A Monster's Notes by Laurie Sheck.

And the Monster Is -- ?
by Mary Rice

A Monster's Notes by Laurie Sheck. (Knopf. 530 pages; $30)

Frankenstein. Ever since Boris Karloff's memorable portrayal, the monster at the center of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein has been called that, even though he actually had no name. A Monster's Notes is about that monster and that author. The book's premise is that the monster was real, and has continued to exist to the present day. Yet Mary Shelley was intimately involved in his life, and he in hers.

"Where do you end and I begin?" the monster asks early on. That question is never quite resolved. But here the monster is not really monstrous; he commits no violent acts. This is not a horror story, but an experimental novel. A gloss on Frankenstein, it re-imagines both the novel and its author's life.

The structure is enormously complex, and initially confusing, an amalgam of disparate parts much like the monster's own body. Fragments of information -- the notes of the title, even whole articles, are combined with passages of first-person narrative.

The primary "I" is the monster; his consciousness, his struggle to understand himself and human life, is the organizing principle. But there are other voices as well, in the form of letters, that staple of 19th century novels. Mary Shelley's narrative is crucial, but only appears late in the book. It is through her step-sister Claire Clairmont that we first see her.

Characters drawn from Mary Shelley's complicated family history include her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, the 18th century feminist writer, who died after giving birth to her; her father William Godwin, the philosopher, whose step-daughter from a previous marriage was Claire Clairmont; and Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft's daughter from a previous relationship of her own. Not to mention poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who eventually married Mary, after eloping with her -- and Claire.

Conspicuously absent from the cast of characters is Frankenstein himself, the monster's creator. Although the monster addresses him in his thoughts and, poignantly, keeps his lab notes, it's as though he can't bear to think about him too deeply. Victor Frankenstein created life to see if he could, without thinking about the consequences. When he finally succeeded, he was appalled by what he had done and abandoned his creation, like a profoundly rejecting parent. In this book, he is never given a chance to speak for himself.

Mary Wollstonecraft, the parent who, by her death, unintentionally abandoned Mary Shelley, does speak and speaks eloquently. "I never wanted gorgeous words. Wanted language stripped. Plain as undraped windows." In letters imagined as she lies dying, she relives her life and wonders about her newborn daughter. This is only one of the deaths in the book, where absence and loss are themes. Naming and the power of words are others.

Fiction writers often say that characters come to them, suddenly appearing in their minds, or take a story they're writing in unexpected directions. Here a character is presented as having an independent physical existence and writing a book of his own, which is partly about the author who wrote about him.

Who and what, exactly, is he? The monster's nature remains elusive. He is able to observe people in a way that transcends geography and time. "Time meant nothing to me," he says near the end. "Past, present, future, all wrapped up as one." Yet he is material. Mary Shelley finally admits to Claire that she saw him as a child, heard his "gravelly" voice, interacted with him repeatedly. Some two hundred years later, he walks around unremarked in New York, and his manuscript and computer are found in an abandoned building there in 2007, when the book begins.

Beyond the complex relationship of character to author, the book explores the nature of human identity. In her preface, Laurie Sheck puts it beautifully: "So much of a life is invisible, inscrutable: layers of thoughts, feelings, outward events entwined with secrecies, ambiguities, ambivalences, obscurities, darknesses strongly present even to the one who's lived it -- maybe especially to the one who's lived it."

For all its own obscurities, A Monster's Notes is both imaginative and intriguing. In an age of robotics and cloning, exploring the psyche of an artificially created being has special resonance.

ZVI SESLING: POET, PUBLISHER AND MENSCH

ZVI SESLING: POET, PUBLISHER AND MENSCH




I once described Zvi Sesling as an avuncular presence. And he is, as he has patiently mentored many students in a long teaching career. He wears his years of experience comfortably on his open face. Sesling has been an alderman, a founder of a much touted PR firm, as well as being trained as a lawyer.

Sesling is also a Brookline, Mass. poet who has published in over 100 magazines, including: HazMat Review, The Chaffin Journal, Ship of Fools, Ibbetson Street and many others. He is the founder of the Muddy River Poetry Review, and the winner of the Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition and a finalist in the 2009 Cervena Barva Press Chapbook Contest. I talked with Sesling on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer”

Doug Holder: Zvi, years ago you started the Muddy River Review, and now revived it online. Which do you prefer: Print or Web? What do you look for in the poetry that is submitted to you?

Zvi Sesling: My choice is really quite eclectic. I like things that are accessible. When I read it, it should grab me. Years ago when I did the print journal my choices were very different. I was looking for much more simplier things. But print is much more expensive than online, so this time I went with online.

