Hugh Fox on Cameron Mount's Evening Watch

(Cameron Mount)


Hugh Fox on Cameron Mount's Evening Watch
Evening Watch.
By Cameron Mount
2009; 27pp;Pa; Ibbetson
Street Press, 25 School Street,
Somerville, MA 02143.$10.00.

Review by Hugh Fox

Cameron Mount is Mr. Sea/Seaside. That’s the real center of his whole world-view: “A wall of solid noise is headed my way/visually and aurally moving ashore,// Waves build crescendo as timpani drums/puntuated by strikes and crackles of light/and thunderous cymbal clashes that echo/across the building surf.//Thirty-knot winds tear through sea grass/perched atop protective dunes, whistling like
flutes...” (“Surfside Orchesta,” p.22).

He’s refreshingly unpretentious and classroomish, although he does have an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Of course Emerson College specializes in communication, not pretentiousness and that’s what Mount specializes in too, getting it across, so you walk away from his work not turned into a golliwog of confusion, but a satisfied partcipant in the variations of Mount’s sea-visions. Not that he’s Mr.
Super-Simplicity either, but has just enough artfulness to smack it to you effectively: “The cyan sky houses/a yellow sun and cotton clouds/as it arches over azure seas/and the foam-flecked northeast wind.//Zephyrs carry sea gulls, terns,/turk’s heads hung from mast heads...” (“Evening
Watch in the North Atlantic,” p.3).

His six years in the Navy didn’t hurt either, and although he’s very New England centered, a member of the Bagel Bards, Somerville’s top-drawer poets-getting-together society, there’s a lot of historical-

2.
international geographical overseeing in his work too: “moss growing in the sidewalk cracks of Istanbul/counterfeit Malese casino dollars/tracer rounds bouncing off the Sargasso Sea...Diamond Botanical Gardens on the island of St. Lucia/Sonoma cacti in the American desert southwest/wild bamboo in a village near Shanghai.” (“Green,” p. 20).

A fascinating combination of Mr. New Englander and World Viewer, but no matter where in the world he goes, he’s always sea-oriented, the ancient past, the present moment, whatever future may come along, it’s always refreshingly sea-centered: “Heralds of the western Med,/they greet us at the Gibraltar gates/the Pillars of Hercules, harbingers/of
our approaching task......” (“Flying Fish,” p. 10).


***** Hugh Fox was the founder and Board of Directors member of COSMEP, the International Organization of Independent Publishers, from 1968 until its death in 1996. Editor of Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry from 1968-1995. Latin American editor of Western World Review & North American Review, during the 60's. Former contributing reviewer on Smith/ Pulpsmith, Choice etc. currently contributing reviewer to SPR and SMR. Listed in Who's Who: The Two Thousand Most Important Writers in the Last Millenium, Dictionary of Middlewestern Writers, and The International Who's Who. He has 85 books published and has another 30 (mainly the novels and plays and one archaeology book) still unpublished on the shelves.

She: Insinuations of Flesh Brooding by Spiel

( Spiel)

She: Insinuations
of Flesh Brooding
The poet Spiel
March Street Press. com
2008 ISBN 1596610891

This book presents itself as short stories in poetic form like so many of the classical poets, Virgil, or Homer, we glean understandings from others lives. The comparison is only in that it is a telling, characters who garnish our attention, with a total American slat, the words congeal, leaving scabs to pick at until the crust lay on a surface and the flesh turns red. The poet Spiel spins tales, catches lives or creates the illusion of actuality.

“…If ever I have imagined
the voice of a muse,
this is it.
I extend my hand
to shake hers,
then notice that she grasps
four bantam chicken eggs
and two juicy sprigs of fresh-picked parsley.
With no further words,
but a forward nod of her head,
she directs me to follow her…”

The poet devours his own life in images so vivid he connects us to each one, forcing the reader to follow all the threads until the end, then we realize how powerful the stories are, how they could impact our own knowing.

“…just as she told my father in years before he passed
she wished to die she tried to die she pressed knives
against her throat and practiced in a mirror practiced
out the act and showed her wish and told you doc and
told us all so many times her wish her pain-filled life
would end so why not pull the plug…”

The book is worth having and reading many times.

Irene Koronas
Poetry editor
Ibbetson Street Press

The Collected Poetry of Hugh Fox 1966-2007,

Review of The Collected Poetry of Hugh Fox 1966-2007, A World Audience Book, New York; Newcastle Australia, 2008

By Luke Salisbury

Hugh Fox’s Collected Poetry runs 543 pages. This is a daunting volume and a most interesting one. Many of the poems are short, and the lines are almost always short, so despite sometimes archaic, very personal or scatological subjects, they are remarkably accessible, and frequently, remarkably good.

Twenty-eight different collections are collected here ranging across forty-one years. SOUL CATCHER SONGS from 1967 begins:

Fog opaques the screams

And invisible snakes and ravens

Become visible

I paint snakes on my eye wall

And worship them.

Radioactivity deradioactivates

And the time-fugue precipitates out the

Colloids of pollution.


A reader might ask, are we on the edge of the abyss, or in the abyss? This poet is not going to shy away from anything—internal or external. The next poem begins:

White air and black water,

“Reality is

Cunts and garbage. The hard edge.”

Cutty Sark -------

Straight as a yard stick.

Plane wreck, off the

Beaten path, three dead,

Only the bones of one

Recovered.

Bear tracks

circling the place in the

snow.

Bear mask,

Bear rattle,

Pray to the Spirit of the Bears.


The poems go on speaking of UFOs, “time-flow compartments split op,” and “anoxic space-warp spirits.”

The spectrophotometer

Confirms the validity of

FUCK


The SOUL CATCHER SONGS end:

I am Coyote, Bear,

And all the metamorphoses of

TO BE.


One reads on and is blasted with anthropology (“ALL THERE EVER WAS WAS/THE GHOST DANCE/SPRING-BURN PLANTING/SUMMER HARVEST/AND THE/COMING OF/THE GODS/THE GODS/THE GODS”), science (“Three gods in one bomb--/Sun/Ex-/pan-/ding./Trinity, Zero +”), ancient religion(“Corn-Mother out of the cleft of/Cliffs Corn/Mother of the spread open/Legs Mother of Moisture/Mother of Rain Sea”), eastern religion (“Having become Buddha,/I want to un-numb my legs and jolly my prick”), dirty words (“Mrs. Genghis Cunt,”) dirty notions (“’I’ll suck you off’”), amusing (Verses to “Mrs. Coffinlid”), poignant (“My personal entropy of wrinkles and sags”), mocking (“Sistine chap last judgment/stern,/Thou Shalt Have Children”), visionary (“The Great Goddess/spreads her/rain-cunt/legs”), surreal (“I believe in Christ the Candy Bar/ and the resurrection of the bowels,/eternal life on the conveyor belt/in the cracker factory,/surrounded by the whiskey and streetcorner/cunt saints.”) and wide, wide erudition. One is sometimes tempted to ask, is the poet serious? I would answer, yes, I think he’s deadly serious. He’s even serious when he’s not serious.

