Deborah Noyes’s CAPTiViTY

Deborah Noyes’s CAPTiViTY


CAPTiViTY (US $25.95 / CAN $29.95)
(Unbridled Books)
Published 2010
http://www.unbridledbooks.com
By Deborah Noyes


Reviewed by Pam Rosenblatt

Fiction writer Deborah Noyes has written a most intriguing, suspenseful, and captivating story that begins with Captivity’s eerie green, black, and white book cover with a double image of a young girl in a sheer white dress. Immediately the reader’s imagination is captured.

Then, through detailed imagery and articulate, often lively and clever language, she draws the reader into Captivity, a three hundred and forty page read based on a real life paranormal drama surrounding the Fox sisters, mainly Maggie and Kate, who lived between 1833 and 1893. They lived in upstate New York. Noyes’s Captivity was recently published through Unbridled Books.

Maggie and Kate Fox became famous for practicing spiritualism and being very good at it, so good that many people around them considered them legitimate Mediums.
In Microsoft Word’s Encarta Dictionary English (North America), there are actually fourteen different definitions of the word “Medium”. But only one, number 5, discusses the word “Medium” spiritually, as “somebody supposedly communicating with dead”, or more explicitly, as “somebody believed to transmit messages between living people and the spirits of the dead”.

Captivity lifts more than the spirits. Questions raised include: Are the young Fox sisters legitimate mediums? What is imagination? What is reality? What is life? What is death? What is “madness” -- is it simply a state of mind or is it simply a way that one perceives life?

And, of course, is there a spiritual world? And if there is a spiritual world, what does this mean to the Fox family, to the Gill family – mainly to Clara Gill, another main character, who is a woman in her forties, a recluse, and befriended by Maggie as soon as they become acquainted; to the neighbors; and, finally, to the reader? And, as the reader reads on, even more questions abound. Noyes has written Captivity to be a thinking person’s novel.

The book begins with “Chapter 1 ** Machinations” with Clara Gill thinking, “A bell is tolling for me,….Or in spite of me.” She isn’t in a happy state. She thinks that her father is about to announce his engagement to Widow Bray and Clara feels that she has lost her status as matron of the house. Besides this inner conflict, Clara doesn’t like to leave the house, and doesn’t take kindly to seeing visitors, especially those people currently entering the house for a party:

If she could she would stop the voices, the laughter, rising around her like bars. Her breath is feathery, her life a crushed bird. Who are these people? Who’s playing the square piano—unplayed all these years? Who thought to tune it and unseat the dust? Not Father.

Why has he exposed her this way? He owes Clara her privacy, and more. What else does she have? What more could she want? To die, maybe, or live. To leave the place between.

Clara seems to be in limbo, uncertain whether she wants to live or not, uncertain that life is worth living.
The characters of Maggie and Kate Fox are first introduced in “Chapter 2 ** Mr. Splitfoot, Do As
I Do” when:

[they] are giddy with fear and on the mattress when Ma comes running
with the candle. ‘We’ve found it out,’ they cry, and Ma’s monstrous,
flickering shadow rounds the bedroom wall. She nods hard, poor soul,
hefting the candle higher, and her hand shakes.

“It” is the rapping that’s robbed them of sleep and peace for so long,
a hellish business, and who can hear it? Not Ma, surely.

In this second chapter, Maggie and Kate appear to have contacted the spirit of a deceased man, Mr. Charles B. Rosna. His spirit has reached the two young girls through a “Rap. Rap. Rap.” series. Her mother was witness to this paranormal occurrence where the two younger sisters, Maggie and Kate, were “believed to transmit messages between living people and the spirits of the dead”.

But Maggie and Kate’s mother understands that her two children may have a gift of communicating with the beyond. At the end of “Chapter 6 ** The Invisibles”, the suspense has built up. Noyes writes, “Can it be possible?” pleads Ma, in the dark. “How will we live and endure it?”

While the mother is uncertain and afraid, the two Fox girls are not. In “Chapter 2 ** Mr. Splitfoot, Do As I Do”, they even accept their neighbors into the séance room, upon the request of their mother:

“Will you continue to rap if I call my neighbors in?” Ma trembles. It’s a terror to see her this way. And a thrill beyond reckoning. Pity and fear catch like a bone in Maggie’s throat, but she has no shame, evidently. It’s too late for that.

“That they might hear it also?” Ma pleads.

Maggie imagines the men and boys out night fishing by Mud Creek. They’ll mill and murmur with eyes full of moonshine. They’ll listen intently, blow into strong hands with icy breath. She will have them in thrill.

Rap rap rap.

Ma stamps out into the darkness of the hall, clutching her shift close round a spacious bosom, Pa stumbling at her heels.

Kate leads their visitor up and back in a hypnotic square, the walls resounding. Doesn’t she see there’s no one left to impress now? Where has she going to in mind? Her eyes shine like ice.

Rap. Rap. Rap.

Had the river burst its banks and come swirling in under their roof this night, Maggie understands, the Fox sisters could not have seen their way clear.

We were born for this, she thinks.

Neighbors and people from afar have quickly heard of Maggie and Kate’s supernatural talents and begin flocking to the house. At this early point in the book, Leah, their older sister soon arrives and wants to split the two young girls up. (Leah eventually quickly takes Kate to the Rochester, New York, and Maggie ends up meeting and befriending the distraught Clara Gill.)

Obviously, the two main characters Maggie and Kate are enjoying themselves. But not everyone is convinced that these two young girls are actually contacting the dead. Some of the local neighbors, men, wonder about the feasibility of such psychic connections while shoveling out the Fox basement in search for the skeleton of Mr. Charles B. Rosna:

“There’s that cobbler fellow down the way. Might be an insomniac hammering his leather all night.”

“He’s outside now, taking his nips on Obadiah’s wagon whole we dig.”

“Waste of a night’s rest.”

“Why does the spirit rap only with those girls present? It’s fine sport for them.”

“These children were the first to befriend it. Maybe it trusts them.”

The feasibility of the Fox sisters reaching the beyond is questioned by a lot of folks. But more people want to believe that these two young girls are that spiritually gifted. Leah worries about what her two siblings have done. She seems to recognize the responsibility that the three of them have:

“You’ve unearthed something here in Hydesville,” Leah says, “Besides your Mr. Charles B. Rosna, I mean….You’ll open up a passageway between the mortal and spirit worlds,” Leah adds, nodding as if to reassure her, This is true. “Know what you’ve been given. You and Kate and me. The Fox sisters,” she adds slyly. “We’ll outwit death. We have that duty.”

People like Amy and Isaac Post, friends of the Fox family, and Mrs. Lyman Grainer, whose husband is a “skeptic” want to believe in Maggie and Kate’s spiritual abilities. They hold séances where:
“Only then can they enjoy the spectacle of Maggie and Kate being magnetized and slipping, with closed eyes, into a half-conscious trance state. Soon faint, eerie raps resound. The guests shift soundly in their chairs, anticipating ‘manifestations.’ The raps grow louder, questions are called out, and Leah painstakingly translates the raps of reply.”

Eventually, people in western New York want realistic answers from the Fox sisters. Can the said psychic occurrences really be true? Are the Fox sisters legitimate? And even Lizzie, Leah young daughter, reveals to Clara, the recluse, that even she doesn’t believe her aunts are legitimate Mediums:

“It’s plenty of humbug.” Lizzie savors the word clearly, which has no doubt served her well of late.
“I take it you don’t believe in the spirits?”
The girl bristles, stands taller. “I don’t suppose you do, so why should I? Am I any less wise?”
“Am I so transparent?”
“I wager someone like you doesn’t believe in much anything.” Lizzie waves at the scientific drawings everywhere. “Except what you see.”
Noyes’s Captivity is a suspenseful novel filled with mystery; drama; the supernatural; and, though not addressed in this review, love affairs and murder.

Noyes has written an imaginative, stimulating book based on factual events. Everything flows along nicely; even the chapters are integrated and connect together well. It’s almost as if Noyes is taking her reader on the same amazing psychic journey that the Fox sisters may have experienced. Who knows? Maybe the Fox sisters’ mind-boggling trip has been replicated!



