The Hypnagogic Whispers of a Modern Berserker

The Hypnagogic Whispers of a Modern Berserker
by Michelle Lyons
myspace.com/missreneemessenger


A review by Mignon Ariel King


In case the title hasn't tipped you off, it needs to be emphasized that Lyons' voice is that of a nonconformist 21st-century woman. She slams the girl- and woman-crushing formal institutions with which she once had the displeasure of dealing, in addition to one loser of a lover. Intelligent, gut-wrenching observation and sarcasm are her friends. Simply put, if you love Anne Sexton or are drawn to Plath, you'll love Lyons. Girl, Interrupted fan? Well, hold onto your vodka.

The first poem in the collection, "According to the Magazine I Found at the Gym", is a neo-feministic anti-media riff. The tone is unusual in that the narrator slams the stupid mainstream rules and media that assault young women's self-esteem by imposing rules about how women are supposed to look, yet she is reporting more than ranting.

Health.
That's her name.
Some bombshell with an orange tank top
Graces the front page. The cover. The color doesn't suit her...
But she's the poster child anyway, for Health (2).

The narrator reads the magazine while working out, using the sidebar to a 'Diet Now!' article to calculate how much time she has spent dieting. She concludes, "The average woman spends a decade of her life trying to lose weight. ...How many years do you think I've wasted/So far?" (3). Her edgy, screw-the-world tone chimes in for "Boy, Interrupted".
The narrator reminds her lover that he promised to visit if she became an inpatient in a mental health facility. She explains, "Well, they've caught wind of me honey...They've locked me away, again (4), and she fantasizes about having sex with him on the floor, "And I have to let myself wish that you would/Come remind me who I am/...Listen to me re-read my old poetry" (5).

"Black Widow Sunshine" reveals Lyons' astoundingly fresh metaphors. "I remembered a boy today/His soul was an empty walk up..." (10). This poem follows one about moving (on):

I guess you could say I've left his chambers
I've crawled out a hidden fissure
--a crack in the hardwood floor
I guess you could argue, I'm free (11).

There are many poems in the collection that compare and contrast sex:violence, sex: loss, lubricant:tears, restraint:spiritual escape, love:loathing, self-awareness: confusion. Not new concepts, but delivered by a very engaging new voice. This is confessional work at its best, with only a few poems being so personal as to elude the reader. Most make larger statements about people in general, regardless of how the monologues are set up. "The Turtle", by comparing turning over a turtle to mistreating a woman, chides how casually one lover destroys another: "You, my friend/Are merely a school boy./A sophomoric narcissist, soaking wet behind your ears...And you are the boy who had nothing better to do...(19).

"Annabella Returns" mocks the worship of plastic images of women: "I want to be a modern day pin-up girl" (24) ...Be a pin-up flapper, upon request./I've got the hair, the dramatic flair" (25). "The Little Black Sheep" invokes the same voice in a pseudo carpe diem poem, with amusing innuendos such as "But, I aimlessly follow your staff" (28-29).

The collection is rounded out with the narrator's responses to other people as they react in various ways to her previous addictions to alcohol and drugs. She mock-responds to her sister's "So what have you been up to lately?" with "I've been having long talks about things like/Method acting. And John Locke. Pantheism..." (33). "My Valentine" begins: "Hello sweet sedation..." (42). The collection comes full circle, the narrator getting the upper hand in a dysfunctional relationship this time, in "The Stolen Mannequin":

Yes, I found myself a new man.
He's not much yet, but...
Wait until I dress him up!
He doesn't even know words like yes and no
Like leave or go... (47)

In the acknowledgments Lyons thanks her insurance for becoming so expensive that she went off her medication. Perhaps medication makes some people better, others just temporarily calmer. This is not wounded-inner-child diary poetry. There is nothing calm or complacently wallowing about this work, and it is just as cathartic to the reader to allow this poet's fantasies, rages, and shouts to tap into one's inner berserker.





Mignon Ariel King is a womanist writer, the editor of two online journals, and a former adjunct professor of English

BLACK AND BLUE,a new DVD by Lo Galluccio

BLACK AND BLUE,a new DVD by Lo Gallucio,www.myspace.com/lo gallucio Lo Galluico-singer/ (piano) Eric Zinman,6-26-’09.

Lo Galluccio's CDs are available on www.cobaby.com


Everything that Lo Gallucio touches turns into magic. The songs here aren’t that avant-gardish and outer-space-ish, but the pianist, Eric Zinman, is a wildman piano-banger/experimenter, and Lo’s performance throughout, both with wild and more traditional backgrounds, hits you right between the eyes.Lo is Ms. Experimentalist, mistress of all and every kind of pop expression, and once you start listening, you can’t stop. She brings you back to Chicago, New York, New Orleans, from the 30’s to the 80’s to Infinity.Another amazing thing that reveals the depths of her musical talent is the fact that she did the arrangements of half the songs, including “You go to my Head,,” “Mona Lisa/Mozart’s Wife” and the ee cummings tune “The Boys I Mean are no Refined.”Everything on the edge of wild experimentation, avant, avant garde and then some, but at the same time loaded with old-time Jazz power. The main thing here is total mastery of sound, nothing normal, ordinary, deja vu, everything fresh, new, never-before-heard, and Lo Gallucio totally in charge of the sound. A trip into outer musical space!

Somerville Writer Steven Ford Brown: Explores the Punks Among the Brahmins

Somerville Writer Steven Ford Brown: Explore the Punks Among the Brahmin

By Doug Holder

I got an email from Somerville writer Steven Ford Brown recently inquiring about an alternative school in Cambridge in the 70’s called “ Trout Fishing in America” the title of a Richard Brautigan novel. I wondered why Brown was interested in such a piece of arcane information. Brown, who is currently in Barcelona, emailed me back that he recently edited a book on the work of American poet John Beecher, a political activist and great nephew of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Brown wrote: “As far as the Richard Brautigan and what I am up to, I have been working on a book for a long time: ‘Punks Among the Brahmin: A Cultural, Political and Social History.’ It is about change in Boston and Cambridge. How the cities moved from small conservative Irish Catholic enclaves to what is seen as some of the more liberal cities in America.