I don’t always understand what Fox is saying but I like it. I like the energy, concision, rhythm, the anger. I like being shown territory I don’t understand. That’s what I mean when I say it’s accessible. Something in almost every one of these poems pulls me in, holds me, spits language I can’t deny in my face.

Yes, I like it.


Later in FOR RICHARD (DICK) THOMAS’ FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY, Zerx Press, 1991, the subject becomes personal. The poet seems to be writing about friends, ex-wives, his children, family patterns functional and dysfunctional. Me and You, Kid is elegiac:

Everyone else gone,

Just me and the kid in the

Big old house,

For a while it’s going to

Be a pain,


And later:

You’d think 24 hours a

Day would be heavy for

Us both,

No baby sitters,

No separation,

But what it does is

Show the bones of

The bond between

Us,


And:

God,

A few weeks and

He’ll be gone

Too,

As if anyone ever went without

Leaving a ghost behind.


Or Enough from the collection TIME: The Plowmen, Whitby, 1992:

… there’s a picture on

The wall of the boy when he was

Two, light years ago, chunky,

Squat, fat-faced, not Bojangles

Loose-limbed basketball playerish

The way he is now, it’s four months

before the next visit, and you lament

not just the absence and emptiness,

but for the illustration it all provides

of the infinite hunger of

Time.


Fox’s poetry is not all garbage and cunts, astrophysics, Mayan mythology and borrowing as eclectic as Ezra Pound, it’s about loss, sadness, how everything goes away. Some is quite beautiful. If you’ve got the ear, stomach, and intellect, I recommend Hugh Fox. You won’t be bored. And, like me, you may like it.


Luke Salisbury/Ibbetson Update/Somerville, Mass. June 2009.


** Luke Salisbury is a Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston and teaches English and Film. He is the author of The Answer Is Baseball (Times Books, 1989; Vintage, 1990) which The Chicago Tribune called the best baseball book of 1989, (A Common Reader said, “Salisbury reveals the heart of the sport better than writer I’ve read,” No. 47, April, 1991), and a novel, The Cleveland Indian (The Smith, 1992; paperback, 1996) which was nominated for the Casey Award in 1992 as best baseball book of the year, and was studied at Indiana State University in an American literature course. Blue Eden, a novel in three stories, (The Smith; hardback and paper, 1996). Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine said, “The middle tale, ‘The Number of the Beast,’ is a gem.” Hollywood and Sunset, a novel will be published by Shambling Gate Press, fall 2005. Mr. Salisbury contributed to Red Sox Century: One Hundred Years of Red Sox Baseball, Baseball & The Game of Life, Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures, DiMaggio: An Illustrated Life, Jackie Robinson: Between the Baselines, Fall Classics: The Best Writing About The World Series’ First Hundred Years and wrote Chapter 9 of a Treasury of Baseball, published by Publications International Ltd. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Ploughshares, Stories Magazine, Pulpsmith, Fan, Elysian Fields, Spitball, Nine, SABR Review of Books, Cooperstown Review, and (in translation) AERA, the Japanese equivalent of Time. He is a past vice president and national secretary of the Society For American Baseball Research (SABR). Mr. Salisbury was the first keynote speaker at Nine Magazine’s Annual Spring Training Conference (1994), and was a frequent guest on Channel 2 Boston’s “Ten O’clock News,” “The Group,” and “Greater Boston,” New England Cable News Network, Comcast’s Sports Pulse, and WBUR’s “Connection.” He was featured in AMC’s “Diamonds On the Silver Screen,” HBO’s Curse of the Bambino and wrote the Krank column for Boston Baseball from 1996 to 1999.

Mr. Salisbury attended The Hun School, New College, and received an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He once taught third grade in the Bronx, and now lives with his wife Barbara and son Ace in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

Something to Exchange. Celia Gilbert.

Something to Exchange. Celia Gilbert. (Blaze Vox Books Buffalo, NY http://blazevox.org)

Celia Gilbert’s new book of poetry “Something To Exchange” speaks to those who have been around the block once, twice and thrice. And for younger folks, take note: these poems will be sure to sucker punch you along this roller coaster ride we call “life’

Gilbert is a printmaker and painter as well as a poet and maintains a studio in Somerville, Mass. An accomplished poet, she has published three collections, and is the winner of an Emily Dickinson Award and a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Southwest Review, and many other prestigious journals.

In the poem “You Ask: Are You My Daughter?” a grown daughter confronts the sight of her elderly and infirm mother strapped to a chair, which brings on an accomplished meditation on mutual love and disappointment, with an unflinching eye to the ravages of time:

The lips pout as the skin sags—a look of disapproval
I never saw in my childhood. Hard not to shrink back
and think you don’t love me but you do,
or did. The one tied into your chair
doesn’t know me now, your precious only daughter
who grew up fearful of all physical danger lest in hurting myself
I wound you. This disappointed face
Seems to say you’re not what I wanted, not what I meant.
Now I am a memory, and you are a memory too.

“Father in His Summer Suit” brings me back to my own, late father, resplendent in his summer Seersucker, off the train from the canyons of Madison Ave, a New York Post under his arm, and his requisite cocktail hour breath. Gilbert’s memory of her dad is decidedly more pastoral, but searing none-the-less:

“ Home from work, Father, in his summer suit, / comes down the country lane.
Honeysuckle spills over the hedges. /He takes a blossom and nips the foot/
of its open-mouthed trumpet, /Letting me taste one translucent drop…. /All summer I tippled, drunk /on the connection to people long ago/who foraged in the wild—
A\and to my wild father—/So newly discovered.”


---- Highly Recommended


Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Somerville, Mass./ June 2009

TIM HORVATH: The tome sets the tone in his novella ‘ Circulation’

TIM HORVATH: The tome sets the tone in his novella ‘ Circulation’

Tim Horvath is a youngish, scholarly looking man, with a new novella out from the former Somerville-based press sunnyoutside. His book “Circulation” concerns a librarian, his love of books, and his relationship with a decidedly eccentric father. Through books he connects with his father, as well as a love interest.

Tim Horvath received his MFA from the University of New Hampshire where he won the Thomas Williams Memorial Prize. His story “The Under Story” won the 2006 Raymond Carver Short Story Award. His work has appeared in Alimentum, Puerto De Sol, and other journals. He was the recipent of a 2008 Yaddo Fellowship. I talked with Horvath on my Somerville Community Access TV Show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer”


Doug Holder: Books in general are the real protagonists in Circulation; from the father’s never realized work: “The Atlas of the Voyage of Things,” to the numerous other titles you mention. Do books make good heroes?

Tim Horvath: I think so. The impetus for the story itself… the first image that came to me was the book itself. The book circulating around. The worlds it would go into—the lives it would intersect. This was inspired by Primo Levi’s book the “ Periodic Table” He was a chemist in addition to being a Holocaust survivor. In “The Periodic Table” he takes 20 chemical agents and builds stories around them. Each one is a sort of incorporation of the elements. The last one was carbon…it really was a beautiful essay. It traces a single molecule of carbon throughout. For instance, at one point it in winds up in a bottle of wine. It has a marvelous ending. So I had this idea swimming in my head. I assigned the idea to books.

