitting at the Sherman café in Union Square on a snowy Sunday, and two local artists blow my way. In fact, they live a mere two houses down from me on School St, and we happen to be fellow “Bagel Bards” as well. Lucy Holstedt, an associate professor at the Berklee School of Music, and her husband Kirk Etherton, (an artist in his own right), are at it again, promoting and putting on the 12th Annual Women Musician Network Concert March 12, 2009 at 8:15PM at the Berklee Performance Center in Boston.

Lucy and Kirk have lived in Somerville for a while, and some years ago we shared the same street in the “ville, Ibbetson Street. (The namesake of that small press Somerville literary magazine.) Lucy told me over a delectable oatmeal scone, not to mention a piece of mouthwatering carrot cake, that she loves Somerville because of its accessibility to public transportation, and it has, as she so succinctly put it: “A small town or village feel to it.” Lucy is teacher of music theory, ear training, and may I say a damn fine poet to boot. She is also a composer, lyricist, and performer. She performed at the sorely missed Jimmy Tingle Theatre and many other venues, and was a member of the “Planet Girls”, a well-known performance group.

Lucy told me that she started the Women Musicians Network in 1998 with Jane Stachowiak. The mission statement of the group according to Lucy is:

“To provide an opportunity for women students to present compositions, compose new work, perform, direct, and learn how to produce a major concert.”

Women are a minority at Berklee Lucy said, and a minority in the music industry at large. So any help is needed. Women are often lead singers in bands, but there are few behind-the-scenes, and in the business aspect itself, she lamented.

Lucy talked about the upcoming concert while her public relations man of a husband handed out concert cards to bemused patrons. The concert will have many special features including Latin vocalist Mili Bermejo, and her husband the bassist Dan Greenspan. There will be performances from students from many different countries including: Israel, Sweden, Scotland, Turkey, etc….

The style of music will be mostly Pop, Jazz and Celtic. There will be an innovative arrangement of Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish,” by a Japanese student; There will also be a beautifully performed ballad by Maureen McMullen, who is quite well known in her native Scotland. And don’t miss the violin duo by Julie Kang and Rika Ikeda, as well as a performance by an African drum/dance troupe—to name a few highlights.

Tickets are a bargain at 10 smackers---go to http://www.berkleebpc.com for more info

Review of: From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers by Doug Holder

From the Paris of New England:
Interviews with Poets and Writers.
By Doug Holder
2009; 133pp; Ibbetson Street Press,
25 School Street, Somerville, MA 02143.
http://ibbetsonpress.com
http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress


It’s really true, Somerville, Massachusetts, right next to Cambridge, is a kind of New England Paris, all kinds of little eateries and galleries and everything-else-ries, like an Asian market, a Peruvian cafe, you name it. And what Holder has done here is to take the interviews he has done with Somerville (and other fancy-wancy, avant-garde, or no-guard-at-all) writers, book-store owners, publishers, etc. and put them together in a book -- with photos.

Masterfully done, Holder really brings the Somerville lit-world alive, alive, alive. There’s Louisa Solano, who ran the Grolier Poetry Book Shop for over thirty years, talking about Robert Lowell, Philip Levine, Bukowski, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ed Hogan, there’s poet Lisa Beatman, talking about her recently published working-class-centered poetry (author of Manufacturing America: Poems From the Factory ), there’s poet Martha Collins who established the Creative Writing Program at U/Mass Boston and who teachers Creative Writing at Oberlin College, there’s Dick Lourie, poet-musician-publisher (of Hanging Loose mag and publishing house) talking about the old (and new) days in Somerville, Beat poet and organizer Jack Powers, Eva Salzman, who has spent years and years in England, there’s poet Afaa Michael Weaver, a professor of Literature at Simmons College in Boston talking about being an African-American poet in a community that gives you the space to be eccentric, poet Sarah Hannah, a professor at Emerson College in Boston, talking about Ph.D.’s versus poetic creativity, there’s poetic genius Lo Gallucio talking about

2.
psychological problems and creativity, poet-publisher Gloria Mindock who glories in the richness of cultural life in Somerville, filled with writers, painters and actors.....