Brown has decidedly eclectic interests and his book will include the communes, the alternative schools, the head shops, the gay and feminist bookstore, the music venues, the alternative presses, newspapers, and the literary small presses form 1950 to 1980. Brown continued: “ Add to that the counter-culture protests of the era, the demolition of entire neighborhoods, the forced busing and segregation issues.” Brown wrote that he has been talking to everyone including a cabdriver who told him about a group of girls in the 60’s/70’s from the Cambridge housing projects called the Easties. The Easties were notorious for kicking, well…. you know what, out of any guy who had the temerity to mess with them.

Brown is also interested with the writers of this era who pounded the Boston/Cambridge/Somerville pavement. Folks like Richard Yates of “Revolutionary Road” fame, George Higgins known for his novel “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” as well as John Cheevers. And if any folks out there have a list of literary presses in the Cambridge/Boston/Somerville area from 1950 to 1975, well Brown would be much obliged for access to them.

When I read this I was all over it like a cheap suit, a dog on a meat truck, I was on it like a hornet, like a fly on that proverbial mound of… For years I have discussed with friends of the need for a book like this. I have even entertained the thought of writing about the small press poetry scene in the 80’s and 90’s. So hopefully when Brown gets back to the states we will have a chance to talk, and maybe I can help in some small way.

Brown has lived in the same apartment in Somerville for the past 22 years. He cut his teeth as a journalist in 1973 writing for alternative magazines down South. He profiled artists and writers like Diane Arbus, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hugo, etc. Looking him up on Wikipedia is an eye-opening experience. He has extensive experience as a rock music critic, he founded his own small press Thunder City Press (Later becoming Ford-Brown&Co), and has published folks like Richard Brautigan, Bei Dao, Mark Doty, Paul Zimmer, and the list goes on. He directed/managed research for George Plimpton's PBS TV interview series "The Writer in Society." He is an accomplished translator, and a featured writer at Boxing Herald.Com And this is only the tip of the iceberg. Brown has actively been involved with the Somerville arts scene of the years, but has had a lower profile recently. After his extensive travels are over, he may be spending some more time in the ‘ville, and who knows I might convince him to come to a Bagel Bards meeting at the Au Bon Pain. Can’t blame a guy for trying, now can you?

Between Compassion and Self Preservation : Toxic Environment poems by Kelley J. White, M.D.

Between Compassion and Self Preservation
Toxic Environment
poems by Kelley J. White, M.D.


article by Michael Todd Steffen


Poetry learns to read for this and that. Readers of poetry are keen and curious. On one hand we heed the literal register, the words used outright, and look for the presence of the poem, its urgency, its statements. Under this light the title of Kelley J. White’s Toxic Environment strike home to us here and now, in an age of unprecedented waste, of production and disposal of so much noxious chemical material, of landfilling and dumping in our resources including our vast atmospheric reserves of ocean and space.
If it is loud and in your face, the book’s title sounds familiar and resonant notes in the dissonance of late 20th and early 21st century life on planet earth.
The poem bearing the title demonstrates, moreover, a powerful poetic mind at work, as Dr. White compresses this environmental crisis with other pressing dilemmas of the day, hunger and violence. A child has been brought to the doctor, with a laceration on his neck from a thrown paint scraper.

“The kid has lead poisoning.
I was scraping the wall
to repaint and he walked in
and started eating from
the pile of scrapings
on the floor. I lost control…”

Here and throughout the book Kelley White adheres to a fidelity for harsh realistic subjects, depicted with everyday language, sensibly lined by breath and phrase. The eye is voracious, what is more, for the poverty of the inner city, its squalor and degradation, its grit, shortcomings, shame and suffering humanity. It is not reader-friendly, in this way, but neither is Dante’s Inferno, though White holds no didactic purpose in demonstrating this suffering. She is not out to explain to us why the people she meets are where she meets them. Her journey inclines toward compassion for others and preservation of herself. In that latter sense the title takes on a modulation. The environment White confronts is not only physically toxic but psychologically corrosive.

I have come back to violence, its work eternal,
“Seven Found Dead in Drug House,” already this winter,
a murder spree; bloody horror, screams the corner
…
tires crunching snow, purposefully moving,

steady, and I have to go to work, I must keep moving,
force myself to work against despair, to hope, eternal…

“Cadaverine” (p. 23) reels with such harsh mundane details that only after second and third readings do you realize that the same words are being repeated at the ends of the lines of the sextets, that this is a popular form-poem derived from the medieval Troubadors. Admirably White buries her cultural technical scaffolding in such unseemly garb as a drive to work on a cold winter morning with her mind racing over the bad news headlines and the riff-raff on the sidewalks.
White is sly in this way. I felt set up, having struggled through the poems at first, complaining that there was no rime or reason (except for the title page that shows the poems are arranged in alphabetical order, lest the world appear haphazard). But then I had to recant my grouse as consecutive readings unveiled more subtle work at form and suggested metaphor.
Look at the book’s title again. There’s an ox in Toxic, the burdened farm animal driving the plough. Am-scram “Environment,” the metal in that word, and you come up with “nerve” and “teen” and “norm,” etc… It’s a game the word puzzles in the daily paper teach us.
Here is the book’s first poem:

After Performing CPR

like skiing the white hills of sleep
following mountains all the bright chill
day the rhythm of falling in time with
a wind singing above the flight falling
yet never touching ground sweet sore
muscle learned and the child will breathe
will open her eyes this time will breathe

The imagery, almost ethereal, is birthed back through a technical act (necessary, “muscle learned”), CPR, a little theft from Avernus, or Mount Purgatory, that further realm so many of our greatest artists cite as the source of human inspiration, so modestly pulled off by White. On reading it, I thought this is going to be an amazing book. Yet this is it
as far as displaced or metaphorical or euphemistic imagery is going to get in White’s book. The rest is hard stuff under a harsh light in abrasive terms. Have we gotten truth instead of the graces of poetry? If so, it’s not that White doesn’t understand those graces as this first poem so deftly illustrates. Maybe the proportions between the truths she confronts and the grace she witnesses are honestly weighed out in this book.
Kelley White’s poetry has been widely published, and she has been selected to read from by Garrison Keilor on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac. Toxic Environment is a trying yet rewarding read, full servings for content, silent side-glances of know-how for the reader especially interested in poetry as an art and tradition. Hats off, thumbs up, shakes of the umbrella, bitten palm of envy for a fine book.