DH: Are you a bookish person?

TH: I grew up surrounded by books. I did eventually move away from the book being the only character in “Circulation.”

DH: Have books been heroes in your own life and others? Can they save people?

TH: I think so. I was surrounded with books as a kid. I can remember sort of sleeping with a bunch of books. My own daughter, who will be 4, does the same thing. It is almost like she is genetically programmed. Books have a power beyond their physical status.

DH: Your novella is not big on plot It seems more like a meditation. No sex and violence either. Any comment?

TH: Yeah, but the sequel we’ll have it. (Laugh) The novel I am working on “Goodbye Many Languages” will have three plots from the opening page. It is not my natural tendency. Obviously in “Circulation” it wasn’t a priority.

DH: Give me a description of the book and your influences?

TH: Borges was a big influence on the main character and me. The main character is a librarian. Borges has a story called “The Library of Babel” which is basically about
the universe as a library. The protagonist in my book is mindful of that library. The idea haunts him a little bit. It is almost like a Platonic idea of a library. Although Borges is a big influence on my work, he is almost purely concerned with metaphysical issues. He is not writing about sex, love and relationships. He is not writing about fathers and sons, which my book clearly does. I’d like to think that my book does both, the metaphysical and the ontological.

DH: The title character connects with a love interest through his father’s obscure book about caves. Is this part of your concept of the strange circulation of books, and the strange circulation of the world?

TH: Yeah. Global patterns or connections. There is an element of Chaos Theory there.

DH: In the many interviews with writers I have conducted I have noticed that they held many unusual jobs to make ends meet. Your work at a psychiatric hospital in New Hampshire. How does this fit in with your writing life?

TH: In a lot of ways it doesn’t. It pays the bills. It opens up time for me. Some of my obsessions with human character and personality come through in that job. I spend a lot of time working with autistic patients and patients with developmental disabilities. I spend a lot of time thinking about how to connect to them as individuals. I try to figure out what drives them, what makes them tick. What are they trying to communicate with minimal language? It’s certainly an opportunity to use what I glean in my work.

DH: Do you get much fodder for characters in your books?

TH: More of a composite thing. In the novel I am working on there is a troubled teenager whose character was derived from experiences I had. But also a lot was derived from teaching high school.

DH: I have been reading the new biography of John Cheever. He wrote a lot about his experiences at Yaddo, a famed writers’ residence. You went there. Can you tell us about
your experience?

TH: Yaddo is a wonderful work environment. It is an old mansion, that is filled with 2nd or 3rd rate art, which is good because it might have become a museum rather than a writer’s retreat. It’s located in the woods in Saratoga Springs in upstate New York.

DH: Who was there when you were there?

TH: David Means, a great short storywriter, Jackie Lydon (NPR), and others… It was dreamlike being there. We had a salon-like environment. It felt convivial.

DH: Was writing a novella a first step to writing a novel? Is there a definition of a novella?

TH: A novella is from 10,000 to 50,000 words. I don’t know anyone who has a theory of the novella. This wasn’t a first step for me. It is a pretty typical length for my work.

Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award 2009

Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award


IBBETSON STREET PRESS POETRY AWARD


The Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award is presented at the annual Somerville News Writers Festival (http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com/ ) held this year at the Armory Arts Center in Somerville, Mass.. The festival will be held November 14th (2009) this year. In past years poets and writers such as Pulitzer Prize winner Franz Wright, Junot Diaz, Robert Olen Butler, Oscar-nominated novelist Tom Perotta, Iowa Writer’s Workshop head Lan Samantha Chang, Sue Miller ( author of “The Good Mother”) , Steve Almond, Boston Globe Columnist Alex Beam, poet Nick Flynn, and many others have read in this event. This year Frank Bidart will be receiving the Lifetime Achievement award.

Ibbetson Street Press is also pleased to announce the 3rd annual Ibbetson Street Poetry Contest.

The winner of the Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Contest award (must be a Massachusetts resident) will receive a $100 cash award, a framed certificate, publication in the literary journal “Ibbetson Street” http://ibbetsonpress.com/ and a poetry feature in the “Lyrical Somerville,” in The Somerville News.

To enter send 3 to 5 poems, any genre, length, to Doug Holder 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143. Entry fee is $10. Cash or check only. Make payable to “Ibbetson Street Press” or “Doug Holder." Deadline: Sept 15, 2009

The contest will be judged by Richard Wilhelm http://richardwilhelm.blogspot.com/ poet and arts/editor of the Ibbetson Street Press.

The winner will be announced at the festival, and will receive his or her award. A runner up will be announced as well

Somerville News Writers Festival Lineup Nov 14, 2009

(Tom Perrotta reading in the fifth Somerville News Writers Festival)

Somerville, Mass.


Timothy Gager and Doug Holder founders of the 7 year old Somerville News Writers Festival, announced the lineup for the fiction and poetry features today. The Festival will take place at the Armory Arts Center in Somerville Nov 14, 2009.

Fiction

Rick Moody

Steve Almond

Margot Livesey

John Buffalo Mailer

Lise Haines

Timothy Gager


Poetry

Frank Bidart ( Winner of Ibbetson St. Press Lifetime Achievement Award)

Sam Cornish

Tino Villanueva

Richard Hoffman

Tam Lin Neville

Doug Holder

Postmark Atlantis by Paul Kareem Tayyar

Paul Kareem Tayyar, a Southern California poet and the author
Of “Scenes From a Good Life” and “Everyday Magic”, is a two-time
Pushcart Prize nominee.

Paul has given us a collection of poems stunningly simple and yet filled
with a depth of wisdom and experience, each page transporting us
into a world filled with magic and the mystical energy of hope.

From the ghostly and moving “Survivors”,
Our bodies tethered to a darkness that holds the voices
Of the painted like a
Thousand silent hostages,
Eyes closed to face a God
They are not certain
Anymore exists.

We travel with the author through orchards and into kitchens,
accompanied by dancers and gypsies…

In “The First of May”

You see the horizon like a gypsy
Would: an easy mark, with pockets
Deep enough to pick without him
Having noticed.

You do not stop to eat until you
Are well into another landscape,
A clearing where the white river
That you forded sleeps like a
Child among the banks.

The reader becomes the child among the banks listening and opening
to the soft and subtle verse, imagining that we can hear…

curious bees,
Producing lime-colored honey
That would slide down your throat
Like a river under the influence of heavy narcotics.

From “Last Night on the Telephone”



The need to tell a secret is so stark and crisp in “The Magician”,
that we are holding our breath, waiting to hear what will be revealed.

You want so badly to tell how it’s done
That you tell it to yourself each night before sleep,
Narrating a film that no one will see,
The sound of the rain like the beating of wings,
The applause you receive for keeping the secret.

In Paul’s writing a prince declares war on the winds and the girl
with white eyelashes stalks the snows with her silence.

As the reader moves from “Night Swimmer” to “Sunday Morning Laughter”
and into “The Mapmaker”, the visuals are so stunning that we along with
the author are skating on the lake of swans….