Basically, for the online journal I don’t want long, long poems. They can be humorous. The first edition is online, and the second edition is coming out this summer. But basically if something grabs me I take it.


Doug Holder: I interviewed the poet David Slavitt some years ago. He is a poet, and he decided to run for State Rep. against Timothy Toomey. He lost by a landslide. He thought a poet would make a good politician because as he put it: “ He or she has a built in shit detector.”

Your take?

Zvi Sesling: Actually I don’t feel a poet would be a good fit.. I think the only thing the poet brings to politics is the power of observation, and the ability to listen better, and to take mental notes about what’s going around him. If you want to be a politician you have to be tough. You have to yell, you have to swear. I tend to view poets as a little more gentle, and calm about how they do things.

Doug Holder: I like how you focus on ordinary objects, a fish, a piece of licorice, and make it a starting point for much larger themes.

Zvi Sesling: I try to take something I observe and connect it to something else. I did it with wine glasses, and a pomegranate. I think everything in the world is connected in one-way or the other. So you can connect a very small issue or item and make it into a much bigger thing—then come back to the original.

Doug Holder: You made a switch in your writing from hardboiled mysteries to poetry. Why?

Zvi Sesling: I found that poetry was much more satisfying to me. It appealed to my new direction when I was getting out of the political scene. I found poetry much more calming and easy to deal with. I was writing much more succinctly. It is something I truly enjoy.


Doug Holder: Are you a fan of the hardboiled genre of writers like Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett?

Zvi Sesling: Yes. These are two of my favorites. They were more than just hardboiled writers. If you read them enough you could see there were social issues involved.

Doug Holder: Did you like Nero Wolfe, the obese, gourmet detective?

Zvi Sesling: Yeah. Wolfe was overweight and he gets his food involved with everything. The food was connected with life in general. It was a lot of fun.

Doug Holder: How much does your Jewish background come into play in your work?

Zvi Sesling: In some of it, it is very strong. I have been to Israel 24 or 25 times. I lived there for a year after high school. My father was born in Russia, went to Israel and then the states. My mother was from Germany. She escaped the Holocaust, and went to Israel. So a lot of that stuff has an impact on me. Also things like Hebrew School, or my Bar Mitzvah, sometimes fits into my poems, sometimes very subtly.

Doug Holder: Are you a religious man?

Zvi Sesling: No not at all. I am what they call a “Three Day Jew.” I go for the high holidays, and that’s it.

In My Bustan by Michael Mahgerefteh

In My Bustan ($13.00) (Poetica Publishing Company, P.O. Box 11014, Norfolk, VA 23517), published 2009. www.poeticamagazine.com
By Michal Mahgerefteh

Review by Pam Rosenblatt


It’s a fact. Every living person has an identity. There are four main parts to a person’s identity, at least to me: personal, religious, cultural, and sexual orientation. Whether his identity plays a part in his life depends upon the person. Some people readily accept their identity, while many people deny it. And some people never know their true identity. When a person realizes the importance of his identity in his life, it is the mark of self-realization.


In 2009, Poetica Publishing Company published poet Michal Mahgerefteh’s In My Bustan, a seventy-seven page book about a Jewish woman and her personal, religious, and cultural experiences. Mahgerefteh uses her Jewish background as a vehicle to understanding herself, her religion and her God.


It is a pleasure to read a poetry book that has a clear and distinctive voice. And In My Bustan has that voice, a voice that belongs to a speaker who knows she is Jewish and appreciates her ancestry and cultural background. This book isn’t all fun and games, though. Mahgerefteh deals with issues like birth, life, and death and all the conflicts that a person experiences underneath, on top, and in between.


Mahgerefteh has lived in the United States since 1986 when she moved from Israel. Poetica Magazine, Reflections of Jewish Thought, a magazine that she founded, publishes, and edits, consists of poetry, prose, fiction, and essays all dealing with the Jewish experience. She belongs to the The Poetry Society of Virginia. Many of her poems have been published in established literary magazines and anthologies.


Mahgerefteh is also an artist who creates painting with acrylics and paper collages. Her award-winnings works have been displayed in venues in Virginia, New Orleans, and New York and published in Golda Magazine, Being Jewish Magazine, ken* again Literary Magazine, The William and Mary Review, among others.