Toxic Environment by Kelley J. White, M.D.
is available for $13.95
from Boston Poet Publishing
19 Oakridge Drive
Londonderry, NH 03053

It's Not Enough of Elvis by Paul Fericano

It’s Not Enough of Elvis
Paul Fericano 2009
The Shave and a Haircut Poetry Series
Poor Souls Press/Scaramouche Books
POBox 236, Millbrae, Ca. 94030 USA
25cents

“we dig up the grave
and sell little envelopes of Elvis plots
we pulverize the casket
and market little vials of Elvis coffins
we auction off the corpse
and sell every last bone to the highest bidder”

Fericano gives us one hell of a poem for 25 cents in a hand held
3”x5” chapbook. like the dust being sold, as Elvis’s testicles
lay limp on some fan’s hand. you gotta love this guy for writing
about, “enough is enough.”

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor
Ibbetson Street Press

REVIEW of GUD issue 4 by Anne Brudevold

REVIEW of GUD issue 4, Spring 2009 by Anne Brudevold



Reading the latest GUD issue 4, Spring 2009 inspires the disjunctive in me. I am full of admiration for its editors who aim for the deep-seated healthy shock value of wildly varying essays and stories, each one completely unique and surreal, yet creating its own world that connects to the worlds before and after it in subtle ways. The structure of this issue of GUD totters the lines of the huge, insane no-man’s land between life and death, good and evil. Sometimes, as in “Unfinished Stories” by J(as)D Brames, life, death, good, and evil become as knotted together as lovers killing each other with calculating, hopeless, eviscerating love, love that could be called hatred. This harkens to the tradition of Becket, Albee, and The Silence of the Lambs, horrifying, unimaginable, yet here vividly imagined and unforgettable.. The story incorporates a parable of Hans and Gretel and the Wicked Witch, who eats Hans and loves it, in this version, and by eating him, grants him a new life as a bird.

The story is preceded by an astute analysis of Kafka, who “believed that we are only a bad day of God’s.” (“What Kafka Knew,” Nonfiction by Christy Rodgers. Kafka, the first postmodernist who gave us a “parallel symbolic world” that not only literature, but also politics adopted. “The system chooses to punish you not for the specifics of your individual actions but merely to demonstrate to others that its authority is absolute. This idea is incarnate in military invasions and occupations, in racial profiling and ethnic cleansing, and in the punishment of dissenters; it is not a fictional exaggeration or a phenomenon of a particular society in the historical past, but a pretty accurate description of how power continues to operate all around us, right now.” The battle for the power of definition of good and evil is summed up in the title of the poem, ”Jesus Fucks an Atheist and calls it Love.” By Lisa Feinstein.

Reality as we know it walks a thin line in GUD. In “Unbound” by Brittany Reid Warren, one moment a family is having an almost unattended birthday party of the twelve year old son, the next, the world ends as the parents argue. “There was something like the low stink of a relentless predator….My mother stood at the sink, running her hands under the water and humming. As I watched, the water grew into strange shapes on her palms: now a tree, many-branched and reaching’ now a snake, curling over a tangled rope. Now my father’s face. Now mine. “ Reality curls and tangles.. People from another dimension appear and eat pizza.

Acceptance of evil. death, contradiction and the slippery slopes of reality brings hope at the end of many of these essays and stories. It’s a psychological healing. Confess your sins, your doubts, your addictions, your deceptions and you will be healed, if only momentarily. “Lifthrasir , I thought. I formed the name with my tongue. It tasted like life, like growth, like order out of chaos. /It tasted like…hope.” (Warren). “If there are days when I feel that life on earth will be reduced to two idiots battling to the death on a charred cinder…I read Kafka. I feel the suffocation of nightmare, but I feel the possibility of awakening from nightmare as well.” (Rodgers)

Humor noire abounds. In the succinct poem “Quack” by Brian Beatty, “The mystic said/my spirit/animal/was a duck/because---/I forgot to ask why,/I was so distracted/by her/week-old loaf of bread.”

Sentimentalism is nowhere to be found. Death is an interesting object, examined from astonishingly imaginative angles in this issue of GUD. Death, Life, Good, Evil. If there are more crucial issues than these today, let me know. I am caught up by GUD’s passionate and unimpassioned examination of these subjects. A read-through is impossible, so intense are the language and subject matter. I read and reflect, read, am shocked, examine my shock, am fascinated by my shock, absorb it and look for other angles to be shocked and intrigued by. GUD will wake up your sensibilities, will challenge the things most precious, most sacred to you (your pet cat, your love, your belief in order) and turn them upside down, inside out, splay them and return them to you, intact, and glowing with new possibilities. Read GUD and you’ll never be the same. And that’s a good thing for the world, a necessary thing, if the world at present is ever to regain its sanity, which GUD, I think rightly, assumes it has lost. You must lose your mind to find it. You must deconstruct the world to understand and recreate it. A Must Read.

CO-FOUNDER OF PLYMOUTH ROCK STUDIOS KEYNOTES 47TH ANNUAL CAPE COD WRITERS CENTER

CO-FOUNDER OF PLYMOUTH ROCK STUDIOS KEYNOTES 47TH ANNUAL CAPE COD WRITERS CENTER CONFERENCE, AUGUST 15 – 22, 2009



Two prominent leaders in the arts will address Cape Cod’s premier writing conference on Wednesday evening, August 19 at 7:30 PM: David Kirkpatrick, co-founder of Plymouth Rock Studios, and Marita Golden, founder of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation of Washington, DC.



Contact: Anne Elizabeth Tom, Executive Director of CCWC 508.420.0200, AnneETom@alumni.tufts.edu



David Kirkpatrick, former President of Production at Paramount Pictures and co-founder of Plymouth Rock Studios; and Marita Golden, founder and President Emeritus of the Hurston /Wright Foundation - will address the 47th Annual Cape Cod Writers Conference, held during the week of August 15 to 22, at Craigville Conference Center on Cape Cod. Mr. Kirkpatrick, will provide insight into the decision to build a television and film studio in nearby Plymouth and its partnership with the MIT Media Lab to create The Center for Future Storytelling.



