Camelot Kid's Triggertopia by David S. Pointer

Camelot Kid's Triggertopia
By David S. Pointer
Propaganda Press
alt-current.com
alt.current@gmail.com
Price: $5


A review by Mignon Ariel King

The cover sketch of the collection announces that this is not pretty poetry: an automatic rifle and guitar hybrid. Inside is rough, political work with titles such as "A Slice of the Modern Sex Trade" accompanied by disturbing sepia-toned sketches. Sharp humor appears, as in the "Major CEO: Basic Job Description":

must be expert
at creating the image of
false job creation while
using the money to move
overseas...(Lines 17-21).

No institution or organization goes untouched by Pointer's pen. The poet links the all-too-excruciatingly-obvious link between modern medicine and money. What distinguishes this political writing from much of the "rant" work being done lately, however, is its knowledge of the past that is sentimental without being sappy in its nostalgia. The tone is: Remember the good ol' days? --not that they were perfect, just better than the polar opposite we're stuck with today, including an over-medicated society. Really, is the "time-sturdy statement" (L3) of "The Patient First" too idealistic a goal for modern medical professionals?

Sprinkled throughout the collection of full-length poems are haiku, again, more entertaining than most I've seen in recent years. Here's one that amuses and produces a "Yikes!" from the reader at once: "casino daycare/plastic coins/for the kids." Halfway through the collection the reader discovers (via a spoken-word-worthy prose poem) that "Camelot Kid" grew up in a federal housing project named "Camelot". There, "where there were no/round tables, or lingering middle class/fables..." (L13-15).

In another class statement, the narrator's advice for "Removing Rot in Excessive Riches" is for the rich who are "laughing on their caribou calfskin couches" (L3) to "make wage suppression go down/smooth as white chocolate cheesecake" (L4-5). More anti-economic inequity lines offer this brilliant metaphor:

and nobody clears
poverty's airway
just the pockets
of the global poor (L9-12, "Wall Street Washington")

The poet's criticism of institutionalized social injustice and corruption is not softened, rather humanized, by autobiographical family-oriented words and old photographs. The reader is drawn in as opposed to feeling yelled at. Pointer's indignation feels righteous.



Mignon Ariel King is a former English instructor, a voracious reader and writer of poetry, and an online journal editor.

The Loulaki Bar and other poems from Hydra Henry Denander

The Loulaki Bar
and other poems from Hydra
Henry Denander
Miskwabik Press
Calumet Michigan USA
2009

The poems in this illustrated book of poems are an intimate
look at intimate ways people live within a small community
and each poem becomes part of the whole story.

“The water was leaking in the kitchen and
I’d called the plumber. He was out fishing
but his son would come by and help me.

A young guy turned up, only 15 but already
taller than his father. Dressed as a real plumber
with all the necessary tools, he fixed the problem.

When I asked about the bill he said I could pay
whatever I wanted - which of course is tricky.
He should be paid handsomely for taking an hour
to come to me this Sunday afternoon….”

Henry Denander and his family bought a home on the island
of Hydra in Greece, “a peaceful little island. Nothing much
happens. A perfect place for a summer house,” but much
does happen and Denander writes and paints some of the
happenings, some of the village life that carries us into the
poems; we float, bob with the ebbing tide along the shore
of this blue and aqua poetry.

This book is worth the read because we are all invited to swim
and to partake of the Greek life, just the way the poet has
and the poems invite us. This book will give you:

“the mandarin tree that seemed dead
suddenly has small green shoots.”

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

You Know About The Somerville News Writers Festival, Nov. 14, 2009 at 7PM. But how about the Book Fair?

You Know About The Somerville News Writers Festival, Nov. 14, 2009 at 7PM. But how about the Book Fair?

Timothy Gager, like me, realizes the need to mix art and commerce. Gager is allergic to the dust that collects on unappreciated books on shelves in many bookstores. Since he appreciates good craft and good sales he told me that he would love to have a book festival to be held before the main event on Nov. 14,: The Somerville News Writers Festival ( 7PM at the Arts Amory Center--191 Highland Ave.)

If you know Gager like I do he goes after things like a fly on… well you know what. So before the readings that takes place at 7P.M. we will have a book festival at the Armory Arts Center as well. The Fair will feature both publisher and author tables. There also will be author readings by folks like Margot Livesey, Brian McQuarrie, Lise Haines and others.

We are going to have a number of fine presses as well. Gloria Mindock’s much touted Somerville-based Cervena Barva Press, as well as Gary Metras’ Adastra Press, which is known world-wide for their fine-crafted books of poetry will be there. The Boston Review, a well-respected literary and political review, based in Somerville, will be on hand, as well Leah Angstman’s Propaganda Press. Angstman is a young, prolific publisher of beautifully crafted mini-chapbooks of poetry. And we shan’t forget Tam Lin Neville (a featured reader) and Bert Stern’s Off the Grid Press, a Somerville-based publisher of fine poets over the age of sixty. And of course the much lauded school for writers Grub St. will be there to answer question about course offerings and events they have year round. I can’t forget my own press Somerville’s Ibbetson Street Press, and an out-of-towner the Black Lawrence Press of New York City.

At the author tables will be Paul Steven Stone, the author of “Or So It Seems,” Luke Salisbury, well-known baseball writer, novelist and author of the award-winning novel: “Hollywood and Sunset,” Boston University astronomy professor Daniel Hudon and author of “The Bluffer’s Guide to the Cosmos” as well as Paul DeFazio author of “Pros and Cons,”, and others will make the scene.

So drop by at 11AM on Nov. 14, browse, schmooze, go out to dinner, return for the readings at 7PM, make it a literary day and night!

For more info: go to http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com

For the Sake of the Light: New and Selected Poems. Tom Sexton

For the Sake of the Light: New and Selected Poems. Tom Sexton. (University of Alaska Press PO BOX 756240) $23.

I reviewed a previous collection from Tom Sexton (Clock With No Hands), a poetry collection that dealt with his childhood in Lowell, Mass. Well Sexton is not only a topnotch urban poet, but he is an accomplished nature poet as well. And if you look at a dramatic sky, and see it as only that, well fine. But Sexton is a poet who transcends, and sees in nature a portal to another world or dimension. And since many of these poems take place in the hinterlands of Maine and Alaska, how better to view the grandeur? In “That Other World” we have case in point:

Out of the heavy cloud cover, a shaft
of light falling on the only leaf
of a devil’s club plant that has turned

bright yellow a month before it should.
Could this, and not the arching sky,
be the portal to that other world,

the place where the gods, disheveled
and slightly sulfurous, enter ours
trailing bright red berries for a cape?

And in “Burial Ground” Sexton shed light on a cemetery, and its spectral denizens:

Past the man who was kind to his wife and children,
past the woman of biblical age,
past the Grand Army of the Republic markers,
past the child who knew only one winter,
past the peddler who sold needles and thread,
someone has knelt in the snow to fasten
a Christmas wreath, with a spray of holly
and a red velvet bow, to a defaced slate—
now a door for the dead to pass through
if only to see earth wearing the moon for a crown.

Sexton’s poetry will make you a much closer look at that tree, that sunset, that flick of movement in the corner of your eye, that deep orange in an autumnal leave….Highly recommended.