It would take another book to just write about this book, that’s how rich it is. Interviews with Mike Basinski, Errol Uys, Lan Samantha Chang, Miriam Levine, Mark Doty, Claire Messud, Ed Sanders, Robert Creeley, it’s a veritable Who’s Who of artistic souls in Somerville. You go to the Bagel Bard readings in Somerville, hang around with the Somerville poet-artist gang, and it is like going back to Paris at the end of the nineteenth, the beginning of the twentieth century.


*Hugh Fox is a founding editor of the Pushcart Prize and author of “Way, Way Off the Road: Memoir of an Invisible Man.”

When Performers Swim, The Dice are Cast by Judy Katz-Levine

Review, When Performers Swim, The Dice are Cast by Judy Katz-Levine (Ahadada Books, Ontario, Canada)

Reviewer: Barbara Bialick, author of Time Leaves (Ibbetson Street Press)


There are many different languages a poem can speak in. For Judy Katz-Levine, it’s the language of jazz. Music plays her rhythm and meter, her unusal imagery, and the world of dreams of past lives. For out of jazz and Judaism, her mysticism is born.
It peppers her poems, her motherhood and her marriage. Herself a singer in a choir and a jazz flutist, her husband is an acupuncturist and jazz sax player. (It helps to be told these tidbits in her bio, for saxophones, presumably her husband’s, keep cropping up nameless in her poems.) But where she’s particularly proud is of her unnamed son, who she hailed as a prodigy by age 4 in “Sunset III”:

“trees with leaves like the hands of prodigies/…a son about to redeem himself/…
saxophone moaning its scales…/prodigies who can’t fit in, and talk strange languages/prodigies who wait for the morning’s river./being 4 years old and speaking perfectly/…a boat not quite ready, but we are patiently waiting for that day.”
Near the end of the book her son is attending college orientation in Amherst, Mass.

In “On Mortality”, the first poem of the book, she ends up with a lily, to me a symbol of Easter, “the lily that comes up on the young man’s computer screen” It doesn’t seem coincidental that the book comes out before Easter—and yet it is a Jewish woman’s book…Meanwhile, a young man “whoops it up over the/ universe’s peculiarities. Then he doesn’t eat. You and i, we/talk about what’s hard to talk about. Mortality whispers in/the night rain. The will to survive emerges…” Yet the ones she’s speaking of and to are to me a mystery.

She won’t give up all her secrets. “I get by,” she says in the poem of the same name.
Is that the song “I’ll get by as long as I have you”? Either way, she’s “stern” at a party where she’s had a glass of wine…But musicians are controlling the imagery. “Seagulls float. The sax was smooth,/as delicious as a chili with wine. The guitarist did tasty licks/from his days on the road….?” It takes a woman drummer to get her to loosen up…The woman said “Sometimes you just have to shake your money-maker…”

“When performers swim,” the poet declares in the title poem “Performers”, “the dice are cast.” (You’ve got to keep up the performance no matter what?).”when performers tango, stages turn into bridges, an aster in/a garden blooms…when performers die, the oceans leap up and keen as seals/emerge and fly.” (a vivid and surreal or holy moment?)
Like most of her poems, the title poem is a hard one to analyze. But that’s a poet’s fun.

Poets and English teachers alike can have such fun throughout the book. Try analyzing “The Attributes”: “the attributes of this saintly presence are to be numbered/according to flowers. The initiate will enumerate laughter/according to myths and waterfalls; giant spiders, miners/lost in mines due to seismic tremors. What is lost, and/what can be seen—the white circle above, the woods/below…”

But when she speaks of horses, she is impressed with their power and beauty, like her mother apparently was as in “Games of Survival”: “I remember my mother on lonely days. The gusto/She loved…the stallion that couldn’t race…I am poised to play.”
Or this image in “She speaks of horses.”: “Who will I meet, what stranger, emerging/from the dark wells of the eyes of those horses/what body lit under a midnight crescent?”

And finally, she includes space as if it is the so-called thing to do, which is include a little politics in your manuscript: In “Blood Storms” she writes “they say a storm will come. E-mail the whitehouse on/Darfur, imagine what a youg girl suffers in a camp in/Darfur as the snow starts to fall/to be raped as a child…to starve/…every night we hear about/the limbs of soldiers maimed, Iraqis killed…” A good poem, but it lacks any imagery of music, which surely it needs!