In My Bustan is comprised of four chapters about life and living it to the “fullness of every moment”, as Mahgerefteh quotes herself in the book’s beginning pages. In fact, the word “bustan” found in the title actually means the word “life” in Hebrew. [It also means “garden” in Farsi and “orchard” in Arabic, as Mahgerefteh defines in the back of the book. (p. 75)]


Throughout the book, Mahgerefteh uses the personal voice “I”. The speaker always knows who she is, where she came from, and what she is doing, through good times, bad times, solemn times, angry times, and enlightening times.
Her personal, religious, and cultural orientations are identified in her poem, “Peaceful Thoughts to my Sleep” (pp. 4-5):

Tell me Mami, still washing clothes
outdoors in the leaking rusted faucet?
I suppose you are attached to this tradition,

something from the old days you do not
want to forget, like cooking on Thursday
night, sitting on a wooden stool in the yard

chanting while peeling and cutting. I pass
these mizrachi tunes from my lips to my
children’s as a token of your memory.

I want to walk in your bustan to the scent
of sweet-lemon tree. Harvest this rare
fruit, prepare marmalade for me. Take me

back to the old days….

Here the speaker reminisces about her younger days when her mother “wash(ed) clothes/outdoors in the leaking rusted faucet” and “cook(ed) on Thursday/night” in preparation for the Sabbath, a weekly holiday celebrating the Jewish day of rest. The speaker seems to be hinting something is going on with her to make her yearn for the past so, to request “Take me//back to the old days….”
Life seems to treating the speaker well, at least as seen in “Friday before Shabbat” (pp. 6-7) when the speaker remembers her childhood memory when

…(she) giggled as (her aunt)
pinned her colorful head cover firmly

with greasy hands. Together we prepared
the table with the white lace cloth, gold-
trimmed china and a silver kiddush cup

on the eighteen-place dinner table near
the veranda. Father kissed my forehead
before he left with my brothers and uncles

for minchah, and I with my mother,
grandmother, sister, aunts and cousins,
recited the blessing over the Shabbat
Lights, wished each other Shabbat Shalom,
eager to start Seudat Shabbat filled with
thanksgiving, song, laughter and spice.

“Friday before Shabbat” reveals the traditional, Jewish side of the speaker’s identity. She is family-oriented, observes the holidays and its customs with close family and relatives. The speaker is recalling her youth and how much fun it was.
But then the tone of the poems change, as reflected in the fall of the Garden of Eden in Mahgerefteh’s “Lilith and Chava” (p. 9) This coming of age poem further solidifies the speaker’s identity.

Lilith, swayed by the serpent’s
hiss, No man is my master as I am
as strong as he, no man will tie my
lips as I have tasted sun and fruit,

echoed above the Trees ‘til God
shackled her tongue, binding her
name to the shores of the Red Sea.
But when Chava bit into the Bitter

Fruit, Lilith rushed to assist: sitting
within a circle of stones on a mat
of reeds, she cleaned Chava’s gypsy
curls with oily wool, perfumed tawny

skin with orchid petals, and fed her
on goat milk, pomegranates and roots.
As the Garden awaited, Lilith gracefully
wrapped her Skin around Chava’s,

Implanting the Infinite Life into the
unborn child. The First Cry rushed
out of her womb and with a stream
of blood became the House Israel.

The speaker’s world changes with the fall of the Garden of Eden as such things as sex, birth, and Judaism have been created. Here she becomes aware of the importance of her sexual identity and of Judaism in her life. But there has been a fall from innocence in “Lilith and Chava”. The poems that proceed have a more mature, somewhat disillusioned tone.
Mahgerefteh begins to deal with hardcore subjects like the death of an infant son in “The Isolated Room” (p. 16), the impending and eventual death of her mother in “Descending” (p. 17), “For Twenty-Three Years”, and “Upon Her Death” (p. 19), and the discovery of “‘pre-cancer cells” in “And I Thought I was Good” (p. 24). All these poems challenge the speaker. She wonders why these things had to happen, as can be read in
“Kaddish” (p. 21) when Mahgerefteh writes:

All colors gone from the world,
life is redone in black as his coffin
lowers into the thawing ground,
and I frail lips and imploring arms,
scour the distance for my Maker.

Through the use of vivid, articulate word choice, Mahgerefteh asks God why death has to occur. The speaker is lost without this man, who is probably her father but could be her husband. She finds solace in her religion as understood when she writes “of the unsayable words of the kaddish, life has meaning, plan and purpose ‘til death overtakes.”
By the end of “Kaddish”, the speaker is rejuvenated and finds life again:

The sun startles into motion. I bind
my left arm in leather straps, warm
under a prayer shawl, and dance on
spines of books like gravestones;
within each scripture words fortify
touch feel hear breathe

Above the waters on many voices,
prayers, passing intensities, refresh
with language and sound, and as
Shabbat starts to depart sweetly,
circles of meaning slowly brush
shoulders with every chorus.