###



Bibliography:

Carlson, Suzanne. “The Door Opener Articles: The Fox Sisters”, pp. 1-2.
http://www.anopendoor.com/TDO/nagen2.htm
First Spiritual Temple Mediumship, “The Fox Sisters”, pp. 1-7.
http://www.fst.org/fxsistrs.htm
Microsoft Word Encarta Dictionary: English (North America), “Medium” (definition).
Summie, Caitlin Hamilton. Press Release, Captivity by Deborah Noyes, Unbridled Books, May 14, 2010.
Unbridledbooks.com
Taylor, Troy. “The Fox Sister: The Rise and Fall of Spiritualism’s Founders”, pp. 1-2.
http://www.prairieghosts.com/foxsisters.html

Poets House: Touring the Spanking New Home for Poets and Poetry Lovers

Poets House: Touring the Spanking New Home for Poets and Poetry Lovers

By Doug Holder


Over the years I have attended Poets House showcases in their previous home in the SOHO section of NYC. Recently, Lee Briccetti, the director of Poets House contacted me when she heard I was doing a reading at the KGB Bar in the East Village. She wanted me to give me a private tour of their sprawling new facility in the Battery Park section of New York.



Poets House is well-situated in Battery Park City. In a New York Times article (Sept. 2009) it reports that Poets House has had a number of readings in the Park over the years, and some the ferries that navigate the nearby Hudson River are adorned with poetry from poets who participated in those readings. The Times reports: "...just a few yards south of the lily pond in Rockefeller Park, poems are engraved on the stones: Seamus Heaney's "Death of a Naturalist" and Mark Strand's "Continuous Life." The area was also the home to Herman Melville, Eugene O'Neill, and other acclaimed writers. So Poets House seems to be the perfect appointment.


Briccetti was called out of town on family matters, so Mike Romanos, the head of Children's Poetry at Poets House, was my guide for the afternoon. I also had a chance to speak with the librarian Maggie Balistreri. Accompanying me was Dr. Philip Segal of Queensborough Community College, and another distinguished guest: my Mom. Romanos reminded us that Poets House was founded in 1985 by poets Stanley Kunitz and Elizabeth Kray. Poets House has a great deal with their new space. The venue at 10 River Terrace comes with a lease of sixty five years, and it's rent free. They raised money from private and public sources in order to construct the interior. They share their first floor with the rest of the building at the ground level, and the second floor houses the poetry library and the other facilities that Poets House offers. Romanos told me that they have doubled their space.

There are many nooks and crannies to read, research or daydream. From the staircase, (which is wired for sound) you might trigger a spurt of verse from Robert Frost or a poet of his stature. And you might wake up from your daydream to see a photographic portrait of a favorite contemporary poet staring at you with probing eyes, like Robert Pinsky, or Robert Creeley (without the eye patch). These portraits are compliments of the photographer Lynn Saville.

Romanos, who has worked at Poets House for six years, told me that their first home was in the spartan digs of a home economics classroom in a public school in the city.

Poets House is beautifully appointed with mementos of the former Poet Laureate Stanley Kunitz, paintings by Philiph Guston ( a friend of Kunitz's), paintings by poet Basil King, a collection of postcards with people's favorite lines of poetry, and other points of interest.

Poets House has striking wood floors, glass walls, and a floating Calder mobile in the entryway. There is a fresh, transparent and welcoming sensibility to the whole environment. I had a chance to view their extensive chapbook collection, easily accessible to the public and housing up to 10,000 titles. One of the first titles I saw was by my old pal Connie Fox, Hugh Fox's drag counterpart, with his/her poetry collection "Blood Cocoon"

There is also a "New Book" section in the front part of the second floor. Books that were in the Poet's House Annual Showcase are on the shelf, and of course I checked to see if my collection " The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel" was there... and sure enough there it was. Also on the stand was Boston's Salamander Magazine, a few titles from Gloria Mindock's Cervena Barva Press of Somerville, Mass. to mention a few.

In the main collection there are 50,000 titles--quite a difference from the 1,500 titles they had in their early days.

Poets House has an ongoing schedule of workshops, events, readings, and classes throughout the year. They hold an annual poetry walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, where comedian Bill Murray reads some verse every year. Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" seems to be a favorite poem for this event.

During our time at Poets House I noticed the patrons ranged from mere babes, to folks in their dotage. There were tours of the facility through out the day. I saw one group of elated school kids from the Brownsville section of Brooklyn as they departed the building...bubling over no doubt about what they saw, read and heard.

Romanos showed me an old and very large Webster's International Dictionary that was owned by the late Stanley Kunitz. Romanos said school kids are amazed when they see this book. Unlike other generations books more and more play a secondary role to computers, etc.. A book this size, to them, is a relic of an ancient civilization!

After I presented Poets House with some new Ibbetson Street titles such as Zvi Sesling's " King of the Jungle," Kevin Gallagher's " Gringo Guadalupe," "Ibbetson Street 26," and "The Endicott Review" (the undergraduate lit. mag of Endicott College where I teach)I gave myself time to look through the impressive Poets House collection of poetry books. I ran across many poets I have met, corresponded with, interviewed and read. I felt like I was home--like I belonged there. Billy Murray, a great supporter of the House said "Poets need a refuge--they need a hideout, a clubhouse." And I think this is what the current director Lee Bricetti, Stanley Kunitz,(who died at 100 in 2006), and Elizabeth Kray envisioned. Poets House has been beautifully realized.

Charles Plymell : Eat Not Thy Mind Review by Paul Hawkins

Charles Plymell : Eat Not Thy Mind Review by Paul Hawkins



French translation by Jean-Marie Flémal in Bienvenue à Interzone

Eat Not Thy Mind is a piece of art. A collage by Claude Pelieu on the front cover and a foreward written by friend and bass spanker Mike Watt. This book comprises of 18 contemporary poems by the Outlaw Poet that is Charley Plymell. With love and care Glass Eye Books/Ecstatic Peace Library series editors Byron Coley and Thurston Moore have produced beautiful artifact. And that`s just the outside! Charley Plymell is rightly thought of as one of the best poets within the Amerikan literary underground. He has seen a lot since his birth on the Kansas high plains in 1935 and the early memories of the sound of the wind in the cab of an Reo Speedwagon truck. His father was a cowboy, his mother once a stunt car driver. He stormed out of Kansas with the likes of Bob Branaman, S. Clay Wilson, Michael McClure, Bruce Connor and the Wichita Punks speeding through the vortex, wailing and roaring north, south, east and west. Plymell and the Wichita Punks had road tested speed, dropped LSD, held mescaline rituals and experimented with art and other creative forms in the 1950`s. All trail blazers. He already had two volumes of poetry, Neon Poems and Apocalypse Rose out when in 1971 City Lights published his seminal novel, Last of The Moccasins. This novel grips, gleams and glistens with his hobohemian prose-style; spinning tales of his life in and around Wichita, his road trips to and from the West Coast along the Rt. 66 Benzedrine Highway and beyond, his crazy Hipster years and the boho life of his elder sister Betty. His words became sparks of energy, sparring partners to the mind. Eat Not Thy Mind`s lexeme glows incandescent in 21st century dark consciousness becoming the lubricant on which the freaky brain clouds part to reveal a head-on, vibrant and astute engagement with life. Charley`s words at once heady, seductive and intoxicatingly descriptive. His Hipster years melded into his psychedelic ones and he hit the handbrake in San Fransisco. Charley lived with Ginsberg and Neal Cassady, printed the first Zap Comix by Robert Crumb, wrote and wrote and wrote some more. Having burnt rubber and seen through the Beats Inc. Charley licked his wounds and wound up in Cherry Valley. He condemned the National Endowment for the Arts and his sharp and intelligent analysis appeared in the NY Times and other print outlets, spilling the beans on the NEA`s inbred favoritism. With his wife Pam they started Cherry Valley Editions publishing Herbert Huncke, William Burroughs, Roxie Powell, Claude Pelieu, Mary Beach to name but a few. Charley still and always will remain very firmly a poet. And what a poet. Always sensing where to cross the tracks from an early age, Charley`s Eat Not Thy Mind sends energy pulses soaring round the readers mind, birth pooling a new view on the present day madness, anutha zone of interrogation, a fresh windblast for the head and heart to get tanked up on and soar. Charley Plymell`s Eat Not Thy Mind is supreme.

Poet Marilyn Jurich: A poet interested in all things bizarre and unremunerative.

(Jurich--Left)









Poet Marilyn Jurich: A poet interested in all things bizarre and unremunerative.

By Doug Holder

Marilyn Jurich is a poet after my own heart. She is interested in the bizarre, and she doesn't make much money. Jurich, a winner of the Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award, and a professor at Suffolk University in Boston, has written about lusty wenches, and rogues in literature, as well as other characters of this ilk. In 2009 she released a collection of poems "Defying the Eyechart" ( Mayapple Press) that deals with her near brush with total blindness, among other topics. In spite of her condition Jurich continued to teach and live her life under severe duress. Marilyn is a scholar/poet and has written about children's literature, the Jewish experience, Science Fiction, to name just a few subjects. I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV show " Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."





Doug Holder: You had an harrowing experience with the eye condition Macular Degeneration,that was the theme of your poetry collection "Defying The Eye Chart." How has your experience with blindness affected your poetic vision?