But it all gets somehow connected in the final poem “She has said…”: “that she would be able to sing again, after the hoarseness/subsides/she has said that all belongs to the red shooting twig./she will still mother, trembling in the car/…she has said everything will turn out okay, and she hopes/she is exactly perfectly correct/the guitar responds to her fingers, a strong rhythmic/ cadence, and a lamentation”

It’s always in the music where she finds her meanings, mysteries and explanations, and her uniqueness as a poet

By Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES (Ibbetson Street Press)

Streets. Poem Book by Mel King.

Streets. Poem Book by Mel King. ( Sensations Publishing A Division of Sweetie’s Books Silver Spring, Maryland http://sweetiesbooks.com/sensations.aspx

Mel King has been a presence on the Boston political scene for more years than most of us have been alive. I remember his unsuccessful run for mayor—this tall, dignified Blackman, sporting a dashiki, amidst a sea of Brooks Brothers suits. King was born in Boston in 1928, and grew up in the “New York Streets” neighborhood of Boston, named after the towns served by the New York Central Railroad. For years he pounded the pavement, or the streets as a political activist, a gadfly in the status quo’s eye. When I lived in the North End of Boston in the 1980’s I used to see King walking down the winding, fragrant streets, sampling the colorful array of produce that decked the bins in the markets. Like the title of Alfred Kazin’s famous memoir, King is a “Walker in the City.”

King realizes the value of the “street”, thus this poetry collection’s titled “Streets.” With wonderful illustrations by Allan Crite, B.Z. Nunez, and other local artists, King tells the reader that streets have long been symbols of political action:” take it to the streets,” or “take the high road,” for instance, are common enough call to action phrases. King reflects:

“Streets are a major player in all aspects of our lives. Just look at the many ways they shape our songs, poems and stories. There are over 50 songs and thousands of stories and poems inspired by roads and streets. Streets are part of our social rhetoric, as in “street smart” or “hit the road, Jack.”

The poems here fit beautifully with Allan Crite’s paintings. Crite was noted for his painting of street scenes in Boston in the 1930’s and beyond. He portrayed a plethora of street activity, and included in this book is a picture of a parade on Hammond St. in the South End by the artist. King dedicates this book to Crite, who King describes as a “chronicler of life on the streets of Lower Roxbury.’”

And of course being a lover of everything that has to do with food, I loved King’s description of the fare of the thoroughfare. Here are some mouthwatering descriptions:

“streets are a venue for prostitutes and hustlers/ hawkers and peddlers for rags and bottles/ fresh fish get your Porgies today/matzos and ‘ranges as the words faded away/some came with goodies like roasted chestnuts/and popcorn waffles melted butter lemon slush/ and snow cones…. matzos kielbasa feta cheese rolled apricot sheets/delis with pickles and pastrami/pistachio and frozen pudding ice cream…/eel for the holiday wine whiskey beer…”

My word—what a tasteful riff!

There are many stories of the street in this book. On Seneca Street King gets a lesson from a homeless man about life, he remembers organ grinders with their monkeys (I remember a guy on the Commons in the 70’s, the monkey tipped his hat and you put change in it—now that’s what I call monkey business), the bastions of break dancers on the hot, cracked pavement and much more…

King has had a long, and varied life. He was a State Rep in Mass. for a number of years, taught at MIT, and to cap his career, what better way than a book of verse, a love letter to the streets of Boston, his home, the beginning and end of his journey.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

Behind Our Memories by Michael Hettich

Behind Our Memories
By Michael Hettich
ISBN 0-938566-93-8
Adastra Press
16 Reservation Road
Easthampton MA 01027

Review by Steve Glines

It’s the Strathmore laid paper, 80 lbs. at least that catches your eye. The paper is hand folded into a single hand sewn signature binding a beautiful little volume of Garamond letterpress type titled “Behind Our Memories,” by Michael Hettich. It catches your eye. The cover is also done in letterpress but in 5, yes, 5 subtle colors. The book, the binding, and the colophon all say old time, even Victorian quality and it is.