Marita Golden, Writer-in-Residence at the University of the District of Columbia, will tell her inspirational tale as a novelist inducted into the International Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent at the Gwendolyn Brooks Center at Chicago State University, and her founding of both the Washington-based African American Writers Guild and the Hurston/Wright Foundation.

Sunday evening, August 16, two other keynote speakers will address the first half of the conference: Roger Sutton, Editor-in-Chief of The Horn Book, and one of the country’s leading experts on children’s literature; and Martin Sandler, Emmy award-winning scriptwriter and author of over 60 books.



“For attendees interested in film and TV writing,” says Executive Director Anne Elizabeth Tom, we offer screenwriting and advanced screenwriting taught by Marc Weinberg, who has sold scripts and story ideas and written for many shows.” She explains why there are twice as many workshops this summer, “Our classes were growing too popular and too big, so we have more, smaller, and advanced classes - in literary blogging and how to get published, taught by acquiring editors from publishing houses; in memoir, novel and short fiction-writing, poetry with Martha Rhodes, and more. Likewise, twice as many literary agents, editors, and authors will give writers manuscript evaluations and mentoring, including Mary Lee Donovan, editor with Candlewick Press, publisher of books for children and young adults, since it began 18 years ago.”



THREE-DAY WORKSHOPS ($185) and ONE-DAY WORKSHOPS ($65) and MASTER CLASSES (135) in Fiction, Nonfiction, Screenwriting and Poetry are listed in a full brochure, downloadable on the website, www.capecodwriterscenter.org.

For more information, call Executive Director of the Cape Cod Writers Center, Anne Elizabeth Tom at 508.420.0200 or email AnneETom@alumni.tufts.edu

Novelist Paul Stone Interviews Poet Doug Holder on Poet to Poet: Writer-to-Writer

Novelist Paul Stone Interviews Poet Doug Holder on Poet to Poet: Writer-to-Writer


Paul Stone makes a living by being creative. Stone, the Creative Director of W.B.Mason in Boston, and the author of the novel “Or So It Seems” and “How to Train a Rock” had an idea. He thought it might be interesting to interview me, Doug Holder, on my interview show on Somerville Community Access TV “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.” As you probably know I am the founder of the small literary press, “Ibbetson Street” and the author of a number of poetry collections including: “The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel.” We figured a novelist interviewing a poet might bring some insights to the creative process.


Paul Stone: When did you have the “calling” to be a poet?

Doug Holder: Well I am 54 years old now, but I didn’t start publishing till I was in my mid 30’s. But I was writing and formulating many of my writings into poems in my 20’s. I think I had ideas of being a writer in college, but I really didn’t start writing consistently until I started keeping journals in my 20’s after college. I recorded snippets of conversations in my journals, passages from novels, quotations, etc… and eventually this raw fodder became poetry.

PS: Did you read poetry when you were younger?

DH :Oddly enough I read poetry, but much more fiction. I got a lot of material from that, literary history, newspapers, etc…

PS: By the time you were in your 30’s did you call yourself a poet?

DH: By the time I was in my 30’s the dye- was- cast. I had a need to publish. I published my first poem when I was 35 or so in a Canadian journal Sub-Terrain. They are still around. It wasn’t until I was 40 or so that I graduated with my MA in English. I felt this was another step to become a serious writer. Through this education my writing improved a great deal and I was exposed to many other writers, ideas, and even theory.

PS: So you feel you needed to get an advanced degree?

DH: I think so. When someone on the Harvard faculty says you are a good writer that gives you a lot of confidence. It’s one thing when your friend, mother or wife says you are a good writer, it’s another when Ruth Wisse, a scholar of Yiddish Literature, a woman who worked with Irving Howe tells you. She was my thesis advisor at Harvard.

The thesis is an intense process. It takes more than a year and a half to complete it, and your initial proposal is often rejected three times before you can call it a go. They don’t make it easy for you. For a thesis you have to read closely, and do an exegesis of the work. This was hard for me because my writing is more impressionistic and journalistic. I did these “exercises” for years, while I worked fulltime at McLean Hospital. It was marvelous discipline, and exposure.

PS: You have a book of interviews out the “From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers.”

DH: The book has many of the interviews I conducted on my Somerville Community Access TV show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.” I have interviewed a helluva a lot of people in the six years that I have had the show. The best thing I ever did was to come to Somerville Community Access TV. It opened up a whole new world for me. People are really enthusiastic about coming on the show from the accomplished writer to the novice.

PS: I found the book to be fascinating. Anybody who is interested about how the creative mind works, or what the creative process is like, will enjoy this book. It is very accessible. One of the things I liked about your poetry is that it’s accessible.

DH: Yeah. It is accessible. I hope it is layered with insight.

PS: I immersed myself with Doug Holder poetry. (laugh) And your “mundane” characters (as they were described in a review in The Harvard Crimson) are always
a little off balance, and they are caught in the moment. The “moment” seems to be what interests you. From the woman you wrote about who sat on the toilet for two years (From the collection “The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel), and the other characters you write about, you capture something that visually speaks to you in the moment.

DH: Someone told me at a reading that my book “The Man in the Booth…” reminded her of the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. “Spoon River…” was a portrait of townsfolk, just regular people. So I guess she was right. I am interested in the common man in the moment, maybe the uncommonly common man.

I always loved the old Twilight Zone on TV. You know Rod Serling would come out in a dark, tight-fitting suit, a cigarette in his hand, with that great enigmatic, narrator’s voice and say: “Have if you will. Mr. Henry Beamish, a bookish man, whose only passion is the written word.” These were marvelous character studies. I also loved Paddy Chayevsky, his movie “Marty” and “Requiem for a Heavyweight” these were great character study films I think.

I used to say to my father as we passed through the Midtown Tunnel to go to Manhattan, “Hey Dad, do you think the guy in the booth has a girlfriend, wife, family?” I was talking about a man in a plastic booth in the middle of fume-filled tunnel. He responded: “How the hell do I know?” Most people don’t think about these things. But I think to some extent we are all captured like that man by our own skins, our own baggage. The book was published by Gloria Mindock’s press Cervena Barva right here in Somerville, Mass.