Marilyn Jurich: First, the poetry collection DEFYING THE EYE CHART is not really about my own visual disability / "challenge" as people might say more euphemistically or favorably. Only the first three poems in the book discover the condition, and that "discovery" is slant (as Emily Dickinson might say). I dislike confessional poems -- unless they are wild like Plath's or recognize something outside of the eternal self and that pain and misery so associated. Thus, in "Resisting Blindness" I look at sightless scorpions, Cyclops who only had a single eye, at how a landscape painting looks to one visually compromised. I end this poem with this stanza:
Ghosts created by imperfect eyes
lift us into others' memory
connecting who we are.

There are several other poems on eyesight -- one concerned with madonnas and children in paintings, for in most the Virgin Mary and Christ child do not look into one another's eyes. There is a poem about my mother's death and the funeral director who wanted me to give her eyes "away," another poem called "Oedipus Visits the Ophthalmologist." And, of course, having a certain affliction makes you more aware of many circumstances that you might never have considered.

You ask how my poems, my poetic vision was affected by my loss of sight (now regained in one eye as a result of cataract surgery). Well, of course looking at eyes, creating imagery related to eyes and to vision was a fairly direct response. Other responses (at least consciously -- may be more unconscious ones) numerous: I actually saw things with limited vision I would not have seen before --totally ironic and rather wonderful; I developed an ear (my hearing always keen, this not a result of vision loss) for voices -- dramatic monologues; I am a failed musician and transferred a musical sense to the poems; I felt a keen sympathy for handicapped people, a need to be angry and strong for them; the fantasy of sight (especially when I was hemorrhaging) and the fantastic encounters with those I consulted, both conventional doctors and atypical healer types, gave me a new perspective on the world -- total insanity and vast incompetence. Of course, I was also angry -- that gave me a strong voice and a courage I never had, INCLUDING the courage to write poems.




DH: How did you manage to teach with this disability?



MJ: I managed to teach classes with little sight and with no ability to focus or to see faces. (Nor could I make out the letters on the front of trains and frequently arrived at the wrong destination.) Well, when I look back at this "adventure," I don't know how I did it. I think I must have been crazy. I also feel very smug about this. Not one student knew that I couldn't really see. I distinguished students by gesture, by curve of body, by voice (though lots of students do prefer to remain silent). I graded papers by an accumulated 1000 watts. I read slowly and painfully, frequently adjusting the angle of chair, lamp, my own posture. Hardest, and still hard, are walking down stairs. I edged along each stair, surreptiously feeling for a decline, frequently counted the number of stairs in the buildings I frequented. Often I felt that I was ignoring someone in the hall or on the street who may have been smiling or nodding a "hello." Social contacts were very difficult. Some still are, as the right side is often too blurry for me to make out the face I should know.





DH: How do you feel about the academic world and book biz and how it promotes, interferes with creating literature, art, and honest expression?


MJ: Well, if I were the out-going, well-adjusted, uninhibited, at-ease, "hail female, well-met," I might think differently. Since I not the person just described -- nor was I ever even with "normal eyes -- I cannot self-promote, make contacts, network, market, push. While I often like to read some of my poems -- like to dramatize -- I am frequently uncertain of my own delivery. I am also over-nervous. It all depends on the group, of course. At the sessions at the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts (a member for umpteen years), I am relaxed. All the others are as zany as I am -- we share the same interests and we trust one another. They are interesting in forming meaningful, well-expressed poems and in sharing ideas and criticism. We know we are not "getting ahead," filing up credits, appealing for distinction, awards, position. Also, we are all basically "poor" -- won't make anything on what we do. What was absolutely appalling to me was the absence of ANY response to my collection of poems. It did receive an honorable mention from the New England Poetry Club; it did receive a very few nice comments from e-journals. That's it. No one else commented -- no accolades desired here, just a "Oh, I really could feel . . ." or "Why did you use-----in that poem?" or "You know, I think you should have ended that poem at. . . ." Actually, I wrote to several critics and urged them to HATE the book. Absence and indifference are apparently worse for children than cruel parents or parents who are argumentive with one another. I want a community of writers / poets who are not solipsistic, narcissistic,contemplating their next cocktail party in between contemplating their superlative navels.



DH: In 2005 you got a faculty development grant to study English chapbooks of the 18th century. Can you tell us a bit about your study and the history of the "chapbook."


MJ: True to my tendency of being interested in all things bizarre and unremunerative, I am infatuated by chapbooks (which, by the way, exist all over the world and are kept in archives). My answer will have to be abbreviated here. Chapbooks have a very long history; these are unbound books are a variety of subjects both factual and fictional, prose and poety. They were carried in packs on the backs of chapmen. (Chap comes from ceop, middle-English for "cheap.") Costing several pence, they were affordable by the lower classes who could also understand the plain-spoken words and the subject matter. Of course, since literacy was limited, many had to be recited by several in the village who had the skill of reading. In fact, it is widely thought that the very existence of chapbooks led to literacy. Also, many of the stories told of small men who "made good"; in this sense, the chapbook encouraged a spirit of advancement, praised effort and ambition over class privilege and aristocracy.

The books are often humorous, satirical, sexy; chapbooks also preserved all the old fairytales and myths -- are considered the first form of children's literature. They also reprinted versions of Defoe and Swift, works of Tom Paine, as well as take-offs on Shakespeare. While conventionally, such materials are printed as 8 page sheets, there are chapbooks that exceed 100 pages (as The Life of Mahamet ). Especially interesting for me are the rogue tales, the depiction of other cultures through some of the travel adventures, the strong images of women who are capable and speak their MINDS.

I have collected what I consider the best of these materials (though frustrated by the many more that I know must exist); I need to write a book, but what will happen to the POEM??? If anyone is interested in doing such investigatory work in this field, let me know. And there is also the 17th century English chapbook and the American chapbooks of the 19th century!


DH: I know you have a new collection planned. What are we in store for?

MJ: I'm a little superstitious here and that mums me; but I am also uncertain about what I am doing. I have several long poems I may want to include. I'd really like to write a verse drama for the book. I also have children's poems and some more to write. I used to write a lot of funny poems and want to gain or regain this facility. Also, there is the "personal life" and how this can / will fit in. All this in the stage of unknowing -- and sometimes thinking about writing a poem in a world that is unworlding or at least stumbling in that direction seems pointless and conceited. I need someone to tell me "It's okay."



Reading the Eye Chart

by Marilyn Jurich


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trick the gullible eye --
Lines stick out their tongues, diagonals curve.
Vipers hiss from Druid stones under a white sky.
Advancing shadows dance or die,
trick the gullible eye --
embracing fitful ghosts, longing to tie
circle-line to sense before they swerve,
trick the gullible eye.
Lines stick out their tongues, diagonals curve.

This is the alphabet of ferns
singing between the passages of wind.
Dream language of the lover who yearns
for echoing syllable as he gently turns.
This is the alphabet of ferns.
Whoever learns to see one code, design… listen and rescind.
This is the alphabet of ferns
singing between the passages of wind.

Unraveling my soul by what I see
you count how close I come to hold desire,
gauge my level of normality
according to whether I call the shrinking letter E,
unraveling my soul by what I see,
convinced the eye uncovers mystery --
omphalos to everything we can aspire.
Unraveling my soul by what I see,
you count how close I come to hold desire

A Boston Poet Tea Party: A Poetry Summer Marathon: July 30 to 31 2010

A Boston Poet Tea Party


A Boston Poet Tea Party

A Summer Poetry Marathon
featuring 88 local and visiting poets
reading for 8 minutes apiece

Friday 7/30, 7:00 p.m.-10:00 p.m.
Pierre Menard Gallery
10 Arrow St., Harvard Square, Cambridge

Saturday 7/31, 12 noon-10:00 p.m.
Sunday 8/1, 12 noon-5:00 p.m.
OUTPOST 186
186 1/2 Hampshire St., Inman Square, Cambridge