Two Reviews: The Inman Review/ Bankrupting Joe the Taxpayer

Review of The INMAN REVIEW, Volume 1, Fall 2009, $4, Jahn Sood and Zachary Aiden Evans, editors, Cambridge Street Press, inmanreview@gmail.com



By Barbara Bialick



A new literary magazine in the hip nation of Cambridge has risen up to serve and explain the sensibility and heart of Inman Square. Published by Cambridge Street Press, it’s dedicated to bringing us short stories, poetry, arts and culture, perspectives, drawings and photography of the diverse people of Inman Square and environs. The interesting display ads from different businesses in the neighborhood further tether the review to the spirit of its neighborhood. Indeed, editor Jahn Sood, inspired by the works of Orwell, is also a barista at the 1369 Coffee House.



The new review is even blessed by former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, who writes, “This bouncy prose and poetry, these drawings and photographics are lively and soulful enough to be worthy of the name and the neighborhood…”



One is immediately introduced to its clever artwork, with a huge red and blue drawing of a human heart, where the streets of Inman Square are identified to be in the thick of veins and arteries, as drawn by Alethea Jones.



Here are some lines by some of the writers: “The human heart is a bare room…And there is also a window…” (Poem “Hot Power” by Ezra Furman)



“Man, amazing things always happen in books…Nothing interesting ever happens to me…” He then strings up white cats to balloons which are flying high in the sky.

(Cartoon “Love From Above” by Michael Pollock)



“Lather up with Cotton Mather…” (Poem “New England is an Acknowledgement” by Michael Sean Crawford)



“Boston loves close cropped/haircuts and baseball hats/just as poetry hates it…”

(Poem “Commemorative” by Patrick Duggan)



“Cigarettes. The awning looked like a haunted house, with all the smoke trapped under it. A guy named Bruce asked me if I was in a band…’ (Fiction “Peace” by Infamy Mills)

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



Bankrupting Joe the Taxpayer by D.J. Golio (AuthorHouse)



Reviewed by Manson Solomon







What immediately springs to mind on first encountering this book is that old saw, you know, the one about never judging a book by its cover. But in this case, it is almost impossible not to. Indeed, it is clear that in this case we are actually expected to, that the cover is in fact specifically designed to hit us squarely between the eyes. The very title, Bankrupting Joe the Taxpayer, emblazoned across the top in bold red, is a call to judgment. Also on the aforementioned cover, below the title, there appear two stiffly posed cleancut college-age kids with their clean pockets turned inside out (see how empty they are) and blissfully untroubled countenances, whom we are implausibly supposed to take for embattled taxpayers.



Unfortunately, the judgment that this cover elicits is not the one the author intended. Rather than being moved to righteous indignation, we find ourselves compelled to ask instead just what is this book before us which would seek to draft off that signal halfwit responsible for such a coarsening of the 2008 campaign discourse? The plumber who wasn’t a plumber, who was in fact not even a Joe but a Samuel, and who turned out to be not an upstanding citizen but an unemployed and unemployable lumpish know-nothing tax delinquent.



The point of writing this book, the author tells us, is that “many people see an article on taxes and simply get turned off.” They want something comprehensible and engaging. You betcha! But somehow, page after page of ranting, for example, against the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax, in case you wanted to know) is not exactly a page-turner for Jack and Jill the Readers. Sad to say, the contents do in fact do justice to the cover – the interior is as disingenuous as the exterior and evokes the same reverse response.



As one shovels one’s way through these turgid pages, one cannot help speculating that perhaps the kids posing on the cover might be a couple of the author’s students. For this book turns out to be, as far as I can tell, an attempt to turn the CPA author’s lecture materials for his course on taxation into a popular cash-register impulse buy. A not unreasonable aspiration which, unfortunately, it is not easy to pull off.



The author tries hard to instill popular relevance into the material by starting his pitch with photocopies of his phone bill. Not a bad idea. Everyone gets a phone bill, right? (Except perhaps the kids on the cover, whose parents presumably pick up the tab.) And everyone feels overcharged, right? So you poor aggrieved billpayers know very well what I am talking about, right? And ditto for the other utility bills reproduced in subsequent pages. However, that we get the author’s point doesn’t necessarily make for entertaining reading. To have a hope of grabbing us, the writing itself has to be entertaining, and entertaining writing is not what CPAs are generally known for. So -- here comes another old saw -- let the cobbler stick to his last. Just as it is probably not a good idea for a poet to prepare his or her own taxes, so it is probably inadvisable for tax accountants to attempt literature unaided. Like athletes and politicians, non-writers who turn to producing books should at least have the benefit of a professional ghost writer to craft and enhance the product.



So, as you may surmise, I did not find myself being entertained as I plowed the furrows of this opus, slogging through the turgid undergrowth of blaring fonts, bolds, italics, capitals, burdensome tables, fighting off stealth attacks by phalanxes of numbers after numbers after numbers, not to mention linguistic brambles. Nor is the author’s case helped by his use of hyperbolic language, such as “The Depression and two world wars made sure that the new taxes would become a permanent burden for all legitimate United States citizens forevermore” or ”Most people in the United States are too busy fighting the economic terrorism war . . . “ No need to parse – the emotive loading is obvious.



But, having waded through it, did I emerge at least informed? Well, not really. Too many times the righteous indignation I was invited to feel simply dissipated when pressed up against the facts (much like Samuel Wurzelbacher’s expostulations.) Sure, the phone and gas companies bamboozle us with impenetrable lists of itemized costs, so as victims ourselves we can feel the author’s pain, we can empathize, but the trouble is attributing the overcharging to taxation per se rather than your customary corporate gouging is something of a stretch.



And who is this poor oppressed Joe the Taxpayer, anyway? The author defines him (in typically loaded language) as “Every U.S. taxpaying legal citizen”. He also tells us that 55% of all households earn under $50k and pay no taxes – so evidently they are not Joe the Taxpayer. Those earning from $50k - $100k are another 29% of households and pay 15% of the total taxes collected, so they are not really bearing the burden either. The top 16% of earners pay 80% of the taxes and the top 2.8% of households pay 50% of taxes. In the same indignant breath that we are told that the poor taxpayer is being robbed blind, we are also told that the top 2% of earners pay 98% of the nation’s taxes while the bottom 55% get away Scot free. Following this logic, apparently the vast bulk of the population has nothing to complain about. So who is the author pitching for, and for whom are we invited to be so righteously indignant? Could it be that Joe the Taxpayer really Joseph the Wall Street exec.? Whoever he (she?) is, it is certainly not the average Joe that the title (or the cover) would imply.



The author wants us to get indignant not only about taxes in general but about those being collected for specific purposes, e.g. to fund highway projects, to clean up leaking underground storage tanks, to compensate miners for black lung disability, to pay for the disproportionate road wear caused by heavy trucks and trailers, gas guzzler tax, etc. Would he prefer that these services be eliminated? He rails against a gasoline tax without considering how it could make alternative energy more competitive and free us from dependence on foreign oil. (See Friedman, Thomas – not Milton.) He informs us that aggrieved taxpayers are revolting, saying, for example, “In Massachusetts, there was a ballot measure in 2008 to abolish the state’s income tax. If this ballot was successful on Election Day , it could have wiped out $12 billion of revenue, which would have paralyzed the entire state, since it has a total budget of $28 billion per year.” Grammatical inelegance aside, this would have been a good thing? (And, by the way, the supposedly revolutionary electorate voted it down.)