You watched your figure eights
Become more varied cartography
And followed your map into the country
You always hoped existed

Paul gives us the deeper language of patience and uncertainty and moves
us gracefully through a landscape of myth and folktale.

The poetry of Paul Kareem Tayyar is a kaleidoscope of transcendence
and dream and the secrets of the soul. “Postmark Atlantis” is a book of dazzling tenderness to be savored.

***Louisa Clerici is the host of Sunday Afternoon Words and Music at Café Olio
in Plymouth, Ma. Her poetry and short stories have been published in numerous anthologies including Shore Voices, Tidepool Poets and Carolina Woman Magazine.
She is the co-author of a book on dreams, Sparks from the Fire of Time. Louisa
can be reached at louisaclerici@comcast.net

Wellspring House Springs A New Poetry Collection

A fellow Bagel Bard, the poet Lawrence Kessenich recommended that I go for a stay at Wellspring House, a retreat for writers in Ashfield, Mass. I sent out my writing resume and I was on the road to my first writer's retreat. I noticed in the guest book a lot of talented folks stayed at this retreat over the years. Anyway I got to speaking to the founder of Wellspring House Preston Browning. Browning has a distinguished career as a writer and an academic himself. His wife Ann Hutt Browning (who cofounded the retreat) had a manuscript of poetry she was shopping around, and Browning asked me if I wanted to take a look. I gave it to my two trusty editors to look at it: Dianne Robitaille ( My wife) and Richard Wilhelm. The result: we are going to be publishing Ann Hutt Browning’s collection “Deep Landscape Turning.”


Ann Hutt Browning has two master’s degrees, one in psychology and one in architecture, four grown children, three grandchildren, and one husband of 50 years. Born in England, raised in southern California, she attended Radcliffe College, and has lived in Missouri, Kentucky, France, Macedonia, Chicago, Virginia and now Massachusetts. Some of her poetry has appeared in the Carolina Quarterly, Salamander, Peregrine, the Southern Humanities Review and the Dalhousie Review.





AN ORDINARY LIFE (From the manuscript)


When she awoke in the morning
She threw back her all cotton sheet,
Cotton woven in a far off country
By a dark skinned girl chained to her large loom.
When she went into her kitchen
She ground beans to brew her coffee,
Beans grown, roasted in a far off country
Where the tall trees were cleared off the land
For the coffee bushes to be planted
And tended by boys not in school and men
Old before their time and where all the waste
From treating the beans is flushed and dumped
In the river, adding that detritus
To the human waste and chemical run
Off already there in the gray water
And where downstream others used the water,
That dark water, for cooking and bathing.

After her children boarded the school bus,
Wearing clothing made in the Philippines,
Mauritania, Taiwan, a hodge-podge
Of imports from other worlds, far off countries,
Where sweat shops flourished,
Filled with child workers,
She went shopping:
Guatemalan cantaloupes, Mexican tomatoes,
Chilean oranges, California lettuce,
Carolina rice, Michigan peaches,
Blueberries from Maine, all bought because
In her garden she grew hybrid tea roses,
Siberian iris, cross-bred daylilies in six colors,
Held down by pine bark, chipped in Oregon.

Then she roamed the market aisle marked
"Special," and bought a basket, its colors
Imitative of Mexican folk art, made in China,
The price suggesting child or prison labor
Dyed the fronds of grass, wove the basket
And attached the label.

She ate a quick lunch of a hamburger,
The ground beef from a far off country
Where the virgin forest was burned off
So cattle could graze on tropical grass,
The bun made from Canadian wheat
And the ketchup, again those Mexican tomatoes.
She drove home to prop up her feet
On the foam cushioned sofa, turn on the TV,
Assembled in Nicaragua,
In a maquiladora by a woman
Who rose at five a.m. to walk three kilometers
To the bus, who then rode twenty-five miles
To the factory in the tax free zone,
Who worked from eight to five
With a quarter of an hour to eat
Or use the toilet,
Who got home at eight o’clock
To bathe and feed her three children,
With eighteen cents an hour in her pocket
On good days.

The woman on the sofa
Watched two soap operas
As usual on a week day,
And ate ice cream,
American ice cream.
She liked American ice cream.
She lived an ordinary life.

Evening Watch by Cameron Mount

Evening Watch
Cameron Mount
Ibbetson Street Press
2009 $10.00

To order:
http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/evening-watch/7182268

“By day I repel all boarders.
My front door peephole is
now a full-fledged porthole.

Staring out into the past
of everyday actions and reflecting
six years of service back.”

Usually I read from the beginning to the end of a book, but, for this book of poems I read the first poem and then the last poem, “dry dock sailor,” before I attempt all the rest of the writing. It’s important for me to understand, or to try to relate to the ship, in this case the poems as they move straight through whatever obstacle the ship stirs its way through, in this case the poems stir up all the experiences one has when on duty. The ebb and flow, the relationship of words crashing onto my mind, my feet are swept up and I fall, swimming to shore with the surety of a life jacket. Cameron Mount is a poet who will take any subject and refine it, direct the verse until it shines, “From the darkened bruise of the star-strewn moon-lit pitch to the eclipsed light of dawn.”

If you haven’t bought this book of poems, I suggest you run and catch a copy.

“Navy Wife

He came home broken.
He avoids me at night
leaves me alone on the couch
loses himself in empty drivel
turns on, tunes in, drops out.
Internet.
He thinks I don’t notice
when he surfs for porn-
his compulsions get him over,
off, as if I have no ears,
but it saves me his advances
later when he comes to bed
after midnight, spent.
He spends all day in that chair
when he can, when he shouldn’t.”

Irene Koronas
poetry editor
Ibbetson Street Press

Shadows and Light by Catherine Wang Hsu

Shadows and Light (2007, www.lulu.com) by Catherine Wang Hsu

Review by Barbara Bialick



“Shadows and Light”, by Catherine Wang Hsu, a chapbook published by lulu.com, flows well in a philosophical yin/yang, dark/light voice that suits her background as a Boston-area business woman, Chinese immigrant, “daughter, wife, and mother” and “liberated woman.”


The main theme is that the pain of grief and change can be transformed into freedom. This path led her into poetry, meditation, yoga, and kabbala, although these topics as well as who she is specifically grieving for, are addressed indirectly or not at all.

I assume she’s speaking of her late husband in “Labor of Love”: “It took all his love/…to say good-bye to himself/…to embrace God in His delight.” But then she asks “Is there a God?” She writes “I can’t understand God, through Jesus I can.” And to “Please shut-up!: If (the Lord) is so glorious, why am I so furious?”In “My Independence Day”, Hsu concludes: “I cannot rely on my family anymore/Therefore I learn to rely on myself…I am talking to the moon and stars…”

Then she makes a big step, “The Leap of a Lifetime,” when she learns to use a “trapeze at age 65”… With “dead parents and spouse/gone are my children, my house…” she could now “shake off misery in a magnificent swing.”

Consequently in “Liberated Woman”, she declares “I do not wear my mandarin collar…I would rather wear pants and free my legs!” She further explains her growing philosophy of “Change and Transformation…which might not always happen./It is our innermost work.”