Featuring readings from: Seth Abramson, Kari Adelaide, Dena Barisano, Kish Song Bear, Jim Behrle, Ana Božičević, Oni Buchanan, Mairead Byrne, Macgregor Card, Mick Carr, Kate Colby, John Coletti, John Cotter, Amanda Cook, James Cook, Mike County, Amy D'Eath, Gillian Devereux ,Thom Donovan, Valerie Duff-Strauttman, Jim Dunn, Joe Elliot, Derek Fenner, Annie Finch, Greg Fuchs, Michael Franco, Elisa Gabbert, Michael Gizzi, Peter Gizzi, Kythe Heller, Mitch Highfill, Doug Holder, Fanny Howe, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Andrew Hughes, Geoff Huth, N. F. Huth, Brenda Iijima, Lauren Ireland, Boni Joi, Ellen Kennedy, Aaron Kiely, Jack Kimball, Amy King, David Kirschenbaum, Mark Lamoureux, Gerrit Lansing, Tanya Larkin, Dorothea Lasky, Ruth Lepson, Brendan Lorber, Lori Lubeski, Bridget Madden, Douglas Manson, Fred Marchant, Filip Marinovich, Chris Martin, Joseph Massey, Ben Mazur, Gillian McCain, Suzanne Mercury, Hannah K. Messler, Debrah Morkun, Jason Morris, Anna Moschovakis, John Mulrooney, Eileen Myles, Jess Mynes, Amanda Nadelberg, Urayoan Noel, Martha Oatis, Geoffrey Olsen, January Gill O'Neil, Nathaniel Otting, Chad Parenteau, Kate Peebles, David Rivard, Chris Rizzo, Steve Roberts, Carlos Soto Roman, Douglas N. Rothschild, Lauren Russell, Kate Schapira, Alan Semerdijian, Minal Shekhawat, Nathaniel Siegel, Joel Sloman, Kimberly Ann Southwick, Chuck Stebleton, Aaron Tieger, Joe Torra, Dana Ward, Jacqueline Waters, Dustin Williamson, Elizabeth Willis, Rebecca Wolff, Angela Veronica Wong, Jon Woodward, and Elizabeth Marie Young with more TBA.

Organized by Jim Behrle, Michael Carr,
David Kirschenbaum, John Mulrooney, and Aaron Tieger



Here's the current schedule:


Friday 7/307:00 Joe Torra7:08 Jack Kimball7:16 Minal Shekhawat7:24 January O'Neil7:32 Geoffrey Olsen7:40 Kari Adelaide7:48 Elisa Gabbertbreak8:04 Thom Donovan8:12 Joan Houlihan8:20 John Cotter8:28 Dorothea Lasky8:36 Tanya Larkin8:44 Jibade-Khalil Huffman8:52 David Rivardbreak9:08 Greg Fuchs9:16 Pierre Joris9:24 Buck Downs9:32 Eileen Miles9:40 Martha Oatis9:48 Lori Lubeski9:56 Nicole Peyrafitte


Saturday 7/3112:00 Lauren Russell12:08 Suzanne Mercury12:16 Bridget Madden12:24 Seth Abramson12:32 Steve Roberts12:40 Cate Peeblesbreak12:56 Nathaniel Siegel1:04 Nathaniel Otting1:12 Dana Ward1:20 Doug Holder1:28 Mark Lamoureux1:36 Debrah Morkunbreak1:52 Chris Rizzo2:00 Ellen Kennedy2:08 Kate Colby2:16 Betsy Wheeler2:24 Douglas Manson2:32 Valerie Duff-Strauttmanbreak2:48 Kimberly Ann Southwick2:56 Mike County3:04 Andrew Hughes3:12 Amanda Cook3:20 Lauren Ireland3:28 Joel Slomanbreak3:44 James Cook3:56 Filip Marinovich4:04 Alan Semerdijian4:12 Urayoan Noel4:28 Jim Dunn4:36 Kythe Heller4:44 Lynn Behrendt5:00 Derek Fenner5:08 Joe Elliot5:16 Boni Joi5:24 Amanda Nadelberg5:32 Brenda Iijima5:40 Chad Parenteau 7:00 Jacqueline Waters7:08 Jess Mynes7:16 Chris Martin7:24 Elizabeth Willis7:32 Mitch Highfill7:40 Peter Gizzi7:48 Michael Gottliebbreak8:04 Jon Woodward8:12 Rebecca Wolff8:20 Brendan Lorber8:28 Gillian McCain8:36 Dustin Williamson8:44 Oni Buchanan8:52 Geof Huthbreak9:08 Joseph Massey9:16 Macgregor Card9:24 Elizabeth Marie Young9:32 Kish Song Bear9:40 Aaron Kiely9:48 Carlos Soto Roman9:56 Douglas N. Rothschild



Sunday 8/112:00 Michael Franco12:08 N. F. Huth12:16 Jessica Bozek12:24 Fred Marchant12:32 Angela Veronica Wong12:40 Ruth Lepsonbreak12:56 Annie Finch1:04 John Mulrooney1:12 David Kirschenbaum1:20 John Coletti1:28 Gerrit Lansing1:36 Fanny Howebreak1:52 Anna Moschovakis2:00 Michael Gizzi2:08 Ana Božičević2:16 Aaron Tieger2:24 Chuck Stebleton2:32 Mairead Byrnebreak2:48 Ben Mazer2:54 Amy King3:02 Michael Carr3:10 Janaka Stucky3:18 Gillian Devereux3:26 Laura Simsbreak3:42 Jason Morris3:50 Amy D'Eath3:58 Andi Pinto4:06 Kate Schapira4:14 Hannah K. Messler4:20 Molly Saccardobreak4:36 Chris Jackson4:44 Dena Barisano4:52 Cheryl Clark Vermeulen5:00 Jim Behrle

TEELE SQUARE WRITER IS AN "ODDBALL"

TEELE SQUARE WRITER IS AN "ODDBALL"

By Doug Holder

Jason Wright, a Somerville resident for the past 5 years is a self-described oddball. This 30 year old writer, waiter, and online magazine founder of "ODDBALL" magazine, like many young Somervillians pines to make his mark in the publishing industry. Wright, works at Bertucci's at Alewife Station to keep food on the table and just finished a certificate program in publishing at Emerson College. He stopped by to chat with me at my usual Saturday morning perch at the Au Bon Pain cafe in Davis Square.

Wright is a productive writer who started ODDBALL magazine when he was 16. It covers many subjects. It includes his own eclectic brand of poetry and prose, as well as profiles of interesting characters he runs across. Wright said the magazine gives a voice to the outsiders, and is in a way therapeutic for him. Wright who has a fondness for the philosopher Nietzsche paraphrases him to explain why he writes: ""Through chaos a star is born."

ODDBALL magazine is in blog format, and Wright traces his progress during his day to day. Wright describes it as as a poetry and graffiti magazine from Boston, Ma, that is dedicated to giving the voiceless a voice. There are accounts of his trial and travails as a writer, poetry that speaks to his unique frame of mind, as well as interesting profile (with YouTube video) of Pat Bartevian, who runs a small consignment shop in Boston. This archaic little store is sandwiched in between tall buildings in downtown Boston. It seems that this charmingly eccentric woman was a member of the long forgotten 40's singing group the " Hickory Sisters." Bartevian has tales of gigs with "old blue eyes" himself Frank Sinatra, and other famed crooners.

Wright has a B.A. in English from U/Mass Boston and studied with such distinguished Somerville writers on faculty like Joe Torra and Lloyd Schwartz. He also attended Bunker Hill Community College where yours truly is currently on faculty.

Living in Somerville is a great deal for Wright. His girlfriend works at Rounder Records, and he loves Johnny D's (he used to work there), and other venues. He told me that Somerville is a small city with a big city mentality.

Wright said he has twelve books of unpublished poetry. He has also written an unpublished work: " Journal of a Mad Man."

To finish his certificate requirements at Emerson College Wright is formulating a business plan for his nascent small press, and he is also penning a mission statement for his magazine. He is working on getting all the paperwork done that is necessary to have a legitimate enterprise.

Wright recently attended a lecture by Gloria Mindock the founder of the Cervena Barva Press at Emerson College. Both Mindock and myself are excited about the prospect of yet another publication playing a part in our rich literary milieu.


Check out ODDBALL Magazine: http://www. oddballmagazine.wordpress.com

CD Review: Dan Blakeslee’s “Tatnic Tales” / Pea Pod Recordings (2010)

CD Review: Dan Blakeslee’s “Tatnic Tales” / Pea Pod Recordings (2010)




REVIEW BY:
Reza Tokaloo




The name Dan Blakeslee seems to be getting around town (Boston area) more and more these days. This well established graphic artist is also a budding singer/songwriter/guitarist with an up coming CD to be out on Pea Pod Recordings: “Tatric Tales.” Sporting a well done cover by Blakeslee, “Tales” is a 10 song CD with the songs devised in an album format: the first 5 songs under side A, and the last 5 songs under side B.

Now to the music!