This review is not really the place for a detailed refutation of the author’s “arguments.” Suffice it to say that they are simply too simple by half. For this author, and too many others like him, taxes bad, government bad, free market good, Q.E.D. And now that he has told us what the problem is, what is his solution? Why, just cut taxes and slash government and drill baby drill, spice with a little xenophobia, and voila, prosperity for all! Problem is, we’ve been there, done that, it’s old, it doesn’t work (ask Alan Greenspan), and it’s at best naïve and more likely plain disingenuous.



We all know what some won’t admit: without taxation there would be no roads, no police, no firefighters, no education, no safe food and drugs, no army, no safe cars, air travel, scientific research, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, public vaccination programs, NASA, rockets to the moon or Mars, social security, Medicare, Medicaid, Children’s Health Program, V.A., National Parks, FEMA, and on and on and on. The fact that there is waste and fraud in government, just as in corporations, and that we all feel overcharged makes for cheap and easy indignation without seriously addressing anything. Bottom line: what we have here is a simplistic diatribe, an indignant rant against all and any taxes as if they were the primary source of all evil, against welfare, against the “illegal immigrant invasion”, unions, food stamps, aid to schools, health care reform, the stimulus package, alternative energy, etc. etc. Essentially it is misdirected right-wing tea-bagger hysteria masquerading as analysis. Not useful. Of course we would all rather pay less for everything – not only taxes -- but not at the cost of downgraded services. To take liberties with another old epigram: half an equation is not better than none.



Thanks Joe, but no thanks.





(Full disclosure: the reviewer, before he experienced bhoddisattva and became a writer, feels justified in offering more than a literary opinion, since in unguarded moments he has been known to confess to being the bearer of an M.Sc. (Econ) from the London School of Economics.)

Poet Valerie Lawson: A New Home "Off the Coast"

Poet Valerie Lawson: A New Home "Off the Coast"

Interview by Doug Holder

Valerie Lawson, has the healthy ruddy complexion of a woman who spends a good bit of her time outdoors. This makes sense since she recently moved to the hinterlands of Maine and is editing a magazine "Off the Coast." She has been a mainstay in the Boston poetry scene for years, most notably in the poetry slam scene popularized by her partner Michael Brown. Both Lawson and Brown have taken over "Off the Coast," a well-respected New England journal from the founder, and have made their own unique imprint on it. Lawson was the slam master of the Bridgewater Poetry Slam at the Daily Grind Coffeehouse, has traveled to Europe to perform poetry and help host the Swedish Slam Nationals in 2002. Lawson was a participant in Optimal Avenues, a mixed-media cultural exchange between Massachusetts and Ireland. Her recent collection of poems is "Dog Watch," a book of poems that was released in 2007. I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV show: "Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."

Doug Holder: You and Michael Brown took over the helm of "Off the Coast" magazine in Maine. What's the back-story to this?

Valerie Lawson: Off the Coast magazine began about 15 years ago. It was an extension of the Live Poet's Society in Maine. It was originally an anthology for the society. It later became a triennial publication. The previous owner's wife got ill with cancer, so he decided to let go of the magazine to take care of her. We were happy that the magazine had a good reputation when we took it over. We had pretty good bios that indicated we could do this. So George, the owne,r handed it over to us. We inherited a list of subscribers but no money.

So far for the first two issues we carried the magazine. This year we are in production for our 4th issue. We are short a couple hundred dollars to put this out.



DH: You guys moved from Massachusetts to Maine. Was that because of the magazine?

VL: Well no. Michael was teaching at Mt. Ida College. They closed the program he ran there. It was the Communications program. So we tossed around ideas about what we wanted to do with our lives. At one point we were looking at buying a small piece of property in Maine as an investment. It was to be a place to retire. But when the closing of the program forced the issue, Maine seemed like a cheaper place to live. We started to look at property up there and off we went. It is a six-hour drive to Somerville.


DH: You were, and still are I believe involved in the SLAM poetry scene. I think you cut your teeth in the Cantab Lounge. Can you talk a bit about your involvement? What is SLAM poetry for the uninformed?

VL: It is a poetry reading that is judged Olympic style on a 1 to 10 scale. It is really fun. It is a competition. It is basically a poetry show.

I started out with the South Shore Poets that was a typical, quiet, library series. I loved poetry. I was going to the library and I liked the series. One time at the Fuller Museum in Brockton they were putting on a poetry slam. I thought: "WOW,” this just brought the level up. It was so much fun. People in the audience were engaged and excited. I said: “I want to do that." I met Michael there.

DH: You were involved were involved with the Doc. Brown Traveling Poetry Show, no?

VL: Yes. At the old Jimmy Tingle Theatre in Davis Square.

DH: Your poem "Evening" in your book "Dog Watch" is a beautifully written piece about the beach. I can only describe it as great tidal drama? Are you drawn to the sea?

VL: Oh yeah. I am a water person. I have to be near water. We can see the bay where we live. We used to live on Cape Cod in Buzzard's Bay, and across from a pond in Plymouth.

DH: Has the move to the isolation of Maine helped or hindered you?

VL: Both. It's tough to be away from the Boston poetry community. I miss the frequent conversations. But I am getting a lot of reading done. I have more time to write.

Evening

Boats tethered in their slips,
day captains maneuver trailers—
they've waited years for the chance of a mooring.
Sandpipers and plovers fuss over minnows
and sand fleas, chase receding waves,
skitter from the next wave rolling in.
Sea lavender pokes briny blossoms
above tidal pools. The used tissue of sea lettuce
litters the sand, catches in salt marsh grass.
Terns dive, miss fish, hover
over another target.

A horseshoe crab, empty of life but
shell complete down to spiky telson
marks high tide. The long flight bone
of a gull weathers smooth nearby.
Neither bird call nor blue blood matter.
It always come to this, tossed on the edge,
still waiting for something
as the sun edges below the horizon again.

--Valerie Lawson

When Things are Tight, check out Hanging Loose The Fall 2009 issue

When Things are Tight, check out Hanging Loose
The Fall 2009 issue

article by Michael Todd Steffen

Literary journals as a rule, gathering work from several sources, tend one way or the other: to demonstrate a coterie likeness (in theme or style), or to celebrate like Walt Whitman a grand embrace of variety. The Fall 2009 Hanging Loose sets itself unflinchingly to the latter strategy, giving writers and readers, in this time of economic constraint and hesitation, carte blanche to browse and relish in a range of expressions, from thrift to luxury, from the timid companionship of a calf that follows KEITH TAYLOR’s father around in “The Cattle on the Parthenon’s South Frieze” (p. 84), to KATHY SCHNEIDER’s endearing catalog of excuses not to leave an elusive lover in “Lapigi” (99).

We look through garments, bric-a-brac, we look for others. Between her glassy liberal psychologist and the less forgiving damselflies in “Spooning” (60) JENI OLIN is brought to the surprising consumerist-wit question, “Wouldn’t it be touching/to try on people at a sample sale?”