At this point in In My Bustan, the speaker gets angry, but she still remains true to herself, especially to her religious identity. After finding out in “And I thought I was Good” (p. 24), she has “‘pre-cancer cells’”, the speaker wonders ambiguously to God and/or to her lover, “…I can’t do it without You and I thought I was good, wasn’t I good? Don’t be silent, tell me I was good am I still so good, so good?” (p. 24).


The question often arises is why are certain things happening to her. The answer for her is usually because of or for “Elohai”, or “my God” (p. 66). The speaker understands she is Jewish, accepts Judaism in various forms throughout her life’s experiences, and never questions the existence of God – but it is usually on her terms.
Mahgerefteh goes through three stages of Jewish experience in In My Bustan: 1) acceptance of traditional Jewish religious customs and cultural 2)challenging/questioning of traditional Jewish religious customs and cultural 3) returning of acceptance of Jewish religious customs and culture.
To backtrack to “poetry” (p. 3), the beginning poem, Mahgerefteh writes:

As the pen’s
intuitiveness
leaves a print
I gladly yield
to its intrusion.

In My Bustan takes you on a personal journey. The speaker implies she puts pen to paper to lead to self-realization, or self-identity. This path may be frightening to some readers; but most people will appreciate this memoir’s truthfulness, sincerity, and brilliance and “gladly yield/to its intrusion.”

James Has Diabetes Mariah Daily

James Has Diabetes
Mariah Daly
www.mariah-daly.com
Authorhouse
www.authorhouse.com
$14.70

As a parent it is difficult to comprehend and deal with the diagnosis of disease in one of our children. Yet, as difficult as it is for an adult, the confusion for the child is greater. Lifestyle changes are difficult and when those changes involve the need to remove items we love to eat from our diet, when those changes involve dealing with needles on a daily basis, when those changes involve the possibility of ridicule or shunning by other children, a child can feel fearful and alone.

Mariah Daly is a licensed, practicing nurse with a Master’s in Education. She has taught children in after school programs in both Boston and Cambridge and her love for children, her dedication to helping the child understand their illness shines through in Mariah’s first book, “James Has Diabetes.”

The journey for young James, an active elementary school student with a penchant for baseball begins with his feeling tired during activities. James lives with his mother, his father, and a sister named Julia. Julia is frustrated that James is sleeping all the time and James, himself, becomes concerned when running the bases causes him fatigue and sweatiness. James parents also notice a difference in James’ energy and eating habits and make an appointment to take James to the doctor where he is diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. Mariah’s background in nursing allows her to share the medical information clearly while she writes with empathy about the changes James and his family will encounter. From his hospital stay and the interaction between the parents and children in an educational in-patient program, to the way in which James’ teacher handles introducing his classmates to his disease, Mariah leaves no base uncovered. Even the child who fears the loss of dessert will find that there are delicious alternatives. Even the local baker is a diabetic who helps James understand the options available for his new dietary choices.

Reading to the younger child in two or three shorter sessions will make the length of the book and the depth of information easier handle. Older children will enjoy the book in its entirety and may even enjoy taking turns reading with you!

You can find “James Has Diabetes” in some branches of the Boston Public Library, it can be purchased at Porter Square Book Store; MIT Co-op; Curious George, Harvard Square; Brookline Booksmith; Brookline Children’s Bookstore in Brookline Village; or can be purchased on the author’s website: www.mariah-daly.com. The price is $14.70.


*Rene Schwiesow co-owns an online poetry forum (www.poemtrain.com) and is a co-host for The Art of Words: Mike Amado Memorial Poetry Series in Plymouth, MA. She is the author of Beginnings Beget Beginnings and A Year in the Quilt. Rene can be reached at duetsdove@yahoo.com.

Review of LOST HORSES, Poems by Lyn Lifshin

Review of LOST HORSES, Poems by Lyn Lifshin, 2009, Presa Press, PO Box 792, Rockford, MI 49341, 36 pages, $6.