DH: Can you name some poets you like?

PS: I like Philip Larkin, love his dark sense of humor. I know it is not fashionable but I like Edward Arlington Robinson: “Richard Corey,” “Miniver Cheevey” and other poems. Some contemporary poets I admire are Mark Doty, Sam Cornish, Robert K. Johnson, Afaa Michael Weaver, Ed Galing, to name just a few.

PS: Is there a poet out there who reminds you of you?

DH: T.S. Eliot ( Laugh). Sometimes Sam Cornish reminds me of me. If you read my stuff you know I am not a product of an MFA school. I have a signature style, whether you like it or not.

PS: What is it like to write a poem?

DH: Well today I read a line: “Why speak to the monkey if the organ grinder is in the room?” I thought this might spur on a poem but I drew a blank. Right now I’m in a block, other times I’m in a streak. Paul, you are a Creative Director for W.B.Mason—how does it work for you?

PS: When I am paid to do a job something always responds. If I have more time I can go more deeply. Something always comes back to me to work with.

DH: I was shopping at Market Basket and there was a bunch of elderly ladies sitting there. There were lined up on chairs— the hustle and bustle of the market was their daily drama to view. You never know when your inspiration is going to come, and when this is going to translate into a poem.

PS: If I am writing commercials for W.B. Mason I know when it is not fully cooked. Over the years I have come to recognize that. I’ve come to understand how my creative mechanism works. I can sense ideas coming for my next novel—a sequel to “Or So It Seems.” An interesting idea comes into play and something inside me plays with it.
Doug, talk about poems you did complete.

DH: Samuel Beckett has always influenced me. Recently I revisited his play Krapp’s Last Tape. It concerns a 69 year old guy whose life is in shambles, lives in a gone-to-seed furnished room—the whole deal, you know the suicide suite. He keeps playing back this tape to a recording that concerns the one love affair he had at 39—at the end of his youth. He keeps going back and forth to that time. A constant replay, a constant rehash. I am a ruminator so I was very taken by this rumination, about age, love and lost chances.

PS: Can you talk about some favorite poems you have written?

DH: The poems I wrote for my late father in the collection: “Wrestling With My Father” were sentimental favorites. One poem concerned the image of my father reciting an old ditty he picked up from the Vaudeville halls he attended as a kid in New York City. There was this line he used to recite to me while I was on his knee: “Ladies and gentleman take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice." I used to laugh—we had a great time. There were also the times we used to visit Benson’s Deli in my hometown of Rockville Centre, NY. Dad introduced me to Doctor Brown’s Celray soda, knishes; you know all the food he sampled from his seminal grounds of the Bronx. We lived on Long Island, so the Bronx to my brother Don and me was the exotic old world. Paul-you grew up in the Bronx so it was no mystery to you. But coming from the Island, going over the Whitestone Bridge to the Bronx, was a source of endless fascination. So these poems are steeped with sentiment. I wrote some poems I was quite pleased with in my collection: “Poems of Boston and Just Beyond: From the Back Bay to the Back Ward.” These were poems from the psychiatric ward. I have worked at McLean Hospital for the past 27 years, and many of the poems spoke to my experience there. It was a Pick of the Month in The Small Press Review, and is archived at the poetry collection at Harvard University.

PS: I found these poems had an interesting energy. Especially when you saw people from that environment out in the world. You shared an experience that have not witnessed.

DH: Yes. Working in a mental hospital you see a slice of life many don’t. I have seen highly accomplished men and women, professors, poets, entertainers, captains of industry in a raw, primal and psychotic state. I have also worked with the homeless, drug addicts, the whole gamut. One poem I wrote was about my first time I worked on the psychiatric ward as mental health worker in 1982. A very psychotic patient thought he was God, and he called me his “finest creation.” So he created me. And I created a poem. Another poem I wrote was about working the 11PM to7AM shift and this drop dead gorgeous girl came running out in the nude, and we had to restrain her. On one hand you are a professional, on the other hand you are a man, wrestling, well almost dancing with a woman in the dead of night. Romantic and horrific at the same time. Another poem was about a homeless guy I knew who was hospitalized on the unit. I lit his cigarette at one moment, a few minutes later he was dead. The drama on the psychiatric ward is certainly arcane, and most people want it that way.

When I was working on locked psychiatric wards, I ran poetry groups for patients for 10 years. I published patient poems in Little Magazines. There was a lead article in the Arts/Leisure section of The Boston Globe in Feb. of 2000 about the groups and my press Ibbetson Street.

PS: Now you have run poetry workshops. How does the workshops help you as a poet?

DH: You learn from other people. They are commenting on your poems. When you constructively criticize you work you realize there are parallels in your own work. It’s like anything else—you can’t work in a vacuum.

The Hunger Season by William Taylor, Jr.,, After the Honeymoon by Nathan Graziano / Reviews by Irene Koronas

The Hunger Season
William Taylor Jr.
Sunnyoutside Press
ISBN 9781934513170
2009...$15.00

“The tourists get drunk
buy T-shirts
and fondle the bones of poets…”

Taylor administers wafers, homemade bread, not only to himself, but to any open mouth. He takes the mundane experiences of the moment like a priest‘s hand:

“something beautiful they forgot
to take away

something simple
and real enough

that doesn’t ask too much of you
or taste so much
like death.”

He imparts what we already know, yet, we have forgotten, even in hunger and maybe because of hunger we forget, until we are served the poem, plain and without any apology, even, sometimes, with humor:

“I have decided
as soon as they finish
building that
suicide
fence on the
golden gate bridge
I will be the first
to try it out.”