As shoppers meet limitations, they economize with lists, lists such as the long-lined odes beginning this issue of HL. In “Ode to my Backyard” (19-21) the passage revisiting ‘the so sweet a place” where John Keats is buried in Rome echoes throughout the achieved negative capability of David Kirby’s breathless three-page poem.
Then in the array of vignettes and strophes, a gem by Rosalind Brackenbury, “Ferry across the James River” stands quietly forth in its intimacy and clarity:

the water was carved the bow wave
in a deep almost colorless curve;
you stood at the stern of the ferry
and I came to find you, I knew
you’d be there wearing your jacket,
cap and gloves; and above you
the gulls, their bellies lit by the low sun
from underneath, hundreds of them
following the wake (26).

If HL demonstrates an eye for referential literary talent, it is not blind to the harder experiences, say, of CHRISTEIN GHOLSON’s “Sleep Deprivation,” which records the twists of events in a lidless tenancy building:

One night I heard two drunk kids blubbering “I love you, man” to each other in the hallway. A bit later—fists, bottles breaking… (34).

Still with plenty of play currency for what Nabokov called “unreal estate,” an abundance of cultural acquirements and thoughts for pennies keep turning HL’s pages. We are bargain drivers, says ELIZABETH SWADOS in her poem of anxiety for the critic and author of The Anxiety of Influence, “A Question for Harold Bloom” (85). Look says MARK PAWLAK, a contributing editor, with “Apologies for Rilke,” paying legerdemain for one of the Austrian poet’s most memorable meditations on the spiritual challenge of enduring art. And just why not? Monte Python superimposes wags of a mustache on the Mona Lisa, and as Rolland Barthes has pointed out there is, when all is boiled down, no proof for semantic difference between the pop of film and belles of lettres.

We ask to read as far as the eye sees, and the dreamlike atmospheres of the acrylic paintings by ARNOLD MESCHES, HL’s feature artist for this issue, achieve intensity, volume, through the painter’s method of “unlikely juxtapositions.” Subjects of artifice, acrobats, flame-hurlers, or of sophistication, a white-clothed dinner table, find themselves in the bewildered setting of woods at night. Mesches’ technique of contrasting brilliant colors against deeply obscure backgrounds draws in and offers to swallow the viewer’s eye with enchantments of luxurious baroque ballroom interiors, as well as with the blazes of fire in the nocturnal sylvan scenery.

Mesches leaves us with an overall effect of dark surrealism bordering on expressionism, with the costumed and masked characters of children’s entertainment and nightmares, all befitting the theatrical harrowing of the Halloween season. Lock your doors. Don’t pick up that phone. And cover these paintings!

The Fall 2009 is a well-selected, finely and handsomely bound journal of intriguing and entertaining pen-craft and artistry that makes an apt companion for considerate readers of interest. It is well worth your nickel.

Hanging Loose 95
is available for $9.00
(3 issues for $22.00…) from
Hanging Loose Press
231 Wyckoff Street
Brooklyn, New York 11217
print225@aol.com
visit their website at www.hangingloosepress.com

Terrible Baubles by Lo Galluccio

(Lo Galluccio)


Terrible Baubles.
By Lo Galluccio
2009; 56pp; Pa; Alternating
Current, PO Box 398058,
Cambridge, MA 02139,
color photos by Lo Gallucio.

Review by Hugh Fox


Lo Galluccio’s non-sequitur unexpectedness is one of the most refreshing language-/thought-variants on Planet Earth: “Explosions in the open fists of leaves/Over East 4th Street America’s quilt/Drops handkerchief for patriotic infants/Crawling the street/Who don’t fuss about the November moon/Distant fixture of frozen/Niagara.” (“Moonsong,” p. 44). And if you really start meditating on the sequences here, a whole new kind of sense emerges. There’s 9-11 hidden in here somewhere, the whole idea of the U.S. being subjected to international terrorism, all contrasted with totally non-political (moons and frost) Nature.

And behind all the epistemological scrambling there is an underlying philosophy that calls for sane joy in the midst of endless man-made jumblings: “ I had a true love, I had an angry star/He flung me near, he flung me far/No Mecca can survive such an angry star/Will the moon take me back?/Will the moon have her way?/Will it take another century, a year, or a day?/It will rise again, it will rise again/Like a child whose love is God/Shiver me hard.” (“I had a True Love,” p.25). It’s a real aesthetic trip to sail through the world of Lo Galluccio’s poetry. None of the usual 1,2,3’s, but dice-throws of logic that ultimately force the reader to re-think the whole political-psychological structure of contemporary reality. You really get inside Lo Galluccio and let her flow through you and it’s like a trip through the psychedelic Andes.

PENTAKOMO CYPRUS BY IRENE KORONAS

PENTAKOMO CYPRUS
By Irene Koronas
Cervena Barva Press
Copyright 2010
50 pages, $16.00

By Lo Galluccio


Unlike Irene’s first full-length book “self portrait drawn from many 65 poems in 65 years,” where she explores the formation of poetic language through grids of text which make allusion to various historical figures, including artists and saints, the new book is written more in the style of letters home or journal entries to a travelogue of her visit to Cyprus. In her dedication she reveals her own discovery: that her father never went back to Cyprus because they (the family) were more important to him than possessing the past.

But that has nothing to do with the acute beauty of the island which Koronas details in seemingly mundane lists that obviously transcend the normal, especially the normal American way of life. From April 7:

My own image crosses my path. caterpillar crawls
across ancient mud foundation, mountain’s yellow
wild flower face, I step on dry weeds, the quiver
on dry rock gnats chase each other

There is an unexpected interlude with a villager named John who takes a liking to Irene and invites her to stay in his empty house in back. She carefully navigates the relationship with this strange man, in whom she sees craziness, loneliness and compassion.

friday

after breakfast i walk
the chalk path to john’s farm

we talk for three hours

john loved a five year old woman
with three children. She was jealous,

hooked on amphetamines.

She dreams, she walks, she talks with relatives and neighbors. After awhile sleeping on a single bed in her cousin’s house.





sunday

1.
with bag, camera, peanuts and rain,
rain washes my hair, I duck under small tree,
sea merges with sky. on my left on my right,
mountains rub blue. My voice my walking stick
thumps, tender as aging skin, dry earth. gray
sheet hangs over distance. i run back down
full of quick insinuations

Koronas catches the moods of the days, whether she is alone exploring or participating in the village’s events. In the following anecdote the restaurant owner suggests to a group that if they lie over the saint’s skeletal home, their spinal problems will be cured.

saint erogenous

beside an open air restaurant
a small stone chuch fits ten people
wicks in oil, incense illumines entrance
plain sarcophagas dominates space

……

i unzip my thoughts
spread my body over
his tomb hewn rock


Indeed saints form an overlay or backdrop of a holy tribe in Pentakomo an island which is predominantly Greek Orthodox Catholic.

two nuns

icons kissed right to left. women stand,
men sit. restless children wander. Near the end of the liturgy
some of the men hold an icon of saint Irene, coffin above their heads…


There are rich, but simply told accounts of war stories and village encounters. One senses that Koronas has indeed resolved to feel the rain of this place while seeking
some protection, always wielding her camera to capture the scene-ery.


sunset

late day requests more
than i am willing to give

i do not want to leave my father
in olive groves, kourion’s basilica

wednesday night’s soft purple
yogurt on potato.