The book carries a simple dedication, “for Colleen” and after reading the first, second, … poem you know Colleen must be his wife. This simple volume is a love story, not sappy, not sentimental but almost mater of fact images we can feel of two young lovers being in love. We see this from the perspective of newlyweds, as well as a father of a young butterfly-chasing daughter. It’s refreshing and not in the least bit cynical but rather fits the almost classical image promised by the letterpress cover. It’s old-fashioned love and it’s pleasing without being “pretty,” its worm without being hot and it’s loving without being “feminine.” Yet in spite of its Victorian promise it’s very much 21st century.

Christmas in the Woods

Our twelve year old daughter walks around the cabin
wearing a red velvet sweater with fake zebra
collar and silky underpants, singing.
Her toenails are bright red. Outside small birds
flit through the trees in the gray light, and beyond
down the bluff, the river pulls.

The radio in the bedroom is tuned to a discussion
of refugee repatriation in various
unfamiliar countries. In the kitchen my wife washes
dishes and sings Christmas carols with out daughter.
I pour us more coffee. Yesterday, a friend explained
the coming extinction. He shared all the details:

Squirrels and weeds, he said, and pigeons
will be our wildlife. Since then I’ve been making
lists of what I need to see. My son has started videotaping
everything we do and say, as though he might save us that way.

And so I’ll sing with my wife and daughter –
smiling at the camera, in this cabin in the woods –
to celebrate the season, and to remind us
someday, how happy we were.

This is the kind of book anyone will enjoy reading and when you’re done give it to someone you love … it’s worth at least 20 points … but who’s counting.

Self-Portrait with Severed Head by CD COLLINS

Self-Portrait with Severed Head.
By C.D. Collins
2009; 56pp; Pa; Ibbetson Street
Press, 25 School St., Somerville,
MA 02143. $15.00.

To order: http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress

REVIEW BY HUGH FOX

There’s a tremendously strong, aesthetically erotic and impressionistic sense of the Here and Now here, but always contextualized by time and death so you feel you’re walking through a kind of ephemeral Louvre that is vanishing as you walk through it: “Beyond the jobs,/the traffic, the wind,/beyond aqua stars/I’ll let you spin/Like a cosmonaut into ether,/released without a sound...// When I finish you,/asking nothing of you. When I finish you,/at last loving you.// Beyond the jobs,/the traffic, the wind,/beyond aqua stars/I’ll let you spin/like falling/like falling.” (“Blood Orange,” pp.33-34).

The poetry here is powerfully evocative and Collins turns the page into a reality that never really leaves you: “Along the Champs-Elysées,/the homeless men lie in the middle of the sidewalk.../They lie on their sides or they crouch on their knees./Each has drawn a chalk balloon above his head./Inside is written his story.../I am without a home in Paris./I have no job./I am a poor Frenchman./I am Jamaican./ They all end, Merci.” (“Champs-Elysés,” p.49).

The French touch helps, the low-key eroticism, the socio-economic/historial overview, all very impressionistic and almost fin de siecle, very much in the twenty-first century but with strong immersions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century capture-all-you-can mystique, giving her work a remarkable overviewing sense of running-down (and-out) time. Listening to her read with the Rockabetty band in the background on her CD Carousel Lounge you see just what a major word-/world-view magician we have here.

* Hugh Fox is a founding editor of the Pushcart Prize and the author of "Way, Way Off the Road: Memoirs of the Invisible Man" ( Ibbetson Street Press)

Zebra Poems by Nadine S. St. Louis

Zebra

Poems by

Nadine S. St. Louis

Marsh River Editions

Marshfield WI

Copyright © 2008 by Nadine S. St. Louis


Review by Zvi A. Sesling


When Israeli poet Abba Kovner was dying of cancer he wrote a book of poems entitled Sloan-Kettering named after the hospital in New York where he was being treated. Kovner was a resistance fighter in the Vilna Ghetto in World War II. In Israel he had to live through a series of wars.


His last battle was the one he couldn’t win. Yet he left a memorable book of poems with section titles such as “The Corridor,” “Rooms, Half-Drugged,” “Honored Visitors,” etc. and a final poem “An ending unfinished.”