But in “Thanksgiving,” she concludes “Everything leads us to the right passage/The wrong one/brings us to a good ending/the right one/brings us to good work./I cannot wait to continue my journey/while life is such a discovery.”

ANNE ELIZABETH TOM TOUTS THE WRITER FRIENDLY CAPE COD WRITERS CENTER CONFERENCE

ANNE ELIZABETH TOM TOUTS THE WRITER FRIENDLY CAPE COD WRITERS CENTER CONFERENCE

BY DOUG HOLDER

I have known Anne Elizabeth Tom, the director of the Cape Cod Writers Center for a number of years now, and find her an untiring advocate of writers, a whirlwind of creative energy, not to mention a warm and generous person. Tom is now putting on the finishing touches for the 47th Cape Cod Writers Center Conference starting Aug 15. There will be two separate conferences: one section Aug 16-18, the other Aug19 –21. The Craigville Conference Center is located on a bluff overlooking Nantucket Sound and Craigville Beach on Cape Cod. I talked with Tom about the Cape Cod Writers Center and Conference on my Somerville Community Access TV show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”


Doug Holder: Can you tell us about the history of the Cape Cod Writers Center and Conference?

Anne Elizabeth Tom: It was established by Marion R. Vuilleumier in 1962. She was definitely a woman ahead of her time. She was a writer, and she wanted to get a writing group together. She did form one and eventually they decided to have a couple of creative writing teachers come down to the Cape for a week in the summer. This grew with more and more teachers. So now we have fiction writers, nonfiction writers, creative nonfiction writers, etc. This summer we have folks teaching like poet Richard Wollman, who runs the Zora Neale Hurston Center at Simmons College with the founder Afaa Michael Weaver. We also have screenwriting and poetry courses. All of this has evolved over the years, and the annual Conference is the Center’s major program. But we support writers all year long. We have an author interview TV show and recently we have had poets CD Collins, Lisa Beatman, and Tracey Fern, (a children’s book author) on the show.

DH: I recently read an article in the New Yorker that discussed the question: “Can writing be taught?” Well, can it?

AT: I think like anything there needs to be a certain amount of native ability there. But most definitely people can be guided to write well. Just being exposed to other writers at conferences and workshops as well as reading a lot helps. I think the momentum of getting together with other writers makes a difference. A lot of it has to do with the fact that you become exposed. It supports you. It’s lonely being a writer. And there is a lot of networking at our Conference for instance.

DH: I know you are going to have some literary agents this year.

AT: Yes-we have. Jason Ashlock, an Agent and Contracts Manager at Moveable Type Literary Group, and Molly Lyons of Joelle Delbourgo Associates.

DH: Do you have any anecdotes about writers making connections at the Conference?

AT: We actually do. Last year we had a mock editorial panel with the publisher David Godine and some other publishers and agents. It really was a lot of fun. We had asked faculty to pick some manuscripts they thought might be worth running past the editorial panel. There was someone who had a really interesting book on gardening. His book considered the impact of English gardening on American gardening. Another book that was considered was a romance. Both were reviewed by the panel.

DH: Can you name some of the teachers this year?

AT: Well, Richard Hoffman the author of the memoir “Half the House: a Memoir” will be teaching a memoir and an advanced memoir course. Suzette Standring, a syndicated columnist, will be teaching a column writing course, Tom Daley will be hosting our Box Lunch briefings (These are 45 minute discussions on writing and publishing.) There is just a small part of our offerings.

I would advise people to sign up for classes as soon as possible. We are already 30% full, and our catalogue has only been out for a few weeks. Registration closes July 15. Go to our website for a registration form and other information. http://capecodwriterscenter.org

DH: Can you talk about your background and how you became involved with the center?

AT: We used to spend summers on the Cape when I was a kid. There are so many people I know who have experienced the haunting beauty of the Cape like I did. I had wanted to return here to do some writing. I had been a museum director, and I did a lot of corporate writing to earn a living, but I hadn’t done enough creative writing. When I came back I enrolled at the Cape Cod Writers Center. Afaa Michael Weaver was a poet teaching there that summer, as well as Fred Marchant, Wes McNair and others. The experience jumpstarted my own poetry. Later, it turned out the Director of the Center was leaving after eight years. I applied for the job and got it.

DH: Can you talk about the accommodations during the workshop?

AT: It is possible to stay at the Craigsville Center where the conference takes place. It is rustic. The rooms are $122/ a night but that includes all meals. The meals are family style. You don’t have to stay for the full week. You can just stay as few as a couple of nights. And there are hotels on the beach that you can stay at as well that are not expensive. There are all varieties of options.

You can also come down for the short courses like “Books & Blogs.” This course concerns the use of the Blog to publicize your work. This course is taught by Lisa Warren of Da Capo Press. There is also a course concerning publishing your first book.

DH: Many people fear poetry workshops because they hear stories that members, teachers, etc…literally tear their work apart. Is this true at the Conference?

AT: We have a very friendly Conference. It’s folksy with sophisticated people. This is the culture of the Conference. People have told me the environment is conducive to a positive experience.

DH: What else goes on at the Conference?

AT: Every night we have speakers. Our first night Aug 15 we will have an open mic where people can read from their work. Our keynote speakers are Roger Sutton, Editor-In-Chief of “The Horn Book,” and Martin Sandler who wrote: “The Story of American Photography.” He is well known for his young adult history books.

DH: Why do you think folks should attend the Conference?

AT: It is really about the contacts you make and the friendships you develop.

http://capecodwriterscenter.org

Omni Parker House Series to Relocate to Boston City Hall

Omni Parker House Poetry Series to Relocate to Boston City Hall July 9, 2009



(Somerville, Mass.) Harris Gardner announced at the Saturday meeting of the Bagel Bards that his Tapestry of Voices poetry series housed at the Gardner Room at the Omni Parker House Hotel in Boston is relocating to the Piemonte Room at Boston City Hall in Government Center, Boston. After a ten month stint at the Parker House ended, Gardner, ever the hustler, secured a new venue at an equally prestigious site. The Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish will open each reading with a few poems, and Gardner will continue to be the host. The first reading is July 9, at 6:30 PM.

Tom Daley, Ryk McIntyre, will open the series July 9, others to be announced...

contact Harris Gardner at tapestryofvoices@yahoo.com for more information

Escaping Islam by Mano Bakh, Kelli McIntyre, and Jacqueline Le Beau

A BagelBards Book Review

“Escaping Islam”
The Evil Might Not Be Realized Until It Is Too Late By Mano Bakh, Kelli McIntyre and Jacqueline Le Beau
AuthorHouse, Bloomington, IN price $17.95

Reviewed 6/12/09 by Paul Steven Stone

An unknown sage once declared, “You never know what you have until it’s gone”, a truism clearly illustrated in the life experience of Mano Bahk, and graphically depicted in his memoir, “Escaping Islam”. Through Bakh’s eyes and photographic memory we see the idyllic Iran of Bakh’s youth and early maturity, ripe with the riches of an emerging modern nation, yet steeped in traditions tied to extended families, a rich historical culture and an ancient humanistic religion. That religion, of course, is Islam.
But the Islam of Mano Bakh’s earliest years is not the Islam he later escaped from, in a harrowing ordeal vividly depicted, as a high ranking officer in Iran’s Imperial Navy.
In order to share the sense of loss and dislocation brought on by the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Bakh paints a rich portrait of life as he knew it, growing up and maturing in the Iran of the Shah with its many freedoms, cross currents of thought and manifold opportunities. All of which was shut down for good (or evil, really!) in the Iran that surfaced under the influence and tight control of the country’s Muslim Revolution.
Written as a warning to those both inside and outside his native land, “Escaping Islam” is a searing condemnation of those who would, in service to a harsh and unforgiving religion, restrict and constrain the lives and well-being of their fellow citizens. If I have a criticism of Bakh’s narrative it concerns his exhausting detailing of the twists and turns of his life story, offering more information than at times seems necessary or desirable. Still, in painting his portrait with so many strokes, he has offered the reader a glimpse of his life’s trajectory that stands up to even the closest scrutiny.