There are many layers to this work and it deserves several readings. It is fascinating to visit an unknown village on the Mediterranean, to see what of the ancient remains and what of modernity has struck through. Irene balances her own interior life and reactions with the lives of those around her and nature on the island. Her writing is never over-blown or embellished, but broken carefully into poetic lines which always stay in lower-case. Each poem corresponds to a day or a saint, an event, an encounter. It seems that she is democratizing the alphabet this way so no part of speech carries extra weight. Each poem corresponds to a day or a saint, an event, an encounter It is a style that works well with her highly visual and sensual sense. On May 13, she leaves the Pentakomo and in her final poem ends with a recipe for how to make ketheis or meatballs. Like the feminist message a while back that “history is lunch.” --that is a bit how Irene sees things-- close to the earth, the women, the saints, what nature gives us for nourishment and creativity. All these she walks through with grace, and an artist’s heart and curiosity.

I highly recommend this book.

Lo Galluccio

More Fulcra Poems by Richard Kostelanetz

More Fulcra Poems
Richard Kostelanetz
PRESA :S: PRESS
PO Box 792
Rockford, Mi 49341
$6.00

Richard Kostelanetz’s ‘More Fulcra Poems,’ the literal
word becomes, visible meaning. Single letters jut through
the word form, lending to even more meaning. Meaning takes
on a size and relationship. The relationship of two laid out
on whitespace, layers layered, turning the single word into
memory or recognition:

yours

usually

Kostelanetz, his minimal approach to complex situations,
political or otherwise, allows the reader the freedom of
being influenced:

smartest

shortest

these are perfect poems the reader can sit or walk around with.
participate; perceptions of meaning, I mean, the poems create
an environment; the environment is yours to build from:

start

tart

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor
Wilderness House Literary Review
www.whlreview.com

Review of ANONYMOUS FOX by Naomi Feigelson Chase

Review of ANONYMOUS FOX by Naomi Feigelson Chase, (Turning Point, Cincinnati, OH, 2009)

By Barbara Bialick

ANONYMOUS FOX is a book you can dive right into even though the familiar yet obscure images keep you wondering what deftly sculpted insight you’re about to experience. One thing you’ll notice right away is that the author’s “veins secrete/Ink and tap water” and like “a cat keeps its own couch/I keep mine.”

She’s an individualist and yet, at the same time, just like the masses would, she dedicates this book to her grandson, Matthew, who will read it some day and see both beauty and horror concerned his grandmother, who named this collection after a dead fox Nadia wants to take the tail of, use it for a paintbrush and “bury the rest./It’s my fox isn’t it?/...As for its fur, the author says sardonically, “why not keep it…like Jews’ hair stored/in an Argentine barn/for future use…/Isn’t all death a good riddance,/Lewd providence,/Quitting earth of the useless,/The dirties,/While we expedient managers/Go about our cleansing business.”

All through the book you’ll discover metaphors from nature that turn around and surprise you. For example, in “American Brunhilde” she starts with “Summers, I sleep circled with fans,/In kind Stygian light./Shades drawn./My dreams can’t be spied on/I’ve heard folks in the next town,/So fearful of terrorists,/They’ve painted their doors shut./The mailman puts their letters in the trees.”

On the page previous, the poem “Cold Comfort” is taken from winter, “Those snowy peaks, natures’s scarred darlings,/Comfort me, like Artemis’ one hundred breasts/…Like Pittsburgh winters,/When Zadi pulled my sled up Pocusset Street…/The furred pelf of trees,/Bristling with what./Stark successes now,/ Black matter in a thousand years.”

The person to whom all this is dedicated appears in the book now and then is revealed as a fellow poet or doctor in training… Her grandson wants to know if he can pick the white flowers on the pea plants. To quote her own quote: “How do peas get into pods?” he asks. “Call me when it happens.” A universal concept of where there is youth there is hope… But then again, she reveals in “I Can Tell You Now”: “I can tell you now, I never expected this—to be old and ugly,/To turn away from the beach,/Struggle with the lid of a jar…I took misfortune’s road to the forest./Saw the warlock’s house and walked right in…”

Some of these poems were previously printed in prestigious publications like Harvard magazine and Iowa Review. She won the Flume Press poetry chapbook award and she’s published a variety of poetry books and chapbooks, nonfiction books, and fiction.
The publisher left no obvious note of the book’s price, which indicates what you may agree with when you read it, that this book is priceless…or in any case, certainly worth a read.

MEETING M.F.K. FISHER by Leo Racicot

*** M.F.K. Fisher is the author of more than 20 books
most of which deal with the subject of food, its philosophies,
its mysteries and the memories induced by it. Her books,
among them "How to Cook a Wolf", "Consider the Oyster",
"The Gastronomical Me" and the now classic "Art of Eating"
act as autobiography and memoir and treat the reader to
a glimpse into the author's own life and mind. No less than
W.H.Auden said of her: "I do not know of anyone in the
United States who writes better prose."



MEETING M.F.K. FISHER


by Leo Racicot


"Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly." M.F. K. Fisher




Some books (sadly very few) cast a magic over us, and over
the time and place we read them, that lasts a lifetime. One such
book for me, the memory of which even now resurrects a certain
summer many summers ago, and the front porch I read it on,
during what seemed to me the most beautiful of weather days,
was "As They Were" by an author I had never heard of: M.F.K.
Fisher. The title still has the ability to thrill.

I liked the book, in fact, so much that I set off, after, in search
of another of the author's titles: "A Cordiall Water". I had no luck
finding it (all library copies were marked 'MISSING'). The book was
out-of-print and a friend suggested I write the publishers to see if
a copy could be had from them.

A month or so after, a package, brown-bundled and tied
with plain, brown twine came in the mail. It was from the author
herself, accompanied by a note thanking me for my interest
in her books with a wish that I enjoy this one. Thrilled, I dashed
off a "thank you" straight away. She wrote back -- a longer, more
personal reply, and so developed between us (me here in Lowell,
Ma; she, in California) a regular correspondence that evolved into
years of indescribable joy in visiting her, knowing her, loving her...

I can tell you many good stories about her and her open-door
policy salon, her family and friends but will start here with the story
of the first time I made my way, at her invitation, to her fabled
Glen Ellen and 13935 Sonoma Highway because the first visit
was a real adventure but not, as you will see, the sort I expected.

The flight out to San Francisco was, as I recall, fine but I hit
the city during one of the most relentless rainstorms to swallow
Northern California in twenty years. Oh...my...God!!!

I can still picture being soaked to the skin as I wedged myself
into an equally wet phone booth at the airport where I tried to
summon the courage to call Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher
and let her know I was here. I was more than nervous. The voice
that answered the other end of the line was a shock and a delight,
both, and remained so for all our days together, for what I heard
emerging from a woman in her late 60s was the voice of a little
girl, musical in its pitch, like little, silver bells ringing. "This is
Mary Frances", it said. I said it was Leo calling and that I was
in San Francisco and what I heard next was not what I wanted
to hear: "Well, dear. I'm so happy you came but I'm afraid we
are completely flooded up here. We needed the rain but not this
much of it. The roads leading up here are all washed away. I'm
sorry, dear, but you'll have to go back home. There's no way
up. Maybe some other time..."

"Maybe some other time???" I was not hearing this!! I
had come 3000 miles to be told, "Maybe some other time"?
I heard her start to hang up and so I hollered, "No! Wait!
I'll find a way. I want to see you. I've come all this way.
I......I....." There was a pause, then the child-like voice
replied, "Well, Leo, if you think you can get here, I'm here..."