By Barbara Bialick

For Lyn Lifshin’s ever-growing fan base, the chapbook LOST HORSES can be a challenge to understanding her inner creative process as seen through 20 dreams that evolved into poems. I’m not a dream interpreter, so I’d have to check out some dream and nightmare archetypes to do full justice to this curious collection, but I’m not motivated to do so.
Still, as poems in their own right, the book is written by an experienced hand at it, forming long columns that trail down the length of the pages, often in iambic pentameter or quadrameter. She has recurring imagery of sexual fantasy, worry about losing her cat, her poetry career, and most poignantly, feelings of sadness about her late mother.
One example is BAD DREAM # 2791: “The old Vt house,/it’s enormous from the first frame on/…on the top/floor my mother is dead. It can’t be her/my heart is insisting.”
Or, DREAM OF MY MOTHER PICKING UP MY UNCLE AND BUKOWSKI”
“I haven’t slept well but if/Bukowski is coming, I want to/put my Outsider issues on him/out…What clothes/would Buk want to see/a woman in?/…I am certain I/better clean up the house though they/all, my mother, my uncle and/Buk, are still dead.”
One nightmare image that is particularly awful is the DREAM RUINED BY A DOG-SIZED CENTIPEDE”!
The last and title poem is haunting—IN HER DREAM OF THE LOST HORSES is intriguingly obscure: “they gather by the hill,/once elegant limbs/shattered, made/whole again/…in shadows where she/imagines the lost horses,/she fingers the pebbles/of their names.”
For only $6, this Lifshin book is certainly worth buying if you want to get introduced to or learn more about the author and her writing skill. Perhaps then you’ll want to move on to her more than 125 books and four anthologies of women writers. Or, as her bio continues, “Her poems have appeared in most of the litmags in the USA”!

The author’s Guide to Publishing and Marketing by Tim Ward and John Hunt

The author’s Guide to Publishing
and Marketing $19.95
Tim Ward & John Hunt
2009 ISBN 9781846941665

“This book is written jointly by a publisher and an author, putting their ideas together on the challenges and opportunities for today’s writers.”

There are four parts to this informative book about getting your book of poems or a novel, put out there, into the ’big, bad,‘ publishing world. The reader will get the truth about all the aspects of getting published, marketing your book, using the internet and working with the media.

Without a doubt, if the reader assumes the positions necessary to getting published, this book suggests, you will be a star, not really, but you may at least have a fighting chance. Just as the authors pitch, publishing, they are also selling. So using their own criteria, “The best strategy is to selectively target the groups of people who make up the most likely readers for you book.”

I recommend it to all the writers and publishers of small presses. This will help guide your journey through the market place and we all know we initially need a guide to help us understand the goals, the reality of trying to become famous, make some money, or just get a cherished book published and what market is appropriate to attain that result.

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor
Ibbetson Street Press

Paul DeFazio: Corrections Officer, Drug Dealers, Prostitutes collide in his new novel: “Pros and Cons”

Paul DeFazio: Corrections Officer, Drug Dealers, Prostitutes collide in his new novel: “Pros and Cons”


Paul and Michael DeFazio were both born in Dorchester, Mass, and raised in Quincy. Their collective background consists of 9 years of Air Force and Army military experience, 28 years in correction and law enforcement, nine years of living abroad in six different countries, and extensive business experience. They are authors of the searing new crime novel “Pros and Cons.” It is a novel set in Boston, Mass., that portrays two cousins, both in law enforcement, and the tangled web of drug dealers, prison inmates, and sexual tourism that is their unsavory milieu. Gerald Horgan, a noted correction official in Massachusetts, writes of this work:

“Pros and Cons” is an awesome, realistic look into challenges faced by those who work and live in prisons. A fast paced thriller that reminded me of John Grisham’s ‘The Firm’.” I talked with DeFazio on my Somerville Community Access TV Show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer”

Doug Holder: I interviewed Hallie Ephron and Donald Davidoff who co-write a forensic psychologist detective series. Ephron does the writing and Davidoff provides the psych. background material. Why did you guys decide to collaborate?

Paul DeFazio: The first thing I would say was the connection between my brother and me. He’s lived abroad, we’ve been thousands of miles apart for decades, and this was a way to do something together. It was a challenge for us. We needed each other. To put the story together, with all the different aspects, the international aspects, the different views of cultural prostitution, drug trafficking, human trafficking, the laws and how they pertain to our prison system in America…well, both of us had to contribute. But not one of us were a total expert in the area, and we had to bring our knowledge together to write the book. More often than not we did it over the phone and over the computer. But sometimes we sat in the same room. But we are like all brothers. You better not be in the same room because a fistfight could break out. We feed off each other’s energy and we kept each other honest with the story line. The story stayed real and moving.

Doug Holder: What does your brother do?

Paul DeFazio: He runs a plastics business, internationally. He is around-the-world all of the time. My brother is a terrific idea guy and he is very organized. It was a very nice compliment to the storyline. We are able to make our characters multi-dimensional.

Doug Holder: The novelist George Higgins had a great ear for dialogue. He was a Boston lawyer, and talked the talk and walked the walk. Have you had positive feedback that the dialogue in the book is authentic?