In a book of poems entitled Zebra, Nadine St. Louis, who is a cancer survivor, writes to tell about her emotions, her treatment and her reactions. Her poem titles also reveal much about her experiences with names such as “Diagnostic,” “Magnetic Resonance,” “On Cutting Ladies in Two,” “Post-Op” and others.


However, it is “Scar” that sums up her book because it is not only about the physical scar,

it is about the mental anguish of having to look at the result of the operation, having others see it and dealing internally with the knowledge of being a survivor – for how long? Take the opening paragraph:


“I’m thinking of getting a tattoo.

The nearly half-yard sine wave

across my waistline fairly cries out

for adornment.”


Or let the final stanza sink in:


“Let these sharp lines sign a return

to innocence, fruit of a new earth, color

of sky, the undreamed place we come

when we have confronted the beast in the field,

surviving.”


In the final and title poem, “Zebra” St. Louis provides the attributes of zebras to life. It may take more than one reading of this poem to associate zebras with surviving cancer

which is unlike the rest of poems which are clear and to the point.


Reading this volume, one is happy Nadine St. Louis has survived and grateful she has been able to put her thoughts into this chapbook.

All My Eggs Are Broken by Mike Basinski

All My Eggs Are Broken
Michael Basinski
Blaze Vox [Books]
Buffalo New York
2007 ISBN: 1-934289-31-0


REVIEW BY IRENE KORONAS

“The poem and poems arise from my reading of the Medical Museum’s section on: thee Heart and Stomach. Once upon a time, Medical Doctors discovered what they thought were stones in the hearts of the deceased. They did not know what they were. A heart full of stones seemed like a grand place for poetry….” Michael Basinski

The first rush of pages, the display of dots and self indulgent glyphs; one might wonder who wants or cares to read this solid book of poems…

“u,o,i,e,a.

O
attemplatapus seaDuction
geese goose chicken of Fall
supreme as whim she eaters tuna salad
tuna ye olde refrigeratur mermaid
rattle Rubbermaid Rimbaud
cutting cottage cheese dress…”

it is I, the reviewer who deems, possibility, the experimental poetry with all references, external intellectuality, and therein the problem of critique, review, and summation of what may at first appear unapproachable. “I suggest you are no longer here inspiring beginning sing wem wen Wed Wenday and neither of 1.” for this audacious reviewer it is a joy to skim the cream off the top, to find playful glee between the pages, the shiny covers. I slip seduced by all the word games and I get off on dots and a sense of scribbling an inner consciousness, an inner incision of discovery.

“ow ho 59
o
io ools ov
io oun
dow or ho so
io eelicit
ro rue oto io
yo to ato ato lor
of vous no of
insect oo
no ow of insect
onl insect
to co ou
gno 96

ooo if only I could explain the zero the circle the Oooo made in u s, a, anthology of drawing the reader in and an understanding of being an egg…already cracked open; what is being said is not as unusual as one might expect and academia has surrounded itself with the explainable, reasoning references. at last writing breaks barriers; abstracts, minimalizes, non-objectionalizes, catches up with other art forms.

“splendooruende
spyder hangs on spyder’s silk
milkin puppet memory
closing an empty door
absent saucer and cup
of coffee
I am not here
out of his finger
and spoon
ridiculous
he hears her
getting into the bathtub
breathing the engine
driving away.”

Basinski, I am a member of your fan club, your motto, “practice the aside of poetry,” your book inspires, multiplies and ascribes

“au…..bu…..fr…..in
ba…..bit…..not…..asal
fra…..or…..ula…..ipi
lar…..cc…..tal…..pit
bal…..menta…..cal…..al
ro…..on…..tal…..ora
tal…..nasa…..orb…..ital…”

I recommend this book to all poets and recommend the reader who is interested in serious operations of this sort to view www.ubu.com. you will find historic renditions, creative writing and contemporary papers on what one might term, 'experimental' poetry. you will also be able to access more of Michael Basinski’s creative work. there are scholarly papers to help the reader understand the understandable questions one might ask, that I am incapable of answering.


Irene Koronas is the poetry editor of the Ibbetson Street Press.