With an honest reliance on what the poem puts on the line, “but the loneliness in the air just drifts like fog,” the reader may only take one phrase from this book, and glean all notions, all sad relaxations on a park bench, all the familiar smells and odors of decay, relief:

“The train moves on and the feeling
is pleasant and
all I know is I don’t want to
be anywhere”

William Taylor Jr. writes the story of people’s lives, each poem is a complete rendering in a few phrases, verses. I feel as if I’m treated as an intelligent person who can surmise the fullness of every word, meaning, we are able to use our own imagination, relating to experiences that maybe buried on the surface of familiarity. We find meaning where there may not seem to be meanings. this collection of poems is weighty, substantial, and it sustains. Read, “angry at the Sun,” on page 33

Irene Koronas
Poetry editor
Ibbetson Street Press
Poetry editor
Wilderness House Literary Review





The Hunger Season
William Taylor Jr.
Sunnyoutside Press
ISBN 9781934513170
2009...$15.00

“The tourists get drunk
buy T-shirts
and fondle the bones of poets…”

Taylor administers wafers, homemade bread, not only to himself, but to any open mouth. He takes the mundane experiences of the moment like a priest‘s hand:

“something beautiful they forgot
to take away

something simple
and real enough

that doesn’t ask too much of you
or taste so much
like death.”

He imparts what we already know, yet, we have forgotten, even in hunger and maybe because of hunger we forget, until we are served the poem, plain and without any apology, even, sometimes, with humor:

“I have decided
as soon as they finish
building that
suicide
fence on the
golden gate bridge
I will be the first
to try it out.”

With an honest reliance on what the poem puts on the line, “but the loneliness in the air just drifts like fog,” the reader may only take one phrase from this book, and glean all notions, all sad relaxations on a park bench, all the familiar smells and odors of decay, relief:

“The train moves on and the feeling
is pleasant and
all I know is I don’t want to
be anywhere”

William Taylor Jr. writes the story of people’s lives, each poem is a complete rendering in a few phrases, verses. I feel as if I’m treated as an intelligent person who can surmise the fullness of every word, meaning, we are able to use our own imagination, relating to experiences that maybe buried on the surface of familiarity. We find meaning where there may not seem to be meanings. this collection of poems is weighty, substantial, and it sustains. Read, “angry at the Sun,” on page 33

Irene Koronas
Poetry editor
Ibbetson Street Press
Poetry editor
Wilderness House Literary Review










After the Honeymoon
Nathan Graziano
Sunyoutside Press
ISBN 9781934513194
2009...$15.00

And what is the illness that plagues the poem, “Cracker and Me (for Dan)”? Is it the malady of universal immaturity? Questions are useless when faced with being sick inside and these poems may not answer any questions, except, “can someone pour me a drink?” In asking someone to pour the ending into a glass, the dry inspiration lifts these words as we clink our shot glasses to what merges and swirls like liquid gold burning our throats:

“We wonder if this is creation.
or the illness winking
and rubbing our backs
before driving the knife
between our shoulder blades.”

As the verse smashes into our systems we realize we are inebriated, cold stone sober:

“but the illness still creeps
into the last chapters of our novels,
into the guts of our poems,
into our twisted symbolism,
into the irony we never intend.”

Nathan Graziano does not trip the light fandango. There is no place here for current music, or any music we may think we know how to dance with. Instead:

“The three of us board
the paper ark I built
while the world drowns
in things we can’t afford

I sing sailor songs
and hold you both

while we dance to the rhythm
of a distant drip.

a slow dance.

our wedding song.”

Irene Koronas
Poetry editor
Ibbetson Street Press
Poetry editor
Wilderness House Literary Review

Journey: Anthology by Eden Waters Press review by Lo Galluccio

JOURNEY
Anthology by Eden Waters Press
Edited by Anne Brudevold
Copyright @ 2009
by Eden Waters Press
pages = 136

http://edenwaterspress.com
http://edenwaterspress.blogspot.com

Review by Lo Galluccio

Anne Brudevold’s latest issue by Eden Waters Press called, “Journey” offers an enticing and enlightening range of poetry and non-fiction reckoning with the concept of travel or personal transport. It’s too extensive a volume to cover in great depth, but here are some standouts (in my estimation) to consider.

First, the late Mike Amado’s poem, “We are here” wonders at a petroglyph “off in the desert where the Anasazi lived” through a personal cascade of revelations about how we are all interdimensional beings across space and time. In the second to last stanza, he affirms: “For nothing in the human heart is foreign.” And finally, “You and I exist.” “We are here.” In fact, though Mike’s not living and breathing on planet earth, his profound etchings remain, like his memory, in the desert-blasts of our terrain.

In “Drawing the Moon” Edward S. Gault writes of his daughter’s request of him to draw the moon for her, which he compliantly does, realizing in this delightfully compact piece, that there may well come a day when “you will not care what I can do.” Beneath the poem is a lovely black and white photo of a young girl with an over-sized hat negotiating her way on a rocky trail.

Yvonne Baginsky takes us to Shirati, Tanzania where in a place called Safi Safaris Arusha or “Jo and Judith’s Place” she has arrived to witness again the slow-moving tribal beauty with SOUNDS, SMELLS, TASTES AND MOTION. “The air is warm and completely full. It sort of sits effortlessly on your skin and makes you feel welcome.” She had been invited in 2006 by a volunteer medical association called Touru University Global Health Initiative to go to Shirati, a large village in rural Tanzania. There she ran a number of art workshops in local primary schools who were without basic art supplies. One of the products of the children’s work is pictured in the essay: a magical mural of fish and plants and clouds and flowers, intermingled and mosaic-like, now gracing the maternity ward of Shirati’s Hospital.

John Flynn’s “Four Cent Trip” takes us back to Depression-era Boston where a young Irish boy works two jobs, stocking boxes and selling newspapers, to keep his family going. It seems that John Flynn is Mickey Shea, the fictionalized name he uses, or maybe an intimate friend he knew as a boy. Of course I could be wrong, but the exactitude of detail makes me believe this is a work of non-fiction. Flynn describes the daily routine of awakening before dawn to catch the early morning editions of The Globe, The Herald, The American and the current issues of The Traveler, Life, Look, Colliers, Time and the Saturday Post to hawk on bustling street corners downtown for a few pennies profit. “Three years I took my lumps as a newsy and wore that apron with pride. It always bulged with change.” He writes lovingly of his evenings at home, after supper, when the living room was lit up with the entertaining voices of radio programs like “The Fat Man” and “the Whistler” – his father dancing a little in his silk smoking jacket. The heavy labor shouldered by the young boy, who consistently misses out on schooling, till his mother insists on transferring him to a tough parochial school – finally ends when he’s caught on the street dehydrated and sick with scarlet fever. In this case the illusory and real glow from his laboring life, burn down to a stay in a hospital, where his old boss comes to visit, going by the nickname Red. The boy can smell the decades of “unfiltered Old Golds” and “pickled herring” on his breath as he leans over and asks the barely recovered child, “Where’s my money?” At that point his parents realize that the exploitation of their son must end and pull him off the beat. But Mickey ends blithely saying, “In a way, I’m grateful to Red. He schooled me in what it meant to own a corner.” Thus his ingrained American pragmatism and not self-pity prevail.