Paul De Fazio: Absolutely. Whether it is Boston police officers, or corrections officers. I am very familiar with people in corrections—throughout the state. The dialogue is fresh and crisp. It is something that I have been hearing for some twenty odd years. It only made sense to stay true to what some sound like or talk like. The talk is sometimes very gritty. After all, we deal with people in prison; we deal with people in very stressful situations. The language can be powerful.

Doug Holder: The character Frank Milano was a sexual tourist. He went to the Dominican Republic and got involved in some rough trade. You go into a great deal of detail about this underworld. How much research did you do?

Paul DeFazio: Well truth be told that is a great question. People ask, “ Well Paul you are the law enforcement guy, does that make your brother the sex guy? The answer is no. Michael, my brother was in the Air Force, and he did a stint in Europe. I was in the Army and was sent to Honduras. We both saw cultural prostitution through very different lenses. Michael saw prostitution in a free, liberalized sense—people were doing it for financial reasons. In Honduras it was survival. Women had to do it to support not only themselves but also families. So we brought this in to make the book more than a murder-who-done-it.

Doug Holder: There is very much a cinematic quality to this book. It is action driven, in your face, and fast paced.

Paul DeFazio: Absolutely. My brother and I are working on a screenplay as well. This was the way we like the story to read. I think everyone can learn from this book because it is realistic, and realism makes good films. We wanted to tell an entertaining story that could come off as a movie.


Doug Holder: Do you admire other mystery writes like Dennis Lehane, or Robert Parker?

Paul DeFazio: I like Lehane. He spoke at my graduation at Emmanuel College in Boston. He keeps it real; he entertains you, and makes you think about something that you wouldn’t normally think of. I admire anyone who has the strength and ability to stay with writing. I think writing well is a gift.

Doug Holder: The market is flooded with books similar to yours. How hard is it to sell people on your book?

Paul DeFazio: It is very, very difficult. Especially when you come from a small press. It’s a grind and you have to have confidence. You use the computer and every possible avenue. I’m just starting to learn about Facebook.

Review of WHEELING MOTEL, poems by Franz Wright

Review of WHEELING MOTEL, poems by Franz Wright, Alfred A. Knopf, Publisher, New York 2009, 112 pages, price $26.95

By Barbara Bialick

(Reviewer’s note: The text quoted comes from an uncorrected publisher’s proof copy and may not necessarily match the final version of the book.)

The title poem of WHEELING MOTEL by Franz Wright of Waltham, Massachusetts, seems to represent a stopover on the road from intriguing poet dealing with mental illness, to a place where he almost reluctantly realizes his “remarkably convincing impression of one of the normal.” (“December: Revisiting My Old Isolation Room”)

The Pulitzer Prize winner for his 2003 book, WALKING TO MARTHA’S VINEYARD, does labor over the dark imagery that surrounds his experience of the death of his father, James Wright, a groundbreaking poet and fellow winner of the Pulitzer Prize, who died in 1980. But the symbol of the father is also spiritually connected to the holy father: “God’s words translated into human words/are spoken and shine/on a few upturned faces./There is nothing else like this…” (“After Absence”)

He gets to experience a “fatherly” moment of his own when he meets a child: “time blows through your hair,/the river of the dead/whose name’s forgiveness, very/small, a blue vein/in your temple. And the words/for these things are so terribly small;/and the world of those words/only slightly less mortal/than this instant of taking your hand,/of taking care…not to squeeze too hard…” (“With a Child”)

While his images often speak to death or death wish, there are also sheer poetic moments to savor such as in the poem “Will”: “And this is my alone/song. It isn’t /long…I’m going to the mansion long prepared for me:/the eye socket of a shot crow,/the sapphire/wind on water,/halls of hawk-visited shadows/pines like Chinese characters/in an ancient poem/not yet written/and of childhood/the snows.”
It’s difficult to pluck out a short quote, for his words tumble and flow like fish in a waterfall.

But in “Baudelaire”, he writes, “Evil is hated and feared at least/It is possessed, unlike mere misery of a dark glamour nobody pities.” He doesn’t want to forget his tortured soul as in “December: Revisiting My Old Isolation Room”: “I freely stand here/watching/while you burn/unheard/among the screaming, the/zombies, the pacers, the shit-fingerpainters and furious nocturnal soloquists…”

Wright concludes the collection with “Music Heard in Illness”: “Call no man happy until he has passed,/beyond/the boundary of this life…” But his fellow poets and readers should continue to keep an eye out for the work of Franz Wright. He’s definitely a voice worth considering as he carries on the journey out of horror and pain. Or, as he puts it, “What do we know but this world/…And although I could not speak, I answered.”