Nothing Unrequited Here by Heather Bell

Nothing Unrequited Here by Heather Bell (verve bath press), 2-29-09

*Review by Barbara Bialick, author of Time Leaves (Ibbetson Street Press

) In her doily-covered brown-paper chapbook, Heather Bell takes us through her experiences in building a strong relationship with a man she does not name.From what I gathered, she is a relatively young woman, both in poetry and love—but she has a strong, striking collection full of unusual imagery, which I hope will grow to be more deep in future offerings.

She has a developing poetic wisdom and voice worth checking out. “What are weddings made of,” she asks: “I found my ring hidden/in a gun case/…peace is not/our eventual search anymore. Someday/we will be just like/how we are today…” A wedding, she continues in “Wedding Vows By a Woman Who Self-Destructs”, is a time about promises, but “It’s time to arrive like a mourner/It is time to arrive like a Japanese fan/…like a boat…Everyone thinks we were always like this, midair, dancing, but that would also be impossible…”/

The wedding is not, however, the center of the book. The relationship is. “He leaves kayaks in your/ living room…the way he carved your/name into his kitchen table, misses his shotgun…could be an advertisement for Rayban sunglasses…reminds you of Kafka…” And of course he is her lover…

She drew an intriguing poem title in “The Last Three Poems Left After the World Disappeared”. But she gives some undeveloped ideas that even so speak to her poetic imagination: “It must be my fault, not taking/your advice: always walk/backwards from the rattlesnakes./Bees can hear you breathe.” But she adds “You will find /your heart only because I/left hats hanging from branches…” Despite long streams of imagery in these poems, she ironically declares “etcetera is the closest you/will ever get to the meaning of your love…”

Heather Bell graduated in 2005 from Oswego State University in Oswego, New York.Keep your eyes open for her name, which I’m guessing will be heard again.


Barbara Bialick is the author of TIME LEAVES (Ibbetson Street Press).

POIESIS NO.2

POIESIS NO.2 ( Alternating Current POBOX 398058 Cambridge, Mass. 02139 alt-current.com ) $4. http://alt-current.com

Local poet Leah Angstman is at it again. This prolific, small press holy fool ( I mean it in the best sense of the word) has released a new pocket book of poetry that she has named “Poiesis.” There is a captivating painting of a tearful, blue-eyed, blonde woman on the front, a creation of Angstman herself. Inside are some of the finest contemporary small press poets plying their trade in the little magazine scene today, including: Pamela Annas, Alan Catlin, Jeff Fleming, Tim Gager, Ed Galing, Rebecca Schumejda, Jessica Harman, Mignon Ariel King, B.Z. Niditch, Charles Ries, Joseph Verilli, Simon Perchik and others. So many poems, and too little time to mention them all. But I will let you sample a taste of the rich lyrical fare. Charles Ries, known for his reviews, fiction, as well as his poetry, has a zinger and a winner of a poem that tracks a writer’s retreat from the literary circus to well, the real one:

Why I Gave Up Writing and Joined the Circus

I left it all; the paper and pens, publishers
and agents who could not love my inner
fantasy and joined the circus.

The make-up, big nose and fancy pants
helped me overcome my feelings of
obscurity. I created an identity grander
than my literary art. I now have something
worth writing about.

I married the fat lady, she gave birth to
a midget; I learned to swallow swords,
made friends with a contortionist who
told me to turn my pens into pretzels,
and live like a real man.

The featured poet is J. J. Campbell. In his poem “damage” the poet quickly fleshes out the sudden and raw face of damage in its different forms:

a tornado ripped
through a town
in the south and
this backwards
fuck came on the
news and said it’s
kind of scary how
much damage can
be done in just a
few seconds

i started to laugh
and thought the
same can be said
when one doesn’t

pull out fast enough.


Angstman, the founder of the Propaganda Press that publishes this fine zine, has a good eye for good poetry, and has compiled an excellent collection of work.