Blakeslee’s band is a very solid instrument playing troupe, with all of the musicians adept and dependable, supporting Blakeslee’s voice very well. The songs are a blend of American musical styles: American folk, southern country, jazz, blues, and also some good old fashioned rock n roll. Blakeslee keeps his singing within a melancholy range. No yelling, screaming, or falsettos here. His lyrics maintaining good folk-style story telling that also contain images of nature and life that produce vivid realizations for the listener. You can feel the movement and rumble of a train ride in the song “Wizard Nor King.” The songs, and the musical styles, are spread out nicely like a finely made carpet. Rock, folk, mountain song, and jazz meet and blend well together in a “down home” meets modern concoction that can work in a variety of musical settings, either in a smoky pub or on a CD. Other great tracks to check out on this album are: “The Swinger” (a sort of saloon folk-a-billy), “Shifting of Sand” (country with some soulful blues set to a waltzing folk beat), and “On the Watch” (very solid country beat).

Keep an eye out for Dan Blakeslee and his group. His will be a name we will be hearing from in the future.

Poet/ Performance Artist Michael Mack: Honoring His Mother's Tragic Life

Poet/ Performance Artist Michael Mack: Honoring His Mother's Tragic Life

Interview with Doug Holder



After serving in the US Air Force as an aircraft crew chief, Michael Mack worked a variety of factory and labor jobs before returning to school and graduating from the Writing Program at MIT.

Mack has performed at the US Library of Congress, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, the Columbia Festival of the Arts, Philadelphia Fringe Festival, the Austin International Poetry Festival, and Off-Off-Broadway at the Times Square Arts Center.

His work has aired on NPR, and has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), America, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Cumberland Poetry Review, and is featured in Best Catholic Writing 2005.

Mack has also performed at scores of venues for consumers and providers of mental health services, including McLean Psychiatric Hospital, the national conference of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), and for faculty and students of the Harvard Medical School and Yale Medical School.

Awards include an Artist's Grant for new theater works from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, First Prize in the Writers Circle National Poetry Competition, and an Eloranta Fellowship, which funded a residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre for the Arts in Ireland.

Mack lives in the Boston area, supplementing his work as a poet and performer with assignments as a freelance writer.

I spoke with him on my Somerville Community Access TV show " Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."







Doug Holder: Mike your mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia right?

Michael Mack: Yes, she was diagnosed when I was five. As you know, it’s a life long commitment not only for the people who have the illness, but also the family. It is the kind of illness that ripples out in many ways.

Doug Holder: You wrote a play about your experience with her while growing up titled: “Hearing Voices, Speaking in Tongues.”


Michael Mack: I am grateful to say I performed all over the country with it. When I first started writing it; I really didn’t understand what I was writing. All I know I was writing sketches, poems, about my earlier life. I wrote about Mama, Dad, about how we all were trying to navigate the illness. It was in 1985 when I first scratched out that first line.

For me as a kid to see my mom in the state hospital, heavily medicated with thorazine—well, the term to describe what was being done to her was warehousing. Just give them enough drugs—so the patients won’t give you any trouble.

Doug Holder: You are a versatile artist: Performer, Playwright, Poet. To which role do you identify most closely?

Michael Mack: Everything starts with my spiritual life. I was raised Catholic. I am no longer a practicing Catholic. But the spiritual life is still central. So everything springs out of that. The poetry and the playwriting.


Doug Holder: What do you mean by the “spiritual life.”

Michael Mack: Well, I have heard it said you can leave the Catholic Church, but the Church doesn’t leave you. I think the Church has informed a lot of my life. But I moved on to explore other religious teachings. My poetry accesses that same center the spiritual does. Before every show I invoke the spirit of my late mother.

Doug Holder: If your mother were alive would she feel that you exploited her for your work?

Michael Mack: That is a great question. My dream had been for a long time than Mama would see the show and after I finished she would come up and take a bow. That never happened. She died before that could happen. When I first told her that I was writing about her—that I was starting to perform this show—she didn’t want anything to do with it. For her it brought up a lot of memories that she didn’t want to watch on stage. She started to come around though.

Once I took her to a poetry open mic in Baltimore. We sat down. Poets started getting up to read. She was dumbfounded. It was like she never saw anything like this in her life. For weeks afterward she said: “There is this place you can go in front of a microphone—and say whatever you want and the FBI won’t get you.” From then on I think she was starting to think more positively about seeing the show. Unfortunately—a couple of months later she died of colon cancer—she was 73.

Everybody in the family has seen the show. My father flew up to see me perform it. He sat in the front row. I couldn’t look at him. After the show he said, “ You know son, you spend your whole life with your kids, and you think you know them. And then you see your son doing this and its beautiful.” I’m pleased to say I have the family stamp of approval.

Doug Holder: How was it performing the play in mental hospital for patients?

Michael Mack: I had to take a poetic leap of faith to capture the experience of someone else. When I first performed it in hospitals I was very anxious about that. I am pleased to say the response has been quite positive. Almost to a person, people who have a major mental illness said they appreciate having somebody giving voice to the experience. I would like to see more people with mental illness have an opportunity to give voice to their experience through the arts. I want them to tell us what it is like.

Doug Holder: Why do you think there is so much mental illness between artist and poets? Look at Lowell, Plath and Sexton, for instance.

Michael Mack. I can’t speak as a clinician. People with mental illness, I think, as well as artists, often have a more direct access to those feelings, thoughts, to the dream world. We all have access to this when we sleep, but I am guessing that artists and poets have more access to that dream world in their day-to-day life. The trick is to managing it in the day to day.


For more information about Mack go to: www.michaelmacklive.com


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


becoming annie


who wakes in a wrinkled cotton nightie.

She watches a luminous hand

touch her ticking wrist.



Becoming Annie, who groans and walks



to a medicine chest, rummages for her rosary,

finds a Band-Aid box of buttons and dimes,

one gown propped in the closet.



Are we becoming Annie?



Trailing water, she bends for the stairs

and squeaks down the banister,

dropping lilies of tissue paper.



Barely aware we could be Annie



we cannot remember what to forget,

pray to ourselves in baby voices,

lose names, faces, keys,



till one night we see Annie



sailing out our doorway,

gown lisping over the porch

sidelong to the street.



May a city rise in the gleam of our breathing.

May love brush its sudden

feathers on our bodies,



our running feet.


– michael mack

Palazzo Inverso by D. B. Johnson

Palazzo Inverso
D. B. Johnson
Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt Children’s Book Group
www.hmhbooks.com
$17.00

“I don’t grow up. In me is the small child of my early days.” As we prepare to enter the upside-down world of Mauk, his Master and a host of carpenters, bricklayers and other workers, we are welcomed by this Escher quote. Impossible Structures – M. C. Escher was famous for creating them and Mauk, the pencil-sharpening apprentice who just may have turned the blueprints every so slightly on numerous occasions when his master was not looking, created a very Escher-like impossible structure in “Palazzo Inverso.” What a gem of a children’s book D. B. Johnson has written! And for those adults fascinated by the mathematical artistic creations of M. C. Escher, a quick topsy-turvy read of Palazzo Inverso will be a welcome adventure.

When Mauk enters the Palazzo for work one morning he finds carpenters standing on their heads and bricks being spilled onto the ceiling. Mauk finds that he, too, is running the staircase down to the tower! Mauk longed to draw but was never allowed to. His input came while the Master was doing other things and Mauk turned the drawings ever so slightly. When the Master went back to drawing, the blueprints became very strange indeed. Mauk was delighted by the way the structure had evolved, though his Master was not amused. As Mauk runs to escape the agitation of the Master, a wonderful, fun chase takes place through the Palazzo. What Mauk does not realize is that at some point during the chase all of the workers and the Master began laughing with Mauk. A new and wonderful world had been created. Topsy-turvy wasn’t so terrible after all. Perhaps it’s in the way we look at things and impossible structures may not be so impossible in the world of our imagination. Find a child to read to and enjoy the never-ending loop of this book. Or pick up the book yourself and read it for the fun of it. Remember, if anyone is looking, just remind them that life is a far more lively adventure if we never grow up.

************Rene Schwiesow is co-owner of the online poetry forum Poem Train. She is one of the co-hosts of the Mike Amado Memorial Series, Poetry: The Art of Words in Plymouth and Director of the newly formed Plymouth County Coalition for the Arts.

4th annual Ibbetson Street Poetry Contest Deadline Sept 15, 2010

4th annual Ibbetson Street Poetry Contest





Ibbetson Street Press is pleased to announce the 4th annual Ibbetson Street Poetry Contest.

The winner of the Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Contest award (must be a Massachusetts resident) will receive a $100 cash award, a framed certificate, publication in the literary journal "Ibbetson Street" http://ibbetsonpress.com/ and a poetry feature in the "Lyrical Somerville," in The Somerville News. The award will be presented at the Somerville News Writers Festival: November 13, 2010. The Somerville News Writers Festival is in its eight year and has hosted such writers and poets as: Rick Moody, Franz Wright, Robert Olen Butler, Sue Miller, Tom Perrotta, Steve Almond, Sam Cornish, Margot Livesey, Robert Pinsky, and many others. The Festival was founded by Timothy Gager and Doug Holder in 2003, and has been sponsored by The Somerville News, GRUB STREET, Porter Square Books and others.