Barbara Bialick is the author of Time Leaves ( Ibbetson Street Press)

THE FUTURE THAT BROUGHT HER HERE:A MEMOIR OF A CALL TO AWAKEN. By Deborah DeNicola

THE FUTURE THAT BROUGHT HER HERE:A MEMOIR OF A CALL TO AWAKEN.By Deborah DeNicola.2009; 360 pp; Ibis Press, Nicolas-Hays, Inc.,POB 540206, Lake Worth, Florida 33454-0206,$16.95.

OK, so the core of the book is a call for women to feminize themselves by going back to the theology of the Magna Mater/Great Mother, before God was macho-ized, and learn how to face the world using their dreams, intuitions, their whole inner mental-spiritual powers. Which is a stirring and masterful thesis....but the real fun in the book is when DeNicola goes back to the places where the churches devoted to this feminism still exists, and doesn’t just theorize about traditional Catholicism versus the Cathars and Albigensians, heretics versus orthodoxy, or even goes back to the ancient pre-Christian, pre-Judaic times when the center of theology wasn’t God the Father but God the Mother, and actually goes into the places where the images of the ancient woman-centered theology still exist.

In Marseille, for example, she first goes to see the giant golden Madonna that stands over the city over Notre Dame de la Garde, and then she and her friend, Deborah Rose go to the shrine that tells the real, ancient, authentic story about what the Madonna is all about: "We had come to see the old city and to visit the Abbey Saint Victor to commune with an important Black Madonna known as Notre Dame de la Confession...." This Madonna does not resemble the one that presides over the city from the hilltop at all. Far from glamorous or soft, she is plain and authoratative. Deborah told us that, in earlier times, a Demeter/Persephone ritual took place on this spot. Begg tells of the Candlemas procession that has replaced the Demeter/Persephone ritual in Marsaille since the year 600 A.D. On February 2nd...the point between the winter solstice and spring equinox....this Black Madonna, Notre Dame de Confession, is dressed in a greencape and lifted from her crypt to parade throughtown followed by a crowd carrying green candles. The celebration is one of cyclic renewal. The color green, also the color sacred to the Egyptian goddess Isis, is a representation of the coming spring.....I was overwhelmed by Deborah’s statement that the Anatolian Mother Goddess lineage was probablythe oldest known -- reaching back to 6800 B.C.E....In Deborah’s words, "Mary is the most recent in thelong succession of mother goddesses from Anatolia." There is a connection between Ephesus and Marseille,since Marseille was discovered by Greeks who held the Anatolian Artemis sacred... (pp.=20274-275)

You don’t want to stop reading, do you? And that’s the way the whole book is, an inspired examination into the ancient female-goddess centered world that highly influenced early Christianity but eventually was censored out of existence, putting both Mary Magdalen and the Virgin Mary in minor roles overshadowed by God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But the pre-Christian goddess-centrism is still amazingly visible in the ancient churches of France. Like in Arles in the Eglise Saint Trophime where the doorway is in the shape of a mandorla, an ancient symbol of 3the vulva, where Christ seated right in the middle, symbolizing his subordination to female power: as we enter the church, we enter the body of the sacred. The Black Madonnas, whose postures are straight and empowered, hold the child Jesus on their laps with a strong and stiff authority, like that of Isis’ throne holding Pharaoh. Compared to the late medieval and Renaissance Marys, whose bodies curve, whose skin is lightened, and whose figures show soft vulnerability, the Black Mdonnas are formidable in their appearance of strength...The early Christians took these older goddess forms and images of Isis and Horus and their pagan past to keep the fertility of Christ and the Magdalen’s marriage alive,despite its having been erased by the Patriarchs. (p.262)





And what really saves the authenticity of DeNicola’s contentions, is the total depth of her research. There’s a staggering bibliography at the end.At the same time, though, the book is filled with Denicola’s magnifique poetry, her dreams, her intuitions, her own personal life, her distrust of men, so that what you have here is a profound theological study of the influence of the Power Goddess in the ancient and beginning-Christian world plus a personal confessional account that turns it all into something able to be related to.One of the few-few books I’ve seen in the last twenty years that I couldn’t, couldn’t put down.