* Paul Steven Stone is the author of " How to Train a Rock"

At the Threshold of ALCHEMY by John Amen

At the Threshold of ALCHEMY

by John Amen

Presa Press

Rockford, Michigan

Softbound, 83 pages

ISBN: 978-0-9800081-5-9



Review by Zvi A. Sesling





Raw. That’s the word that comes to mind when I read many of the poems in John Amen’s At the Threshold of ALCHEMY. The other thought I have is that when he writes about subjects such as death, divorce, masturbation (during a wake) there is a sense of the merciless, unending sledgehammers pounding you as in After the Funeral:



The floorboards exhaled,

walls slept for the first time in years.



Grandma slouched in the foyer,

her belly mounding in her lap, makeup streaked.

I distracted myself in the basement, thinking

of Ms. Gilham, my face in her cleavage.



Upstairs, aunts and neighbors – the mercenaries

of resilience –cooked, cleaned, scrubbed

until the house could have passed for a delivery room



I reemerged,

and his brother gnawing the gristly silence.

No one noticed the stain on my corduroys

or saw me put a silver spoon in my pocket.





Amen’s visuals are explicit, his meanings an opposite of what a good wake or shiva is all about. The mystery is his age at the event. The final result can be fascination or revulsion.



In the poem Martin Amen writes directly to a friend:



You were seriously fried, Martin, when you got back from Ecuador,

demanding steak fajitas at the Dairy Queen, asking stranger if they

planned to vote for the messiah in the next election.





There is much more to this poem, more of muscle and gristle Amen is best at portraying.

His poetry is a mirror of the underside of life, poems that reflect visions of the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, bad dreams that crawl into the brain and come out the eyes. A pen – or computer – that tries to record it all while it’s fresh as a dandelion still yellow. His surrealism is Dali in words, Picasso in thoughts wrought in short, raw poems.

Wendy Mnookin: A poet who writes from ‘the dailiness of life.’

Wendy Mnookin: A poet who writes from ‘the dailiness of life.’

David Wojhan writes of local poet Wendy Mnookin’s new collection of poetry “The Moon Makes It’s Own Plea,” “Wendy Mnookin’s poems arise both from the small joys and the larger reckonings of domestic existence—from what Jarrell called ‘the dailiness of life.’ ” From learning a new language, to the wisdom of a domestic cat, Mnookin brings the reader closer to larger ontological truths.

Mnookin is the author of three previous collections. She is a graduate of Radcliffe College and has an MFA from Vermont College. She has won a book award from the New England Poetry Club and a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. I spoke with her on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”


Doug Holder: Seth Mnookin, your son, a well-known writer, wrote in an article for Salon.Com, that he bonded with you through writing and reading. This is a story I hear quite often. Why is this a good way to bond?

Wendy Mnookin: Well, certainly with us it was really good way because he was a reader like me. We were the two readers in the family. He was the kind of person who on any given day would pile up some books and read. For us it was a way to share an interest we both had. In terms of a way of bonding, reading is what I love to do. So if someone else likes to do that then there is an immediate bond. So there you are…sharing a bond. But is amazing the amount of people that don’t read. What’s really fun for me is to talk to people who are reading, reading and reading.

DH: Your son was a Harvard graduate and also a heroin addict. Drug abuse, mental illness is all too common a story among writers. Your take?

WM: He thought he was becoming part of a “creative community” when he first started taking drugs. And now that he is not using, sober and writing, I think he is aghast at the idea he had that the use of drugs would make him into a writer. He bought into the Hunter Thompson thing. He was a journalist like Thompson. But Seth is the first to say he got his best writing done clean and sober.

DH: “The Moon Makes its Plea” is a new direction for you. How does it differ from your other collections?

WM: The challenge of the previous books was to take a single experience that transformed my perception of the world, like my father’s early death, or my son’s drug addiction. These books cohered around some kind of story. Both my method of writing and my method of putting together the book were different. In my new book I wasn’t trying to tell some story. I was trying to see where the poems would lead. So it developed differently.

DH: In your title poem you write: " Nothing gets done except existence.” This sounds very Beckett-like. His two tramps in perpetual stasis. Yet later in the poem you write" Let me stay!" So you don't feel the futility?

MW: So far I feel it would be hard to get to the point where I would let go of things. "Nothing gets done except existence", to me is not a statement of futility. It is a good thing. The dailiness of things. That is what gets done. But I guess it could have two meanings with one tone of voice or another.

DH: Many poets I know obsess about what is factually accurate in a poem. Do you feel getting the facts straight is important in a poem?

WM: I really thought about this a lot because I was writing that book about my son's drug abuse. I was struggling with if it was ok to be factual, or not to be strictly factual. Where I come out on this is I don't have a lot of loyalty to facts. I don't want to make things up for no reason. What you are after is the truth of experience and the facts don't always convey the truth of the experience.

DH: I've been told to be a writer you must be able to insult your mother if your work requires it.

WM: When I wrote the book about my father's early death, I tried not to be hurtful. My mother read the entire book and said, " I knew you were angry at me." I had tried so hard not to hurt her. Family members read things the way they already see them. I did not feel that the book was angry towards my mother, but if she is looking for it she will find it.

DH: In your poem: " And So I decide to Study Hebrew After All" you use the conceit of Hebrew words as kibitzing Jewish uncles. Does language bring out strong familial feelings?

WM: I was learning Hebrew at the time. And one of the ways I could learn letters was assigning them personalities. I don't know if I feel that way about English because it is so much more routine for me. But I do feel certain tugs to certain expressions and ways of speaking. But in learning Hebrew I had to give personalities to the letters or risking losing them.

DH: In the poem: " The River Scrapes Against Night" you write:" I'm not fooled/ by steady breathing. / We are this small/This brief." Could you have written this in your 20's?

WM: Sometimes I think how I came to writing so late. Everyone got this stuff done in their 20's. I think, yeah, but who knows what I might have written? You might want to have taken it all back! In your 20's you don't feel small and brief. I certainly didn't. I felt the center of the universe. I had my life ahead, even though intellectually I knew I was going to die eventually. It is different now when you have most of your life behind you.