No one at the bus terminal ticket booth knew Glen Ellen,
the tiny cow town about 60 miles north of San Francisco
where M.F.K. Fisher lived. They kept shrugging and sending
me from booth to booth. I was mad. I was sad. I was wet.
Good luck came in the form of a bus line, Fedora, no longer
extant (nowadays, you must take an airporter limo to get to
Glen Ellen, if you can get there at all). Feeling relief, I bought
my ticket, found the bus dock and boarded a rattle-y, old
coach bound for Santa Rosa. Much to my dismay, and perhaps
due to the recluse in me, my delight, I saw that I was the only
passenger on the bus. Or should I say the only person crazy
enough to be riding a bus in weather this vile? And so we set
off into the deluge: one bus, one bus driver, one killer storm
and me. Oh...my...God!!!

The further out of San Francisco we went, the more I could
see what Fisher had meant; all roads were beyond-belief bad
and the rain became more and more like an iron wall of water.
We could not see very well but we could see that a major road
had been washed away and that we were banned from continuing
on by a battery of workhorses. During the ride, I had told the
driver whom I was going to see and how determined and excited
I was about seeing her. Pshawing the washed-out road, the driver
became suddenly imbued with a do-or-die John Wayne spirit
and grabbing the wheel with the hams of both hands, he yelled,
(I kid you not!), "I'll get ya there, come Hell or High Water!!") and
veered the giant bus into the middle of a mud-filled field as if
he were re-directing a VW bug or a Cooper. Once again --
Oh...my...God!!! I thought: I am not going to meet M.F.K. Fisher
because I am going to die.

But the shortcut led to the highway we needed and soon
we were back on pavement, at least, and not mud and before
long, as if in a dream, the kindly driver was depositing me
in front of the Jack London Lodge in the center of Glen Ellen.
Eureka!!!

It took me the whole night to dry off, and I don't think
I slept an hour, if that. I was restless with all kinds of
emotion not the least of which was shyness at having
to call M.F. in the morning and actually meet a writer
who had become, for me, the greatest living writer of all.
I was a wreck when I dialed her up and heard her girl's
voice again. "Well, I don't know how you managed to
make it", she said, incredulously, "but I sure am glad
you have. I'll send Pat Moran up in my jalopy to fetch
you. He'll be round in an hour or so."

Pat arrived right on time, a cheerful, mustachioed,
30-ish fellow, tall like a tree, and just as cheerful. We
had a good chat as we made our way up and over some
of the wettest country I had ever seen.

Soon, we came to a gate leading off Highway 12,
to a path lined with wildflowers of every color and kind,
flattened by the weight of the rain but oh, so fragrant,
and a tiny, white bungalow, stucco, hidden carefully
amid a clutch of trees, and a pond, and a belltower
and cows, and oh it was lovely until, as we reached
the house and parked, Pat turned and said to me,
"How many times have you been out here to visit
Mary Frances?" And when I told him this was the
very first time, that I had never met her, he gasped
asthmatically and said, "Holy Jesus! You must be
SCARED SHIT!!!" This, I can tell you, did nothing
to relieve my fear and once more, dear reader, if I
may be permitted to repeat --- Oh...my...God!!!

But she, the Mary Frances of my dreams, was
lovelier than words can describe and more warm
and welcoming than the sun that had finally come out
from hiding. The years ahead would be filled with
the rich and endearing gift of her friendship, her letters,
her love. Not a day goes by that I do not miss her
and wish she was here and I think, in some animistic
way, she still is, and surely is with me now as I write
this reminiscence of the first time we met.


Leo Racicot's work has been featured in "Co-Evolution Quarterly","Utne Reader", "Spiritual Life", "Gay Sunshine Journal", "First Hand","The Poet", "Ibbetson Street Press", "Poetry", "Shakespeare's Monkey"and "Yankee". Two of his award-winning essay-memoirs appear in "Best of..."anthologies, and he is the recipient of the Antonio Machado Poetry Forum Award (1992). His holiday story, "The Little Man" is being published by Snug Harbor and will be available in audio and animated form on fablevision.com. He has been a schoolteacher/librarian/cook/counselor/poet/actor/clown.

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction

Editor, Tara L. Masih

Review by Timothy Gager

· Paperback: 208 pages

· Publisher: Rose Metal Press; First edition (May 13, 2009)

· ISBN-10: 0978984862

· ISBN-13: 978-0978984861




As a writer of flash fiction, I found this field guide extremely interesting, pertinent and useful. It is full of surprises and mind opening essays for those who only look at flash or very short fiction in a limited way.. The essays included in this book read like a who’s who in the form of very short fiction. These are authors that I’ve read and admired for either their economy of language, their punch of prose or their paint strokes of fast and deep emotion. Included are many personal favorites of mine such as Randall Brown, Rusty Barnes, Kim Chinquee and Pamela Painter whom are only a small piece of this literary all-star team ripe for the reading.



Inside the pages of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction you will receive twenty-five short written lectures; points of view of what comprises great flash fiction. There also are writing exercises intended to help writers of various skill levels create work from each point of focus. This is very helpful if you like to write from prompts. Each author also pick examples of flash fiction pieces they feel back up their points.



Fiction today, especially what you may read on-line tends to run shorter in length than ever before. Whether it is the short attention span of readers, the need for something quick and hard hitting and grabbing as a computer read. Whatever the reason, flash fiction has become increasingly popular to both writers and readers. The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction demonstrate this phenomena in great detail by the varying theories from each author, whom all have different focuses on the same point.



The book is aptly presented as a “field guide”, and I couldn’t agree more with that descriptor. It is user friendly, can be picked up and read at any chapter point break by any individual, writing group or classroom. The book also presents historic references of fiction, short fiction, micro-fiction and flash. Shouhua Qi points out the early origins from the Chinese short short or what is called a “Smoke-Long story”. (note: Randall Brown, the editor of Smoke Long Quarterly is also included in Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction) TRMPFGTWFF also distinguishes between narrative/prose poetry and flash fiction---often viewed as interchangeable. Robert Olen Butler says on the form, “it may not have a fully developed plot, but it must have the essence of a plot, a yearning.” Steve Almond instructs as on how to turn your bad poetry into fantastic flash, which was an essay I found to be extraordinarily useful and entertaining.



Jennifer Pieroni’s thoughts on the purpose of images “smart and surprising” was also useful, not only to those whom enjoy Jennifer’s writing but also whom read her and her well know magazine, Quick Fiction (TRMPFGTWFF indirectly shows you what certain editors like). Kim Chinquee presents us with examples of five distinctly different stories based on the same event. Rusty Barnes, author of Breaking It Down and Editor of Night Train, takes you on a journey in the revision process. Randall Brown points out ways to “make flash count’ for the aspiring author.



I highly recommend this book as a learning tool and prompt generator. It pulls from the insight of today’s very best writers of short shorts, many whom are the editors of some of very well known anthologies, magazines and journals of fiction.

For more information about Timothy Gager go to:

http://www.timothygager.com

Poppin' Johnny: new American Poems by George Wallace

Poppin’ Johnny
new american poems by
George Wallace
Three Rooms Press, New York
Copyright © 2009 by George Wallace
ISBN: 978-0-9840700-2-2
102 pages.