Carolyn Gregory contributes several poems, all well-constructed , moving reflections; my favorite being “Among Crayon Flowers (for Peter)” about her own imagistic memories of a broken but hard-fought for marriage:

“I forgot my name in the depths
of your blue eyes.
Schubert flowing through the brook stream,
though we stumbled
when deception burned oil
across our vows and brought us to our knees.”

Chad Parenteau offers an elliptical haiku list through the movement of seasons that is quite striking in its strange spare imagery; each haiku an emblem for his feelings on the four seasons:

2. Winter
Find skeleton tree,
Stare, repeating mantra: it’s just
Recuperating




In Jennifer Lang’s “Sirens and Vows,” a young married couple weather a possible Scud missal strike on their adopted home, Israel, as they remain mostly hopeful and stalwart in their vows to “love cherish and protect each other, whether in good fortune or in adversity, and to seek with each other a life hallowed by the faith of Israel.” As they huddle in a sealed off room with plastic sheeting and duct tape on a blue sofa, these vows take on a greater gravity, as the young wife still checks in with her close friend to make sure she’s all right and their parents worry about them from California. The story examines in unembellished detail the exacting price of moving to a country that is potentially a player and a victim in the tribal factions of Middle Eastern warfare.

Hugh Fox turns in a hyper-real outline poem called, “Dreamland” -- a kind of stream-of-consciousness journey melding edgy existential awareness:

3. Clever-intuitive little ape people to be
able to
fly
cry
sleep
reproduce
meditate
die

with the absurd irony of an America where:

7. A two day Epigraphic Convention, Westerville Ohio,
Christ-town reincarnated, Messiah town past the Arby’s
and MacDonald’s, the Olive Garden Fifth Third Bank, Taco Bell,
a rough stone Jesus ressurectus Est stained glass windows church
almost

In Fox’s wild sensibility, there is great affect in juxtaposing Zen cosmic awareness with the objects of commerce and religious belief in our landscape. He’s always striving for greater reach of vision:

“If only I could change bodies
the way I change cities….”

There are other brilliant poetic turns by Tomas O’Leary in “A Monk Gone Larking” and Elizabeth Kate Switaj’s “Winged Leaf like Flight of Stairs.” – Beatriz Rio del Alba’s “Rest” who takes up Einstein as a muse and ends with the the lines, “My girl rest your tired head on this bed of roses and rest rest again.” And from Tim Gager’s “These Other Days:” looking nostalgically back at a doomed relationship:

“These other days
I had are plain, simple
not devastating, basic
as jokes about elephants
that left footprints in a cheesecake.
these are the ones
that made me laugh –
I wonder why they stopped.”

“Hanoi,” a travel essay by Anne Brudevold begins with her own awareness that the Vietnam War once caused her to flee America for Europe and this same country is now the adopted (at least temporarily) home and mission of her daughter who works as a psychologist for “trafficked children, children sold into sexual slavery and luckily rescued.” Her expectations of a “drab, battered country” are defied by what she finds in Hanoi – a city which “blows her mind.” With its booming tourist industry, packs of Moped riders which make crossing streets hazardous, and a constant Western-style bargaining and hustling in the marketplace. Threaded throughout are political insights and revelations about the aftermath of the war, and in turn of all wars. She writes: “I see Ho Chi Minh’s house. He’s a hero to his people, but of course presented as a villain to us.” And, “The Vietnamese War was, of course, a power-play between leaders, not ordinary people.” She even recalls Churchill’s famous quote: “Truth is so precious she must be protected by a battalion of lies.”

She captures a high-impact shot of the outside of the prison-turned museum where John McCain was jailed – a cement or wood structure in which are sculpted human skeleton-like figures. Some are bound by their hands; others face out in a line. They are somehow not gruesome, but ghostly remnants of what had transpired during the war years.

Anne plays multiple roles during her visit: mother, documentarian and tourist, eager to pick up souvenier bargains at the various market places. Her prize being a string of pearls she vows to treasure as long as they last.

This is a triumphal collection of fascinating paeans to journeys, both interior and worldy, personal and political – and the line blurring at times as how often can the two be adequately separated? This is one of many interesting questions we are left with after reading such a brave and distinguished collection.


Lo’s latest chapbook of poems will be released on Propaganda Press in the fall of 2009.

Review of SEASON OF MANGOS by Clarence Wolfshohl

Review of SEASON OF MANGOS by Clarence Wolfshohl (Adastra Press, limited edition, Easthampton, MA 2009)

By Barbara Bialick

SEASON OF MANGOS by Clarence Wolfshohl is a handsome, hand-set, hand-sewn little book limited to 220 copies of his 12 evocative poems about Belem, Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon River.

A professor and author from Fulton, Missouri, Wolfshohl edited and was letterpress printer of Timberline Press for 30 years. These poems are written from the point of view of a tourist to an alluring city of mango trees where one must “watch out” for the ripe, fertile mangos that are falling “on the hoods of idling cars./On the dreams of sleeping dogs on the sidewalk…”

To the American poet, these mangos are like baseballs: In “High Fly Mango” he writes: “It was like catching the white blur/off the bat two beats before the crack…I flip the yellow orb in my hand/to feel its seams, to judge its heft,/and look up into the evergreen mango’s/finger-waving leaves like fans cheering/ the play.”

In “Heap of Mangos”, he paints a picture: “greens, yellows, and reds heaped/on this stand are slivers of the dresses and shirts/of the vendors behind the tables. Slivers/of the carimbo jouncing from the speakers that make you dance at noon. Slivers/of the paint on the popopos putting across the bay/to fill these booths, the boats stacked like burros/with their cargo of color, of fragrance, of ripeness/heaped on the Ver-O-Peso.”