MAYBE I MADE THIS UP

My mother said, Yes, you can
wheel your baby sister

that far, and back.
The baby blew fish kisses

with her small round mouth
while I pumped high on the swings,

and higher. Hello! I waved
when I hung by my knees

on the jungle gym.
Yippee-yeah! I called

when I herded the cattle
downstream,

over the seesaw, around the sandbox,
past the distant fountain.

At home my mother asked
Where’s your sister?

and the world shifted
slightly. If

there were clouds,
they fled. If birds,

they silenced.
I can only tell you

the truth as I know it.
Last week an ice cream store

opened in my town,
and I wrote to my kids

about another opening,
years ago, when they were allowed

to walk four blocks
for free ice cream,

and each of them wrote back,
one at a time,

no, I was twelve,
I was seven,

it was summer, or vanilla,
or strawberry.

I raced with my mother
to the park and found

my sister, batting
her toys in the carriage.

Just before my mother
grabbed her, my sister

looked at me, she
saw who I was, she

didn’t look away.

--- Wendy Mnookin

-----Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update

For more information about Wendy Mnookin go to: http://wendymnookin.com

THE ENDICOTT REVIEW

The Endicott Review
Vol. 26, Issue 1
Spring 2009


Review by Lo Galluccio

The Endiccott Review combines the work of student writers and those who are outside working professionally or who are widely published. This creates an intriguing and wide-ranging collection of over 100 poems, plus several insert pages of photographs that are, colorful, imaginative and conceptually inspired. Some highlights are the war memorial pics by Johnny Bonacci and David Inestroza’s corporate-sponsored hockey rink shots.

Ted Reicher’s poem, “At the Astapovo Station” is a stunning and spacious call and response which seems to circle back to Tolstoys’s struggle with God – a God of waiting.

“No God.”

“No God sees.”

“No God sees the truth.”

“No God sees the truth, but waits.”

Lauren Peterson writes a prosaic but nice narrative called, “Driving to get Lost” about the value of ignoring a GPS and finding oneself in new surroundings, as if time pressures didn’t matter in the modern world:

“when I’m lost
when I’m found
when I’m lost again.”

In a sultry portrait of a man’s adoration for the charms of the young Lauren Bacall, Richard Mayer concludes:

“How sad for a man if he couldn’t whistle!.”

referring, or course to her most famous star-turn with Bogart.

In the Introduction to this edition by many of the editors – all interesting, philosophical statements about poetry-- Ripley Bottom writes:

“Poetry is angel’s wings on a mouse”
“Poetry is failure”
“Poetry is connection”
“Poetry is skin against skin”
“Poetry is the thinnest strand of string between the piano and the street.”

What I like about this collection, is the variety of voices and the subtleties of the writing, from historical pieces, to modern portraits, to almost “flash fiction” poems to philosophical testimonials. And there is humor:

Doug Holder’s funny and sardonic anti-ode to spring: “Spring: This Ain’t No Love Poem” starts by castigating the tulips:

“Oh for Christ’s sake
here it is again.
Tulips sprout
like maddening colorful clichés.”

Chris Tipler turns in a gorgeous portrait of an ordinary woman living in the lush extraordinary landscape of Seville, Spain….a poem called, Dulcinea, where “sea anemones scattered in brilliant reds among the sage,” and “trellises of grape drop.”

“Rome is Burning” – one of my favorite poems in the issue – uses a jagged rhyme scheme and compelling juxtapositions of life images that history is about to turn -- “The asphalt angel’s crying….” And ships sailing and “prayers for concrete cowboys” – a picture of reverence and irreverence swallowed up by fire that leaves the men dead and “the women and children sold as slaves.” As in all wars, this poem extends beyond the actual realities of Rome burning, which it did three times. Sawiski’s poem resonates with a strange abstraction and a concrete augury.

Another treat is Stone Soup’s MC and fine writer, Chad Parenteaus’ “Found Poem” from the pages of a Wayfarer’s letter giving tidbits of what weighs on a post-WWII maritime man.

“I got a mitt here –
it’s pretty nice and
about time I got one.
Nothing new on Pre-flight
or baseball.”

Lisa Beatman, author of “Manufacturing America” also contributes a handful of interesting works, among them the pithy “Glass” and the more narrative poem about buying lamb in Roslindale for grilling. In “Halal” she contrasts the reality of a freshly slaughtered, “long bone with muscles intact, red.”with a daydream about free lambs gamboling on a hillside.

Against the experimental dream-like and signature Hugh Fox lovc-obsessions in an assemblage of poems across two middle pages:

FUN

“Fun to see my Amazonasmaniac wild-piranha river you-say-it-
I’ll play it wife dyeing her wild jazz-hair black and
stringing it into tame post-menopausal saintliness”

is an elegant villanelle, “Letter” by Valerie Wohlfeld, a fresh breath of formalism
in a collection of mostly modern free verse.

Bagel Bard and poet organizer Harris Gardiner contributes a witty poem about a frog gaining leverage on a beautiful Princess in “Froggy Goes Courting:”

“Beauty won’t outscore common sense.
Well, maybe in your youth. Face it.
You will grow old; then we’ll start
To mirror each other’s looks.”

Finally, Sergio Inestrosa’s poems to Li Po and the Moon in Spanish and in translation are jewels of imagery and refraction:

“He wanted to attain
the moon’s peaceful mood”

“he died, drowned in
its pearly reflection.”

And in “Lunario” or “Concerning the Moon,” he writes in five sections about different auras of the moon:

II.

The moon’s pallor
Turns its back on the sun
while it sleeps

IV.

The honey-colored moon
growing tender
in the womb of night


This is only a smattering of the many poems worth reading, including the ubiquitous and prolific Lyn Lifshin’s work. I urge you to pick up this Spring’s issue with an auburn cover close-up of a bewitching girl laughing.

John Buffalo Mailer to be a featured reader at the Somerville News Writers Frestival Nov. 2009

Somerville, Mass.

(Somerville, Mass.)

Timothy Gager co-founder of the Somerville News Writers Festival announced that John Buffalo Mailer, son of the late Norman Mailer, will be a reader at the Somerville News Writers Festival this November. Earlier this month Gager announced that Rick Moody will be the featured reader. Doug Holder, co-founder, has selected Frank Bidart, Sam Cornish, Tino Villanueva, Richard Hoffman and Tam Lin Neville as the featured poets. Bidart will be the recipient of the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement award.

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

John Buffalo Mailer (born April 16, 1978) is an author, playwright and journalist. He is the youngest child of American novelist Norman Mailer. Mailer is a graduate of Wesleyan University. He has written several screenplays and is a freelance journalist. In 2005 he co-wrote The Big Empty with his father.

Mailer was a founding member of Back House Productions, a theater production company in New York. He was also previously the editor of High Times, a magazine which advocates the legalization of cannabis.

Before graduating from Wesleyan University with a BA in Theater, John Buffalo Mailer published his first novella, Hello Herman, in The Reading Room, vol. 1, Great Marsh Press. The story centered around a sixteen year old mass murderer from a small suburban town in Iowa, and the cocky young journalist, trying to run from his own dark past, who is hired to interview him.