---Hugh Fox/Ibbetson Press

The Buffalo Expatriates Poetry Tour Kickoff: Elizabeth Swados - Bert Stern - Mark Pawlak

****I will be interviewing Tony-nominated playwright Elizabeth Swados, and Hanging Loose Publisher Mark Pawlak on Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer http://poettopoetwritertowriter.blogspot.com July 21 5PM




The Buffalo Expatriates Poetry Tour kickoff
Elizabeth Swados - Bert Stern - Mark Pawlak

Tuesday, July 21st
7:00 PM
Pierre Menard Gallery
10 Arrow Street, Harvard Square

These three distinguished poets were born and grew up in or near Buffalo, New York, but have pursued lives and careers elsewhere for many decades. Now they have teamed up for the Buffalo Expatriates Poetry Tour. Pierre Menard Gallery will host their kickoff for the reading tour that will culminate in Buffalo later this year.

Elizabeth Swados has just published her first poetry book, The One and Only Human Galaxy, a collection of poems about the life of Harry Houdini, with Hanging Loose Press. Perhaps best known for her Broadway and international smash hit Runaways, she has composed, written, and directed theater, music, and dance for over 30 years. Some of her works include the Obie Award-winning Trilogy at La Mama; Alice at the Palace, with Meryl Streep, at the New York Shakespeare Theater Festival; and Groundhog, which was optioned for a film by Milos Forman. Her work has been performed on Broadway, off Broadway, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Carnegie Hall, and venues all over the world. She has also composed highly acclaimed dance scores for well-known choreographers in the U.S., Europe and South America. Ms. Swados has published novels, non-fiction books, and children’s books to great acclaim, and has received the Ken Award as well as a New York Public Library Award for her book My Depression. Other distinctions include five Tony nominations, three Obie Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Ford Grant, the Helen Hayes Award, the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Foundation Writer’s Award, a PEN Citation and others. She lives in Manhattan.

Bert Stern’s chapbook, Silk/The Ragpicker’s Grandson, was published by Red Dust, and his new, full-length collection, Steerage, has just been published by the Ibbetson Press. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including New Letters, Beloit Poetry Review, Hungry Mind, Poetry, and the American Poetry Review, and also in half a dozen anthologies. Presently, he teaches men on probation in a national program called Changing Lives Through Literature, and he and his wife co-edit a small press dedicated to the work of poets over 60. He lives in Somerville.

Mark Pawlak is the author of five poetry collections, of which Official Versions is his most recent. Another collection, Jefferson’s New Age Salon, will be published in fall 2009 by Cervena Barva Press. His poetry and prose have appeared in The Best American Poetry, New American Writing, Mother Jones, Pemmican, and The Saint Ann’s Review, among other places. Pawlak supports his poetry habit by teaching mathematics at UMass Boston. He is coeditor/publisher of the Brooklyn-based literary press and magazine Hanging Loose. He lives in Cambridge.

http://pierremenardgallery.com/contact.html

Review of Coping With Madness by Philip Fletcher

review, Review of Coping With Madness (self published, 2009, www.lulu.com, single-spaced, 84 pages) by Philip Fletcher of unknown location

by Barbara Bialick

Coping With Madness is a blog-like set of streams of consciousness from the 1990s when the author was lonely and sex-starved and in his 50s. I think there’s lots of people who could relate to that, but don’t look for high art or poetry. Even saying that, I’ll throw in some quotes that have an interesting twang such as: (from Seemingly Nothing, Bloke on the Dole aged 48)—“Another night’s soulless sleep and one more barren day to come. I live in a social vacuum…I sit on my favourite park bench in the early morning light, watching my dog relieve himself…an overweight middle-aged woman comes shuffling towards me, led by a squat Scottie dog…the hopeless case stares straight ahead, telling someone off who only she can see. Even the birds are in a bad mood, scrapping in the trees…I might as well go home and back to bed for a few hours.” There are many other lonely, moody, sardonic entries but they are often too obscene to recount here…

Many of his fellow writers could, however, relate to “Dear BLOODAXE BOOKS”:
“I’m nearly 51 years old, I’ve been visually handicapped all my life and now I have Arthritis…I don’t know what I’ll do if you turn me down, I’ve set my heart on being published by you, I like your name and you’re not as far away as London…I’ll probably get clinically depressed again. Yours, etc. (How could they have refused me after a letter like that? I ask you?)”

An enty at the end from 2007, sums up his book, “Aged 60, I’m now concentrating on my personal paradise. My version of the afterlife might differ greatly from yours. It’ll be me, aged 23, and a whole harem of beautiful women Living miles apart in an idyllic green and lush setting, letting me Play Lord and Master whenever I deigned to pay them a visit…And that’s it, please let that be it; if I ever get the urge to write again you can shoot me and speed me on my way to my happy ever after, where the sounds of sex and laughter are all I’ll hear.”

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