Highly Recommended

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

“In the Spirit of Leadership” Cheryl Esposito (Review by Paul Steven Stone)

“In the Spirit of Leadership”
A Vision Into A Different Future By Cheryl Esposito
Plumb Road Publishing, price $18.95

Reviewed 2/20/09 by Paul Steven Stone

“In The Spirit of Leadership, A Vision Into A Different Future”, sounds more ponderous and self-important than this book of poems and insights actually proves to be. Designed (unconsciously, I believe) to resemble a box of luxury chocolates, this elegant book seeks to open minds to their own potential and hidden strengths, sharing through poetry and snatches of prose the author’s many insights gained over years as a leadership consultant to CEO’s, senior executives and world leaders.
The book starts off “on track”, giving you what you’ve been led to expect, poetry and insights focused on creating business leaders and fresh thinkers, teaching them “Being Leadership”—embodying leadership—rather than to wear the flimsy-but-oft-worn mantle of “Being Leaders”.
Soon, however, we wander off into realms farther afield than Applied Business School Philosophy. We are journeying with the author through poetic interludes as she takes wilderness solo journeys, overcomes fears of the unknown, recovers from being badly burned in a fire, pushes herself and her readers toward an ever-opening and never-resolved becoming. We are the chrysalis, the cocoon and the butterfly all in one.
The poems themselves use simple direct language, sentences often chopped up into fragments and stanzas.

A few examples…

There it is again.
That in between.
That place of uncertainty
That place where everything
is possible
and nothing
feels right.

The in between shows up all around me
In this writing I am in between.
The words are in between.
I am so good at seeing
what’s in between —
for others…
hearing the unspoken,
in between the words —
for others…
I listen.
I listen.
The lonely listener is
alive and well…in me.
How do I put her to work for me?
What are the words
from the place
in between
that she will hear?

Or when she is “Connecting with one’s nature.”

Open space. Big sky. Canyons that are endless. There I can breathe. I feel everything. I am alone with my fear, with my joy, with my self.
Out there I understand the insignificance of me…
And the significance of us, the humans inhabiting the earth. We are at once reckless and loving with the mother.
When I am there, I am vigilant with my care. I feel honored to be there.
There. To be there. To be.
I don’t experience “there” during day to day living.
I see and appreciate,
but the “there” feeling is quiet.
I lose the nature within me.
In solo, I connect with my true nature.

Cheryl Esposito is clearly a woman of many talents and the wisdom to pursue them with clarity and vigor. If there is a fault with “In The Spirit of Leadership” it lies in it offering too much for us to consider in a single package, too many themes heading in too many directions. But then again, once one connects with the zen of being leadership—of being our true selves—as Esposito envisions it, choosing what to read and what to leave unread probably becomes a natural act.

And there is much in this poetic enterprise worthy of reading.


Paul Steven Stone is the author of "Or So It Seems" ( Blind Elephant Press)

BREATHER by Bruce Dethlefsen

BREATHER

By Bruce Dethlefsen

83 pages / 59 poems / $15

Fire Weed Press
Send Check or Order To:

Bruce Dethlefsen

422 Lawrence Street

Westfield, WI 53964


Review by Charles P. Ries




Bruce Dethlefsen doesn't write many books of poetry. It has been six years since he came out with his second book, Something Near the Dance Floor by Marsh River Editions. And one doesn't see much of his poetry in and around the small press, but my-oh-my, when he decides to show us his good stuff, he comes out swinging. In this, his third and largest collection of poetry, Dethlefsen does most everything right. He is a master of drawing word pictures that are at once narrative stories, melodies, and free association free-for-alls.



The book is broken into five sections that broadly define the thematic mood of his mind: migrant, knots, poet warrior, secrets, and autopsy. There is great kindness here, and a mind with a very wide reach.



Here are two poems from Breather. Playing the Field: you hover / you say I'm not your first flower / your first lover // you lower yourself / how hoverly / how loverly / then leave // oh bee / my honey boy / oh baby mine / come back to me. And When Somebody Calls after Ten P.M.: /when somebody calls after ten p.m. / and you live in wisconsin / and you're snug in your bed // then all I can tell you / somebody better be missing / somebody better had a baby / or somebody better be dead.



In Breather, Dethlefsen flows from the concrete to ethereal. He orbits around the collective unconscious like a Jungian astronaut - his interior radar big enough to find meaning in both the great moments and the small nuances of life. This is the blessing of the mature poet, one who has lived hundreds of lives and can bring this diversity of experience to us as a numinous pool of images to soak in. Breather is an exceptional collection of poetry.