To enter send 3 to 5 poems, any genre, length, to the Ibbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143. Entry fee is $10. Cash or check only. Make payable to "Ibbetson Street Press." Deadline: Sept 15, 2010.

The contest will be judged by The Somerville News Arts Editor and founder of the Ibbetson Street Press, Doug Holder http://dougholderresume.blogspot.com.

The winners will be announced at the Somerville News Writer's festival, where they will receive his or her award. A runner up will be announced as well.

Somerville Musician Dan Blakeslee lives honestly and lives modestly.

Somerville Musician Dan Blakeslee lives honestly and lives modestly.



By Doug Holder





Somerville musician and artist Dan Blakeslee exudes a frenetic energy from his diminutive frame. No, he is not on drugs or booze. He told me that he doesn’t have a taste for either. But he is a man who obviously has a passion for his mission—that being his art. I met with him at the Saturday morning meeting of the Bagel Bards that meets at the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square.



Blakeslee lives in the Teele Square section of Somerville, Mass., but he is a native son of South Berwick, Maine. Although he has strayed from the ‘ville on more than one occasion; he is very happy to be smack dab in the “ Paris of New England.” Blakeslee said, “ I have grown as an artist here.” We discussed the fact that many artists of my acquaintance have defected to the wilds of Brooklyn and other places South of the Charles River. Blakeslee replied,” Somerville is my Brooklyn.”



I first encountered Blakeslee at a guitar contest that I was judging at the Bloc 11 Café in Union Square. I was impressed by the artistry of his guitar playing and the passion he brought to his songs. Blakeslee describes his music as “Modern Folk.” He said: “It is a hybrid between Country and Folk.” Being the Bard that I am I asked Blakeslee if he was inspired by any poets. He mentioned the poet Robert Dunn. “ I love wordplay, and Dunn is the king. He writes short and potent poems.” And of course Blakeslee is influenced by such iconic songwriters as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, to mention just a couple.



Blakeslee is an accomplished poster artist as well. He makes posters for any number of the gigs he has in clubs in the area. He said he has been influenced by the 1930s artist Rockwell Kent, who among other things was a draftsman and accomplished print maker.

Blakeslee who graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art , designs posters that are a mixture of the surrealistic and the comic.


Blakeslee has a new CD coming out of his music titled TATNIC TALES, based on a rural part of South Berwick, Maine, where he grew up. He said he and his fellow musicians recorded the CD in a bird-dung infested old barn. The CD will be released on June 13, 2010. On Oct. 6 Blakeslee will have a CD release concert at Club Passim in the Republic of Cambridge. And if you attend you can get a vinyl album available only at the concert.

I asked Blakeslee about his philosophy of life, he said: "Live honestly; Live modestly," and you know--I sort of think the man practices what he preaches.

Dan wrote the News:


Here are the lyrics to my song "On The Watch" which is on the album "Tatnic Tales" due out July 13th. It's the song I was describing to you of a real story that happened to me while playing a late night subway set down in Copley Station:


ON THE WATCH

By Dan Blakeslee

Written on January 1, 2009



Last night I played deep in the tunnels of town.

Bear witness my trade if you took the rails underground.



The smoke and the signals they gave me a sign.

I'm far from the whispering pines.

Tonight I am stuck with luck being blind.

And I feel someone watching me.



A few stragglers hear that greed has me under its blade.

As my words fell so desperate those witnessing fade.



Just then a stinging scent took the room.

Of Listerine, oil and perfume.

Somewhere between darkness and doom.

I feel someone watching me.



In through the gate came an Indian tall as an oak.

Just a wandering drunk I though as he saw me and spoke.



"Surrender your song and your fortune too!"

As fury in my eyes it grew.

Then across the tracks came the boys in blue.
Which left no one watching me.

My Fix Takes Another Twist: A Review Of Stephen Kessler’s The Mental Traveler

My Fix Takes Another Twist: A Review Of Stephen Kessler’s The Mental Traveler


By John Flynn


Poet, translator, essayist and Redwood Coast Review editor Stephen Kessler in his first novel has penned an honest, articulate and arresting auto-biographical nightmare odyssey of 23-year-old UC Santa Cruz dropout Stephen the K. Starting with Love Creek Lodge in Central California, and getting high with the older loving maternal Nona, Stephen’s Kafkaesque journey takes him, ultimately, to an understanding that “the world was the poem.”


Stephen abandons graduate studies in English for a confused trek into all his fathers. My favorite part of the novel was the description of the Altamont Speedway Festival of 1969, where Stephen’s day peaks with a spontaneous friendship with a fellow named Norm. The memory of that day stays with Stephen as his spiritual trek lands him in treatment at San Francisco General Hospital, to consoling friends in Benedict Canyon, to maverick eccentric profs at UC Santa Cruz, and to City Prison where Stephen becomes a bard behind bars and admits “A pattern was emerging. Each time it seemed my ordeal was about to end, something went wrong and my fix would take another twist.”


Stephen’s fix is rendered in a frank disciplined telling, a torturous soul-searching identity quest that exemplifies the youth-to-age anguish of his generation at that time. Thorazine, hitchhiking, the Zodiac Killer, acid trips, hashish, instant poems, earthy pot-smoking friends, the experimental psychiatric wing of Franciscan Santa Cruz Hospital, talk of Nixonian politics and the Vietnam war, a move to Beverly Hills and St. James Hospital in Santa Monica “because the revolution would have to include Hollywood.”


Spiraling out of control, Stephen cloys to the LA shrink El Silver Man, to street philosophers, Dylan songs, poems, fellow inmates, ward residents, a casual-sex girlfriend with a split personality. He escapes more than once from his various nuthouses. More than once he willingly returns. He rambles along certain of his purpose if only he can discover it, “the gods of the revolution secretly directing my trip.”


In the end, he returns to Santa Cruz County General Hospital, not bereft of hope, but in despair, addled on Thorazine, lost and growing aware of patron saints of lost causes, the art of obedience, choosing to “play it straight” if only to avoid electroshock therapy and a lobotomy, “deeper into despair of ever escaping…the drama of my so-called psychosis had ceased to be entertaining.”
Unable to write, he continued to read poetry, particularly Robert Bly. He then began “working on another life.”


There’s no miraculous coming of age here. No pat answer, quirky minimalism or self-indulgent dream sequences. It’s about the story, plainly told. For readers like me from the East Coast who were children during the Vietnam War era, this novel offers a close, uncompromising look at a specific time and place, and a universal examination of one artist’s sojourn into fragile self-awareness.

Ibbetson Street 27-- New Issue Due out Late June 2010 ( Front Cover)

(Click on picture to Enlarge)





The new issue of the Ibbetson Street Press will be out in late June. In this issue we will have the fine poetry of Miriam Levine, two colleagues of mine from Endicott College Dan Sklar and Margaret Young, as well as Lo Galluccio, Kate Chadbourne, Mary Rice, Dorian Brooks, Lainie Senechal and many others... The Front Cover photo is by Kirk Etherton, whose poem also appears in this issue... Design of this issue is by Steve Glines.

Review of NAME THE GLORY by Molly Mattfield Bennett

Review of NAME THE GLORY by Molly Mattfield Bennett, Wilderness House Press, 145 Foster Street, Littleton, Massachusetts 01460, 2010, 37 pages

By Barbara Bialick

My first inclination when looking at the striking red background with a black and white photo of winter branches on the cover of Name the Glory was to well, try to name the Glory. Was it the Glory of God, of Nature, of Love? After reading the book, it seems to me it was all this and more…spiritual glory, the glory of childhood, and as she expresses throughout the book’s four parts, or seasons, “Name the glory of the seasons that circle the year.” The book includes a dozen black and white photographs, including the cover photo by Elizabeth A. Bennett.

But who or Who or what is she asking to name all the glory? That’s for the reader to decide. The book is all one grand poem with two voices—that of an adult speaker’s soliloquy on the circle of life (“Name the glory of a spring morning/and a boy and a girl/free to roam”), in counterpoint to a chorus of children’s voices making a colorful play with the ABC’s: “A is for aunties arguing with aardvarks/B is for bisons beckoning baboons…”

There’s a temptation to take you all through the poem’s seasons, but this is one long poem that just keeps getting deeper and deeper into the natural spiral. The fun is to interpret the poem as you weave through it. I urge you to read the book yourself, for it’s done with wit and wisdom that sometimes reminds one of a female Walt Whitman asking nature to explain itself.