Wolfshohl also pays homage to Brazilian beer and ice cream. He captures what’s special about the city in snapshots such as a prison turned jewelry museum and in the sight of “thousands of parakeets/(that) double the foliage/on this amazon tree.”, an “Easy Rider” he calls “Captain Brazil”, and the mysterious looks of a woman, a “yara” (siren) who turns out to be a university student.

Fortunately, he has notes at the end that help with some of the Portuguese words and traditions. But this mango-y introduction to the area also made me want to look up pictures on the internet. And it led me to speculate on the symbolism and imagery he interjected into the poems, as you would expect from a professor-poet. This book would make a fine gift to an arm-chair traveler/poet, or to one who has been to or wishes to travel to Brazil.

Anezka Ceska by Jaromir Horec, Three Islands by Micah Ling /// Reviews by Zvi Sesling.

Anezka Ceska

by Jaromir Horec

Translated into the English

by Jana Moravkova Kiely as Agnes of Bohemia

Cervena Barva Press

Somerville, Massachusetts

Softbound, 54 pages with an Introduction, Endnotes and Postlude

ISBN: 978-0-578-02262-8



Review by Zvi A. Sesling





Eastern European poets have fascinated me for two reasons: the quality of their poetry

and their creative use of language. It is a shame that few of these poets have made their

mark on American poetry either by being read widely or by their lack of influence on

American poets. Two of my favorites are Wislawa Szymborska and Charles Simic. The

former a Nobel Prize winner as was Czeslaw Milosz. This leads us to Jaromir Horec, a Czech poet of considerable talent and Jana Moravkova Kiely whose translations of Horec

bring not only Horec’s poetry to life but the subject of his verse: Anezka Ceska (Ann of Bohemia).



Anezka lived in the Czech nation during the 13th Century, a princess, an abbess and builder of a hospital for the poor. It took more than 700 years before she was canonized.

Horec’s poetry and Kiely’s translation resurrect her, with lines like this from Gentleness Nestled in Her



Gentleness nestled in her

it came to her

at dawn

in silence

over dew



The poems also relate the travails of the Czechs seven centuries ago as in the lines from Mother of Seven Sorrows



Countless times has the land

heard its streams and torrents moan

as swords of intruders washed their blood in them

and forces of darkness broke encampments on the

midnight shores

Linden trees glowing with honey even towering oaks

countless times burned to the roots and wells

blocked with human bodies polluted the soil



There are many fascinating poems about the hero of this book, about light and

dark times of the period with Anezka at the center of it all.



This is a book about a woman hero, life, religion, bravery and destiny. It is a book

with an introduction that places a perspective on what the poetry is about. The

endnotes are taken from historical sources and explain some of the poems, while

the postlude expands on these notes. A biography of Horec is also vital in understanding the author and the poetry.



One personal note: the translations of Czech (and many Eastern European languages) can often be difficult and Kiely’s translations might be criticized in some places, but they are tense, lively, colorful and sensitive, all reflecting the deep religiousness of the subject, the author and the translator.



You don’t have to be Czech, Eastern European, Catholic or even religious to enjoy this

book not only for its poetry, but its history. And Cervena Barva Press should be commended for bringing it to American readers.





Three Islands

by Micah Ling

sunnyoutside

Buffalo, NY

Copyright © 2009 by Micah Ling

ISBN: 978-1-934513-18-7



Review by Zvi A. Sesling



Everyone once in a while a poet comes along who successfully achieves a new and difficult approach to poetry. Micah Ling is such a poet. Her first full length collection is a three-in-one special. Each section of her book Three Islands could be a separate chapbook, and in fact, the final section of the book "Amelia Earhart" was a chapbook entitled Thoughts on Myself (Finishing Line Press, 2009).



So, what’s new? Many poets have spoken in the voice of other people, something I have not particularly enjoyed. But Ling puts Robert Stroud, Fletcher Christian and

Earhart together, hence the islands: Stroud’s was Alcatraz, Christian’s Pitcairn and Earhart on the island where she crashed her plane. Three islands, three prisons: Stroud in Alcatraz for his murderous ways. Christian on an island from which he couldn’t leave because of mutiny. Earhart alone on a deserted island waiting to be rescued.



That these three sections of the book work is a testament not only to Ling’s talent as a poet, but her ability to match such seemingly disparate people in a poetic tour-de-force. Her poetry is strong, her voice clear and her interpretation of these individuals fresh.



You would think after seeing Bird Man of Alcatraz, reading Mutiny on the Bounty, or seeing any of its three cinematic versions or after all the documentaries and biographies of Amelia Earhart there would be nothing new. You’d be wrong. Ling puts Stroud’s thought process into perspective as the lines of the chilling opening poem show:



“Alcatraz Island, 1945: D Block 41”



This birdhouse is barren country,

worse than Alaska,

no sky to escape to,

no hope of gravy trapped by potatoes.



I’d kill again for a decent meal.



Just outside this ghost town

there’s a world that never strays

from comfort, never rises to the heat

of sauteed and sticky, never cools

to chatter or frost. I need more

than a mother now.

I need to be fed.



This stark language, this cold view of life, this self-centered need and the 16 other poems in this section are what makes Micah Ling’s work compelling.



In the section on Fletcher Christian, Ms. Ling conjures these thoughts in the first stanza of “November 22, 1789”:



There’s something about the sound of truth:

cracks of thunder, lashes to skin.

Tiny hairs rise and fall again. Truth

has its own mind



These are words I recognize, perhaps you too: we’ve all heard the cracks of thunder Christian has heard. We have all felt the lashes to skin, even if not administered by a whip. And truth truly has its own mind. These are descriptions that excite, stimulate inspire others to write poetry.



All three poems have people who long for freedom, for a return to civilization, to sanity, to associate with “normal” people, to live again, for they are all doomed to their own island, their physical and mental prisons.



As Ling has Earhart saying:



I fill Noonan’s bottles

with secrets, cork them

with seaweed, and send them away

to find other stone faces,

and assure them,

not crazy.



Talking to no one is better than quiet.



And reading to myself is better than not reading. This book is highly recommended.

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