Charles Ries

Suffering Bastards by Alan Catlin

Suffering Bastards

by Alan Catlin

Platonic 3 Way Press

Warsaw IN

Copyright © 2009 by Alan Catlin



Review by Zvi A. Sesling ( founder of the Muddy River Poetry Review)





I read Suffering Bastards not long after seeing the movie The Wrestler and the movie missed an opportunity to use some of Alan Catlin’s characters – they are suffering and they exist in the rundown, bar infested sections of cities. Some of the characters are of a higher order – or are they?



Catlin’s bio says he is a retired barman and it is obvious he spent his time doing more than mixing drinks or serving beer. His observations of his customers are dead on descriptions written in verse. The poems made me glad I don’t spend time in bars.



What else is interesting to read are his embedded opinions of the people he chooses to write about. No names, but you have probably run into them at various points of your life. Or, perhaps, read them in Raymond Chandler novels or seen them in noir films. In addition to the title poem there are poems with titles like “The Bar with No Name Revisited,” “The Afterburner,” “The Bruiser,” “Double Rapid Eye Movement,” etc. You get the point. And if you frequented bars – the old fashioned kind – not the ones that serve sushi or lamb chops with potato au gratin or fancy named drinks, but the ones with small, dark porthole windows, smoke curling upward toward dim lights and no big screen TVs either, then you get the atmosphere of a Catlin poem.



In “Suffering Bastard,” the title poem, Catlin’s description is right out of a hardboiled detective novel:



Someone had punched

his clock with a jack

hammer, a shot right above

the eyes that left them

unfocused and as hard as

fired clay in a closed kiln....





There is also this excerpt from “Twenty years of hard drink,”



a stretch in county,

two or three times in the tank

and locked down in a ward

with all the full time lunatics

and all he had to show for it

was two knife scars on his chest.....



Having read Chandler, Hammett, MacDonald and seen (never enough) noir film, I found Catlin’s poems of real life people who many people never get to see worthy of a larger volume of poetic sketches than this small chapbook.



---Zvi Sesling.

Allen Ginsberg comes to Pittsburgh by Dave Newman

Allen Ginsberg comes to Pittsburgh

by Dave Newman

Platonic 3 Way Press

Warsaw Indiana

Copyright © by Dave Newman



Review by Zvi A. Sesling



Allen Ginsberg comes to Pittsburgh is a fun book of poetry if you don’t mind gratuitous foul mouthed use of language. And while I support First Amendment rights, it doesn’t mean I have to enjoy that freedom. Nor does mean I am prudish because I dislike Dave Newman’s choice of words.



Newman, who forthrightly claims to be influenced by both Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, does his best to write in the barfly’s style, but Bukowski was Bukowski and Ginsberg was Ginsberg. There was only one of each. So to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen:

I’ve Bukowski and Ginsberg and Newman isn’t either.



Having said all that, Newman is still a fun poet and his stories – true or not – keep the reader interested, often smiling and without the overtones of sadness that permeate Bukowski.



For those who feel inadequate in so many ways: psychologically, sexually, alcoholically, socially, to name a few, this chapbook will strike a familiar chord. For those feeling above failure or inadequacy, enjoy looking down on Newman and his neuroses.



Anyway, once I got past that Bukowski-Ginsberg jig – and the language – Newman’s poetry has a certain appeal despite the flaws and I have the feeling that on his own Newman could be a humorous but more serious poet.



The funniest poem in the chapbook is one entitled “Rick Santorum, For US Senator, Reviews A Reissue of Leaves Of Grass by Walt Whitman which begins



First, I didn’t understand it. But one

of my kids, who made the mistake

of going to one of these fancy liberal

colleges, said there’s gay stuff in

here, and I believe him and that’s

just wrong. The gay stuff, I mean.



I suppose you can really hear Santorum utter these words and it make you wonder what people elect to office from any end of the political spectrum.



Then there’s the title poem, which opens:



Allen Ginsberg came to Pittsburgh and tickets

were ten dollars at the door, and I figured

if I showed up a couple hours before the reading,

someone, one of my friends, would take pity, ....



And pity is something Newman seems to seek as he takes the persona of a Woody Allen schlemiel, a Bukowski barfly, failure at satisfying sex and whatever else he conjures up. But as I said, his poetry is fun.