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Poets like to be compared to great poets, so when I read George Wallace, the late Charles Bukowski wormed his way into my brain. Fortunately, this George Wallace isn’t the former governor of Alabama, whose non-poetic bigotries are not soon forgotten. Fortunately, the George Wallace who authored Poppin’ Johnny is an uncommon poet who goes non-stop from cover to cover with poems that not only conjure Bukowski, but some of the Beat Generation poets like Allen Ginsberg. So now you know a weakness of mine for Bukowski and Ginsberg and I may well add Wallace after I read more of his 18 chapbooks of poetry and, if I can find them, full length efforts. Maybe he should publish a Selected volume. I’ll bet that would be great reading.

Of the more than 70 poems in this volume my favorite was easily That Girl’s A Chevrolet. For a guy (me) who for many years had a romance with fast cars and the women who liked the front and back seats, this poem has it all. Read it fast, like
a ’58 Impala trying to separate a highway like it’s the Red Sea. Read it fast because that’s the way this poem is meant to be read. Fast. Just try the first few lines:

she’s got celebrity
she’s got greed
she’s got ammunition
& she’s got natural selection
i tell you she’s got erudition
palimony free & easy patricide
she’s got manifest destiny she’s got
motorized magic she’s got the tar & feather

Just the first few lines and I was reaching for the four-on-the-floor, listening for the GlassPaks and the 8 Stromberg Heads. and there are more lines:

[that] girl’s a chevrolet, boy she’s
a chevy she’s a chevy she’s
taking to the streets

There’s also the Bukowski-like toughness of :

I’m Just An Ordinary Guy
I’m Feeling Like Pittsburgh Tonight

i’m just an ordinary guy i’m feeling
like pittsburgh tonight buy me a
beer says choochoo charlie to steel
eyed dick and make it american
he was a little older than dick an
old goat a little bit colder to look
at straight in the eye tough old bird

Ah, read on. This is another poem to enjoy, fast or slow. Nitty-gritty, down in hole,Wallace rips life as if it were a piece of paper, leaving the edges jagged and the paper crumpled like so many lives he observes.

Yes, Wallace writes lower case. Yes, Wallace doesn’t use much punctuation, an occasional comma or period, sometimes in a poem that has no other punctuation, but
it works well. Even though many folks say poetry to should be read slowly, sipped like wine, Wallace is meant to be read fast, like Paul LeMat’s yellow hot rod in American Graffiti.

I’ve read many of Bukowski’s books two or three times; Ginsberg too. I know I am going to go through Poppin’ Johnny few times too.

This is a book of poetry I am pleased to recommend.

Some Misplaced Joan of Arc by Leah Angstman

Some Misplaced Joan of Arc by Leah Angstman (Alternating Current Press alt.current@gmail.com) $5 alt-current.com)

Review by Doug Holder

Leah Angstman, founder of the local Alternating Current Press works as a bartender at an aptly named place for a writer to work in: "Bukowski's," a bar in Inman Square, Cambridge. She puts out a neat little magazine Poiesis and a slew of mini-chapbooks of poetry. Her latest project is a beautiful looking small chap titled: "Some Misplaced Joan of Arc," written by Angstman herself. Now Angstman always has an original take on things. And here is a signature poem that you might want to keep "abreast" of:

"seventy something percent of women have mismatched breasts"

perhaps some genes or
parts switched around at birth
and yet
there are no bras mismatched

dressed in discomfort
with the dilemma of the d
or the c

flapping like a jaw
inside d
too roomy on the left
chaffing against pudding

or squished into the c with
right nipple perched
across fabric's edge
bunched to the inside
appearing a cyclops breast
fighting for air
squirming to wink.

If I were you I would get this hot little pocket book of poetry and squeeze into your c or d cup.

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update

Barbara Trachtenburg: A Polymath, A Prison Poet.

Barbara Trachtenburg: A Polymath, A Prison Poet.

Barbara Trachtenburg is one of those people you can comfortably call a force of nature. She is a poet, educator, and currently involved in PEN’s Prison Writing Program. She is also a visual artist, and plays with chamber music, and other forms of creative expression in her spare time. She is a member of the Writer’s Room in Boston, and she is working on a memoir of her mother. Her writing has appeared in such journals as Arts/Editor, Latin American Anthropology Review, and others. She was also a resident at the prestigious artist/writers retreat the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. I talked with her on my show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer” airing on Somerville Community Access TV”

Doug Holder: You have worked as a school psychiatrist and teacher for over 30 years. Was this a rich lode for material?

Barbara Trachtenburg: It really has feed my short stories. Not so much my poetry. I have eight connected short stories with an ongoing character. They come from my first years working at a rehab center in Vermont. It was a residential center for multi-handicapped kids. I knew nothing. I was not a teacher. I was not trained. I was just thrown into this fascinating place. I learned a lot.

DH: As a psychologist you must have gained a lot of insight into the human condition. Did this help your work?

BT: I was a school psychologist. I worked with kids. Unfortunately those were my later years of working in the public schools. The unfortunate part was that working as a school psychologist meant at that time testing kids for their so called intelligence. The Wexler Intelligence Scale for children was a real drag. I couldn't develop relationships with kids because my role was detached in order to evaluate the tests. But of course I studied psychology and my favorite topic was family psychology. I used that to look at myself in the context of my family.

DH: You were a resident of the famous MacDowell Colony. Tell us about your experience. Who was there when you were there?

BT: Leonard Bernstein had just left. Jean Valentine was there. I lived in the area: Peterborough, New Hampshire. My kids were born there. I have to answer your question in the context of me living in the area. I was exposed to visual artists, painters, sculptors, also contemporary composers of music. I am a musician myself so I loved the newness of what was produced around there. I loved being exposed to it. The residency was great. I started to write the biography of a man I had worked with at the residential treatment center for handicapped people.

It was wonderful getting that knock on my cottage door at lunch time. Knowing the basket of food was waiting for me was pleasing.

DH: You are a member of the PEN NEW ENGLAND PRISION WRITING PROGRAM. Can you talk about your involvement in the program and the program itself?

BT: The genesis of my involvement with PEN was when I was riding my bike behind Framingham Women's Prison. I thought it would be great to get out of my world, my limitations and enter this place.

DH: Did other people ever tell you, you were slumming?

BT: No. This project makes you deal with the other side of yourself. I have been trying to get to the other side of myself and I don't think that is unusual. Most of us are faced with having to do that.

So what happened was that I went home, called the education director at Framingham. She told me to call Boston University; there was someone running the program there. I left a few messages but no one got back to me. Ultimately I went to a book celebration and I ran into the poet Fred Marchant. I told him I was looking to do a prison writing workshop. He recommended Springfield, Mass. The problem was that it was a two hour drive to North Hampton County Jail, and driving was very bad in the winter. Still it was a good experience and eventually we started a workshop at the Bay State Penitentiary, which was closer. That was about 4 years ago. This year I helped the Director of Treatment at Framingham State Prison. It is a pre-release. A number of volunteers work with me.

DH: What are the backgrounds of the volunteers?

BT: Everybody is writing. Most of the writers do teach or have taught. The volunteers we are looking for don't have to be published, writing or teaching.

DH: What do you get out of it?