“Name the glory of mind filling the quiet/with thought on thought/until someone breaks in with a word, a touch…” (“Out in the schoolyard the children chant/Q is for querulous Quentin who quizzed quails/R is for rabbits and raccoons rafting the water…”)

A strong stanza near the end of the book reads, “Name the power of those who have no fear/of the dark/they see what they see and know its name.” But coming in right with that is “Name the glory of words that beckon…” This book is not just about life but poetry and the power of words well used. The author, Molly Mattfield Bennett, describes herself as a poet-educator, She writes, “I have taught many young children and their teachers. With Name the Glory I have tried to write my loves into a single poem.” Bennett is a resident of Quincy, Massachusetts, along with her husband, Sheldon.

Salt for the Dead: ‘Passions’ by Denis Emorine

Salt for the Dead: ‘Passions’ by Denis Emorine

article by Michael T. Steffen



Sometimes while watching or reading drama we’re struck by an insight, however subjective, that the theatre the author is presenting to us is the theatre of our own mind. The notion was impressed convincingly upon me once as I read ‘Othello’ and realized that Iago was not an actor of acts, but a protagonist, in the true sense of the word, of the tragic hero’s passions. That is, Iago is the powerful agent of Doubt within Othello’s own psyche.
It’s interesting that Denis Emorine’s one-act monodrama ‘Passions’ (released earlier this year by Červená Barva Press) so deftly evokes this sense of isolated inner psychology, though unusually the drama of ‘Passions’ takes place in the wake of a personal crisis or tragedy, and the tables are turned. The protagonist, Frank, now has nothing to say. He lies on a bed motionless and speechless throughout the short play. Frederick, we gather from his bitter and plaintive monologue, has been the victim of a conspiracy (just what we are not told specifically) which Frank and another referred to as George have played out on him.
This whole displacement of focus from the acts that build to a climax, to the worded invective after, makes a good point in its demonstration of the destructive senseless gestures of regret and spite. We sense throughout the first half of the act that Frederick’s wounded pride is fruitless. He can’t even evoke the events of Frank and George’s treachery, and we suspect moreover, because of this lack of details, that Frederick in fact has no case whatsoever, that he is suffering from delusions.
A further and more poignant point made by ‘Passions’ comes to our awareness when the insularity of the drama is disrupted toward the end of the play by the sound of footsteps rushing to the door outside the room. Here Frederick must realize that he has only deepened his own dilemma by elaborating his grief against his companion. Threatened by the arrival of a soldier, Frederick’s roaring indignation is deflated. He is again frightened and pleading for Frank to help him. At this moment Frank’s unresponsiveness grows haunted and meaningful.
Emorine’s vision operates in terms of shadows and impulses, at the vanities of the essential soul, revealing his subjects unflinchingly at precisely their weakest, at the waste of their own worst powers. In its modest format of a chapbook, ‘Passions’ lurks with dark energy under the surface and filter of our all too frail human confidence.



‘Passions’ by Denis Emorine
published by Červená Barva Press
P.O. Box 440357
W. Somerville, MA 02144-3222
is sold for $7
see thelostbookshelf.com

The World In A Minute by Gary Lenhart

The World In A Minute
by Gary Lenhart
Hanging Loose Press
© Copyright 2010 Gary Lenhart
Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn NY
Softbound, 58 pages, $18
ISBN 978-1-934909-12-6


Review by Zvi A. Sesling


The blurb says The World In A Minute is Gary Lenhart’s fourth collection of poetry, along with one volume of selected prose and his book on poetry and social class. But
this is about poetry and it is easy to see his has built on his past publications to achieve an entertaining volume of poetry and prose poetry.

Lenhart presents sly humor, history and personal commentary in an easily accessible manner. In “A Note on Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams” for example
in writing about his wife or girlfriend:

Louise, roused prematurely
yesterday at dawn, groused:
“Have the birds always sung so loud?”


Yes, the little buggers make a racked
these midsummer morns,
chasing each other up and down,
Creating one flap after another.


When it comes to history he expounds on Eugene V. Debs, the ancient Roman port of Ostia and a devastating account of T.S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism which few poets or critics dare to take on because even though he is not the icon he once was, Eliot remains a pillar of the poetic community. Yet just as Eliot let his feelings be known, so did ee cummings,
W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound and others.

I remember reading an introduction to cummings once in which the writer stated cummings wasn’t really anti-Semitic, it was just fashionable at the time. Sure, there’s always an excuse for that sort of thing those who don’t know better say or write. But Lenhart did not let it go.

Lenhart also, in the title poem, which is a series of prose poem vignettes recalls how the great poet Carl Rakosi, at age 100 suffered a stroke and to check his awareness discovered he did not know the day or the month it was so asked him “Do you know who is president?” Rakosi responded, “Bush...the bastard.”

There is much more humor, some obvious, some more subtle, but all of it entertaining. Lenhart is also very Catholic and some of the poems dealing with his religion are quite entertaining and enlightening.

He also has some wonderful lines like the one from “Footprint On Your Heart” –

Someone will walk into your life,
Leave a footprint on your heart,


Or from “A Robust Homeland”

Yes, we cherish the legends of our parents,
Though glad to live free and a thousand miles
Away, .......

There is a lot of substance to Lenhart’s poetry, but beware, what you think is fluff is not, what you think is humor has an underlying seriousness.

All in all I enjoyed his poetry because it sinks in and when you have finished the book you still think about it, which to me is the mark of success.

Timothy McLaughlin: Writing the Right Way at Bunker Hill Community College.

Timothy McLaughlin: Writing the Right Way at Bunker Hill Community College.

Interview by Doug Holder


Almost right down the block from me in Somerville, Mass., just across the border in Charlestown, resides Bunker Hill Community College. I have always heard about it of course. Poet friends of mine have taught there, many people I know have taken courses there (including my wife); I heard about their Midnight College, the diverse student body, and the almost 12,000 students they serve. I never thought I would have the opportunity to teach there. But then… well, the recession hits and to use a cliché “other doors open.” As it turns out my fellow Bagel Bard as well as an English Professor at Bunker Hill, Luke Salisbury, set me up with an interview with the English Department head Timothy McLaughlin. And sure enough I was teaching an English Comp. course for the spring 2010 session. Now, I have to tell you I was nervous. I had taught in other settings, but this was a newbie for me. But I did it, enjoyed it and will be teaching again in the fall…and glad of it. Now, McLaughlin has been at BH for over 30 years, and has seen that and done that more times than I can imagine. So being the inquisitive character that I am I decided to interview him for “Off the Shelf,” so he could tell you-- dear reader-- what BH offers, and why you might want to go there, or recommend it to others.

Doug Holder: In the June 2009 Mass. Community College Developmental Education and Best Policy and Practice Audit it stated that 61% of students in Mass. Community Colleges begin with developmental courses. Developmental courses are preparatory courses for college work. 50% of those enrolled will withdraw or fail. What do you see as the root of the problem?


Timothy McLaughlin: I’m not sure there is one root cause. It’s a pretty complex problem that we’ve been struggling with for many years. The simple answer is this: community colleges are open admissions institutions. We accept just about everyone. And as the numbers show, many students are not ready to do college work—which means that, despite our best efforts, many are not successful. Why? Lots of reasons. We have many students who come to us after being away from school for years, which means skills are rusty. Most of our students are juggling family and work commitments. We have students who struggle with English because it is not their first language. I could go on. It would certainly be great if everyone who came to us was ready to do college level work. I don’t see that happening any time soon. I should add that there is a recent trend toward lower numbers of students being placed in developmental writing courses. The biggest challenge for us is to keep students once they register for courses. We’re constantly looking at how we can do a better job of retaining students—through better advising, through more tutoring support, through technology. You name it! We want students to succeed.

DH: Tim, you are the chair of the English Department. If I asked you what the mission statement of the department is--what would you say?

TM: Hey, we have a mission statement! It’s actually available through the college website. Basically what it says is this: that the English department is committed to helping students develop the writing and critical thinking skills that are essential to success in college—and beyond. It says that we’re committed to taking students from wherever they are now and helping them become individuals who can express themselves effectively, individuals who can make better sense of the world out there.

DH: From discussions with you I know that the mechanics of writing are emphasized, as well as "critical thinking." Why is it not enough to be a competent writer? Why do you feel strongly about teaching critical thinking?

TM: This takes us back to the mission statement. For me a competent writer is someone who can understand and express ideas clearly. Almost all the writing a student has to do in college is based on reading the ideas of others; it is based on processing complex information and sorting through multiple and sometimes conflicting perspectives. You have to be able to think critically. Further, almost all writing in college involves taking a position of some sort—staking a claim, making an assertion. In order to back up a point, you have to be able to sort information, synthesize various points of view, and distinguish between fact and opinion. Writing and critical thinking are inextricably intertwined. Someone once said, “How do I know what I think until I’ve said it. “ To me this means that writing is not only a means of expressing one’s thoughts; it is also a way of figuring out what you think.