After graduating, John founded Back House Productions in New York City with three other Wesleyan grads. Within one year Back House became the resident theater company of The Drama Bookshop's Arthur Seelan Theater. In 2001, John's first play, an adaptation of Hello Herman, had its New York Premiere at the Grove Street Playhouse.

2003, he took a hiatus from Back House and theater in general to accept the position of Executive Editor for the infamous High Times magazine. Hired by Richard Stratton to help re-launch the magazine as an independent, outlaw version of Vanity Faire, Stratton, Mailer, and Annie Nocenti, the Editor, made national headlines with the stories they published. While there, John became active in the protest movement centering around the Republican National Convention. In addition to the "High Times Activist's Guide to the RNC", he also interviewed his father for New York Magazine, on the possible dangers and benefits of the protest.

His second play, Crazy Eyes, recently had its World Premiere in Athens, Greece, in March 2005. Crazy Eyes, which takes place in October 2001, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, centers on an actor, a day trader, an AIDS researcher, a bag of white powder,and a Palestinian American who owns the 99 cent store.

John is a member of The Dramatists' Guild Actor's Equity Association, and The Playwright/Director's Group of The Actors Studio. He has lectured at the University of Notre Dame, Wesleyan, and the University of Athens. He is also the American Cultural Dramaturge for Israeli actress Meital Dohan's one woman show, Bath Party. In addition to HeIlo Herman and Crazy Eyes, he has written several screenplays, one short play, and freelanced for Playboy, New York, Stop Smiling, and Lid Magazines.

John is the youngest child of Norman Mailer, with wife Norris Church Mailer, and was selected as one of People Magazine's sexiest men alive in 2002.

"The Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers" Reviewed in New Pages

I am glad to see my book of interviews " From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers" got a pretty decent review on New Pages, a well-respected literary site for the independent press. Also glad that my fellow Bagel Bard and co-founder of The Somerville News Writers Festival Timothy Gager is listed as a literary luminary, as well as Bagel Bards: Miriam Levine, Afaa Michael Weaver, and Ibbetson poet Marc Widershien "The Life of All Worlds" ( Ibbetson Street Press 2001) I want to thanks Steve Glines for his excellent design work and for putting this book together. I included some excerpts:



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

Ibbetson Street Press, January 2009

Paperback: 133pp; $18.50

Review by Jeanne Lesinski

At a time when many newspapers – if not going out of business altogether – have cut arts coverage, it’s reassuring to see that poet Douglas Holder works as the arts editor for The Somerville News, in Somerville, Massachusetts, a city on the outskirts of Boston and Cambridge. From the Paris of New England is a collection of Holder’s “Off the Shelf” column interviews and Somerville Community Access television show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer” interviews with literary figures, many of whom live in this city. The literary luminaries in this volume include Martha Collins, Mark Doty, Timothy Gager, Miriam Levine, Dick Lourie, Afaa Michael Weaver, Marc Widershien, and twenty-two others.

Readers will likely find something of interest among the varied genres and experiences represented here, especially because Holder knows how to ask the important questions. He often inquires about inspiration, pivotal life experiences, themes, accessibility, talent, and craft. For example, when plied about his writing habits, Marc Widershien answered, “I wrote between the lines of my existence,” and about advice to novice poets, “Think of everything you do as grist. Talent is vital, but study, experiment, self-discovery through art are indispensable.” Other writers were equally forthcoming on subjects important to them...


To order this and other Ibbetson titles go to http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress

Literature and the Arts in the Transitional Living Center at McLean Hospital

Literature and the Arts in the Transitional Living Center at McLean Hospital

By Doug Holder


Some years ago Alex Beam, The Boston Globe columnist came to my then home on Ibbetson Street in Somerville, Mass., to interview me about the role of poets and poetry at McLean Hospital. Beam was doing research on his book about the history of McLean: Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital.
McLean Hospital has a rich literary past and has been declared a national literary landmark. Poets Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and others had “residencies” at the hospital. Anne Sexton ran her famed poetry groups here and was briefly hospitalized at McLean shortly before her death by suicide. I had the privilege to interview Lois Ames, the social worker for Sylvia Plath and Sexton, and the author of the introduction to Plath’s novel “The Bell Jar” that was set on these grounds.

For 20 years I worked on the inpatient units of McLean Hospital as a mental health worker. And since I am a poet, I made of point of running poetry groups for patients who resided on the units. I worked with an eclectic group of clients on several units. I helped them with their poems, conducted informal readings and even publishing some of their work in the now defunct literary journal “The Boston Poet.”

When I took a new position at the Transitional Living Center at Waverly House at McLean I hoped to continue the literary tradition that I established, and that was inherent at the hospital. The Transitional Living Care Center at McLean, according to its website, is a “… private pay program designed for men and women, age 18, and older, who are involved in psychiatric treatment and require a staff supported setting. For many persons with psychiatric illness, brief hospital stays alone are not sufficient to full recovery and return to normal living. The Transitional Living Center provides a setting for comprehensive treatment, and support of family members by providing the intensive assistance that recovering patients require.”

Shortly after I was hired by Robin Weiss, the program director, Richard Wilhelm, a friend of mine and the arts editor for my small literary press “Ibbetson Street” came aboard. Richard is an artist and a poet, and another staff member at that time Jennifer Matthews was a vocalist and a poet, so it was like a writer’s retreat on the campus of the hospital.


On the inpatient unit you more or less had a captive audience. The patients had to have privileges to leave the unit, so a poetry group in the evening could be a welcomed change from the usual didactic groups in the day. At Waverly House it is vastly different. The house is loosely structured, and the clients for the most part can come and go as they please. I focused my efforts on clients who expressed strong interests in the arts and literature. Some clients who studied writing in college brought whole collections of their poetry to the house. Often Richard and I would sit down with folks and workshop their poems and some even saw their work appear in my literary column in The Somerville News.

Other clients expressed interest in literary journalism, and in this regard I was able to help as well. For many years I have been the arts/editor for The Somerville News, and I have frequently gotten internships for students, friends, etc… I can remember one client, a law school dropout, who seemed to have lost direction. He got an internship at the paper, secured a paid editorship, and then went on to the Boston Herald organization. Another client got her first clippings at the paper, which made her professional journalist father beam with pride.

I have also hooked up clients with literary internships, with magazines like “the new renaissance,” as well as other publications. One client was studying for his PhD in Psychology but also had a strong interest in mystery and science fiction writing. I introduced him to the world of little magazines and online publishing and he racked up an impressive number of publication credits in a short time. We even appeared in the same online journal: his story, my poem.

I also have an affiliation with a local art gallery in Cambridge, “The Out of the Blue Art Gallery.” A number of clients have held volunteer jobs there, helping with publicity, with sales, and other duties .One recent client volunteered at the gallery and made a connection with an organizer at a local film festival. She wound up getting valuable experience writing press releases for the festival.

I find that patients that are involved in the arts have a greater sense of self-esteem, and it helps them get involved with the community, the larger world, hopefully realizing the mission statement of our program, namely transitioning clients back into the community for a fruitful and productive life.