BT: You get a look at yourself. Through the words and the struggles of other people. The women write memoirs and autobiographical pieces, and we don't try to change that. There are so many aspects of their own memoir writing-- food, growing up, that reach us...it is part of the human condition.

DH: What are the women serving time for?

BT: This information is not shared with us. We can only guess. The suspicion is drugs and alcohol.

DH: What was it like for you-- a white-upper middleclass woman to walk in a prison for the first time?

BT: First off, I am not an upper middle class woman. I really don't fear for my safety. The women are all eager to learn.

DH: Is it therapeutic for them?

BT: One or two have told me that. We don't intend the workshops to be therapeutic. But if they are, they are.

Ibbetson Poetry Prize Winners 2009// Kirk Etherton // Marc Goldfinger// Frank Bidart to get Ibbetson Lifetime Achievement Award

Both poets will read their award-winning poems at the Somerville News Writers Festival: Nov 14, 2009 7PM http://somervillenewswritersfestival.com


The Ibbetson Poetry contest was judged by poet Richard Wilhelm.


First prize:
"Georgia, 1963" by Kirk Etherton

Second runner-up
"Flower Days" by Marc Goldfinger







**** Frank Bidart is the winner of the Ibbetson Poetry Award. This will be presented at the Somerville News Writers Festival as well. Previous winners have been Robert K. Johnson, Louisa Solano, Robert Pinsky, Afaa Michael Weaver, Jack Powers, and David Godine, Jr.

New Mexico Poetry Review

New Mexico Poetry Review
http://newmexicopoetryreview.com


Review By Shannon O’Connor


The cover of New Mexico Poetry Review is graced by a painting by the great-grandmother of the editor, Blanche Bell Lefler Evans, a pioneer who moved from Kansas to New Mexico in 1909. One hundred years later, New Mexico Poetry Review has been brought to life, publishing mostly poets from the beginning and the end of the Santa Fe Trail, Kansas and New Mexico.

The journal blossoms with poems of nature. In Ron Houchin’s “Encounters with the Explained,” “life isn’t what it seems, “How do they know it works?/ Soon spring peepers will be keening/ in the cattail ditch beside Taco Bell/ The river will smell clean for a week.” The injection of Taco Bell brings the poem down to earth and makes it grittier and more honest. Not everything in the wide open spaces is the sky and mountains. Sometimes there’s a fast food chain in the foreground. In the poem “Early Spring,” by Linda Monicelli-Johnson, two hawks sweep up the narrator, “We’re buoyant as seed/ in the wind’s power/ My notebook pages/ flap, laughing flags.” This is a different take on the usual nature poem: it is a fantasy that hawks scoop her up and take her for a ride in the sky, with her notebook flapping. The hawks probably don’t like to be the subject of a poem. They want to scare her.

There are poems of change. In Santiago Lopez’s, “Mr. Kubrick or: How I Learned to Stop Acting and Love the Movies,” the narrator’s uncle stopped acting and became an usher at a “third-rate movie house in a fourth rate Texas town.” He was an extra in movies until Stanley Kubrick told him to get out of the shot and that improved the scene. According to the grandmother, she “wanted her first-born remembered/ for more than being the only child/ out of sixteen to never have left home.” In “The Approach,” Miriam Sagan writes of the decline of a western town, “tequila bottles/ shining like planets/ at the edge of the road.” The train in the poem comes through at different intervals: seven minutes, seven years, seven seconds.

The decline in small towns due to centralization and the Walmart factor is discussed in one of the two interviews in the journal with Donald Levering, a Kansas poet. The New Mexico Poetry Review brings light to the Santa Fe Trail as it is now, as it

Shannon O'Connor is working on her MFA at Bennington College in Vermont.

Ibbetson Street Press Puschcart Nominees 2009

Ibbetson Street Press Pushcart Nominees 2009









1) Fall/Winter issue (#26): Gayle Roby: Strawberry Moon" by Gayle Roby

2) Spring/Summer issue (#25): Tony Artuso: "Norm Visits His Autistic Daughter."

3) Spring/Summer issue (#25): Lyn Lifshin: "Orals."

4) Spring/Summer issue (#25) Tunny Lee "At the Sackler Musuem the Day Before Thanksgiving"

5) Spring/Summer issue (#25) Philip Corwin "The American Cemetery at Nettuno."

6) Fall/Winter issue (#26) Dorian Brooks "Eclipse"

Under the El by David Stone

Under the El
by David Stone
Propaganda Press
2009


Review by Miriam Levine




In the Depths



It’s a fine thing to have these little chapbooks from Propaganda Press. The not-for-profit press is part of Alternating Current Arts Co-op based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dedicated to “inexpensive publishing and distributing.” So far their list includes: A.D. Winans, Ed Galing, and B.Z. Niditch, among others. The slim publications printed on recycled paper measure four-and-a-quarter inches by five-and-a-half inches and will easily fit in your pocket or snug into your hand.


Sounds cute, doesn’t it? However, David Stone’s “Under the El” is not cute. Stone is a prophetic poet in the tradition of Ginsberg and Blake. Ginsberg of the Moloch section of “Howl.” Moloch, the cruel hungry god demanding blood sacrifice, burnt offerings. Ginsberg makes Moloch the god of the fallen city:

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in parks!

Demons and death spirits also haunt Stone’s fallen city of “burnt carcasses.” He mentions Pluto, Hecate, and Belphegor, a devil, who seduces people by suggesting ingenious devices to make them rich—certainly not a sin in our era of iPhone apps. He is also the demon of the deadly sin of sloth.

The atmosphere of Stone’s underworld is “toxic,” spirit-besmirching, giving off the “aroma of death” and “sulphur scent.” Stone repeatedly uses the word “hell.” His city is not the City of Light or glorious Athens or dynamic New York or enlightened Boston. It’s a “sad city/ where teachers/ are raped by students,” and where there are ‘more beatings on buses/ & on subways,” and “city/ vultures scan the debris.” The underworld is populated by disgusting creatures: wolves, rats, skunks, and “paleozoic carnivores.”

In this time of feel-good, I-love-this-I-love-that poems, it is shocking and clarifying to read Stone’s work and remember lines from Blake’s poem, “London”:

I wandered through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear.

Stone conjures up his hellish city, jabs at us with spare lines:

crystals
+
streetcars
erode
&
glass crashed
&split nuclei
in Chicago.
Levine-3

In the title poem, the speaker emerges from underground where “in the subway tunnel/ bats slide down stalactites.” He smells chocolate, passes a restaurant, “people eating,/ drinking port,/ lighting up stogies.” These pleasures, Stone would say, exist in a city of “six million rats.” Yet, he composes these playfully constructed lines:

in the realm of the Dead
where sooo
ooo
L
s
survive on benches
with teethmarks
waiting for a
note of jazz.

His playfulness occurs only in his line arrangements, not in his dark vision of hellish Chicago.


** Miriam Levinet recent book is The Dark Opens, winner of the 2007 Autumn House Poetry Prize. She is the author of In Paterson, a novel, Devotion: A Memoir, three poetry collections, and A Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among many other places.

A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts writing fellowship and grants from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, she was a fellow at Yaddo, Hawthornden Castle, Le Château de Lavigny, Villa Montalvo, Fundación Valparaíso, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

She is Professor Emerita at Framingham State College, where she chaired the English Department and was Coordinator of the Arts and Humanities Program.