DH: What are the challenges you face with your diverse student body?

TM: Yes, there are challenges but I also have to say there are many benefits. Students bring an incredible wealth of life experience with them. Getting back to the mission statement, the department is committed to drawing upon this diversity in culture, age and background to make learning a richer experience. The amazing diversity of this place is one of the things that make teaching at BHCC such a great experience. OK, so yes, let’s also recognize the challenges that go along with this. For me this is primarily related to the challenges of helping students overcome writing difficulties related to English being their second language.


DH: Can you give us a brief history behind the innovative Midnight Classes that BH offers?


TM: This was an idea that came from an adjunct faculty member in the Behavioral Sciences department. Her department chair liked the idea and brought it to the attention of our dean. Eventually the president heard about it and found the idea compelling. She saw a need and an opportunity and put some resources into the development of what we now call the Midnight College. We started off with a writing course and psychology class last fall and added a sociology course this past spring semester.


DH: You have a number of satellite campuses, in addition to the main campus in Charlestown. What does the Somerville satellite offer the prospective Somerville student?


TM: As far as I know we are only offering developmental math at the Mystic Activity Center in the fall. This may change in the future. Much depends on demand. BHCC’s Charlestown campus is so accessible to Somerville residents it affects our ability to offer courses at a site in Somerville.


DH: I know you have an interest in jazz. I used Amiri Baraka's essay " Minton's Playhouse" which concerned the famed NYC jazz club in one writing class I taught. There is a lot of improvisation in jazz. One might say this is true in writing creatively, or even in expository writing. What's your take?


TM: Almost all improvisation in jazz is done within a structure of some kind. So while there is great freedom there are also boundaries. Much the same could be said about writing an essay. Jazz players use forms, such as the 12-bar blues, as a vehicle of expression just as poets use forms like the sonnet. Interesting things happen when there’s a creative tension between form and expression. William Wordsworth said that a poem is like a fountain, a sudden bursting forth of creative expression—which seems descriptive as well of a jazz solo. And yet for both writer and jazz musician there is an incredible discipline that is demanded. For a jazz musician this comes in all the hours of practice and study that provide a foundation for that improvisation on the bandstand; for the writer it’s all the hours of writing and rewriting. Even in writing an expository essay you’re always working away at finding a new turn of phrase or just the write sentence rhythm – the same sort of thing you’re trying to accomplish in a jazz solo.

Ibbetson Street Press to participate in the Jewish Book Festival in Nov., 2010

(Somerville, Mass.)

Doug Holder of the Ibbetson Street Press, Steve Glines of the Wilderness House Press, and Paul Steven Stone of the Blind Elephant Press, will run a seminar at the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston annual Jewish Book Fair in Nov. 2010. The panel will concern Print-On-Demand publishing and Self-Publishing. Print-On-Demand is a growing technology used by the publishing industry. It allows publishers and authors to print as few or as many books, etc... as the market demands. Instead of big print runs that often end up in the remainder pile; the publisher can publish just what he needs at any given point in time and see what develops later.


The Boston Jewish Book Fair is a series of literary events featuring an eclectic line-up of notable authors. Programs include panel discussions, readings and workshops by some of the best voices in Jewish literature. Some notable authors who have participated are Larry Tye " Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend,"
Elinor Lipman "The Family Man," Chris Bohjalian "Skeletons at the Feast," Zoe Heller "The Believers," and many others. Congressman Barney Frank will be participating this Fall. There is a new biography out on his life: Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman by Stuart Weisberg.


Check the website this summer: http://jccgb.org/bookfair for complete schedule...

YET A NEW ISSUE OF IBBETSON STREET

YET A NEW ISSUE OF IBBETSON STREET



Well in spite of the trials and travails I have been through the last year --- a new issue of Ibbetson will hit the street this June. I hope to have the manuscript in my eager little hands this weekend, when our great, loyal, and fastidious editor ( Who is also a fine poet --don't forget that!) Dorian Brooks will present the manuscript to me at Bruegger's Bagels on Mass. Ave. in Cambridge--our birth place in (1998)-- of the magazine that is. And as always the talented Steve Glines will design and put it together, and send it off to the hinterlands to be printed.


Ibbetson Street has defined a great part of my life, and from it so many things have sprouted. Friendships, The Bagel Bards, The Newton Free Library Poetry Series, The Somerville News Writers Festival, jobs, even some money now and then. I want to thank folks like Robert K. Johnson, Ray and Linda Conte, Richard Wilhelm, Dianne Robitaille, Irene Koronas, Gloria Mindock, Timothy Gager, Steve Glines, Harris Gardner, Mary Rice, and so many more who have supported us throughout the years.


If you have appreciated the magazine please send your donations to: Ibbetson Street Press 25 School Street Somerville, Mass. 02143 Contributions of $100 will get you a lifetime subscription to Ibbetson, and one new book title a year, when they are released. But we will take anything--it all helps!

As always, we have some fine talent in the new issue. Poets like Miriam Levine, Kate Chadbourne, Ed Galing, Lo Galluccio, George Wallace and others grace our magazine. Ibbetson has given a voice too many for the first time-- and many have gone on to other magazines and broader horizons. We hope to be here for our mission in the years to come.

Here is the list of contributors for the new issue:




CONTENTS






BENNY GOODMAN 1

Ed Galing



JULY FOURTH... 2

Susan Lloyd McGarry



CHILDREN OF THE SUN................... 3

Paul Kareem Tayyar


SMALL VISITORS. 3

Ginny Sullivan


SKETCH # 37................... 4

Lainie Senechal


STRAWBERRIES.......... 4

Laura Rodley


AFTER HAYING.... 5

Sheila Nickerson



THE GARDENER, IN OCTOBER 5

Sheila Nickerson



ON THE ROAD TO AMHERST 6

JoAnne Preiser



THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A MOVIE................... 7

JoAnne Preiser



THAT SUMMER.……… 8

Karla Huston



HAIR DRESSERS IN HELL... 9

Karla Huston



SMUGGLER STOPPED AT THE EGYPT/GAZA BORDER
WEARING A GIRDLE OF LIVE CROCODILES 9

Jean Monahan





SILENT AS THE DAWN 10

Michael Estabrook



WHAT IT IS 11
Margaret Young



How could I learn what to pass on to you 11
C.L. Oxley



DEAR WORLD YOU ARE COURTED TO DEATH 12
Lo Galluccio



VANISHING POINT..... 13

Harris Gardner



“ON BEAUTY’S BUM”...... 13

Philip E. Burnham, Jr.



THE MAD GIRL WANTS TO SING “GOT ALONG WITHOUT YOU
BEFORE I MET YOU”................. 14

Lyn Lifshin



TOO EARLY FOR THIS 14

Lyn Lifshin



THE SPIDERS ARE SLEEPING 15

Kate Chadbourne



KITCHEN SPIDER... 16
Cheryl B. Perreault



WATERBURY 18
William Gilson



SWEATER ON THE BEACH.... 20
Miriam Levine



RELEASE 21

Miriam Levine

HATCHES 21
Jay Matthews







APPARITIONS............ 22

Joyce Meyers

IF ONLY.. 23

Joyce Meyers



TO SEE TREES DIE................. 23

Joyce Meyers



SESTINA WRITTEN IN THE LIBRARY 24
Barbara Bialick


TURTLE SHAPED BOX 25

Ashley Trace



FROM THE BACK WARD TO THE BLACKBOARD: FROM MCLEAN HOSPITAL
TO THE COLLEGE CLASSROOM 26
Doug Holder



LOUIS XVI’S LAST THOUGHT 30

Zvi A. Sesling



THE LOVE AFFAIR... 31

George Wallace



SMOKE IN THE WIND 31

Fredrick Zydek



CATCH.... 32

Ken Seide



REVEILLE 33

Linda M. Fischer



ON THE DOCK 34

Linda Haviland Conte



TOMATOES 34

Mary Rice



THE PERFECT WORLD OF ALUMNI MAGAZINES 35

Dan Sklar



SILENT GREEK... 35
Richard W. Moyer

HALLOWEEN/COTTAGE................. 36

David Giannini



MASSACHUSETTS AUTUMN 37

David Giannini



PASSION.… 37

Sanghi Ehrlich



POLE BARN................. 38

Dale Cottingham



WALTZ IN A ROOFLESS CHAPEL.. 39

Ray Greenblatt



HOSPICE……. 39

Keith Tornheim



BOMBARDIER............ 40

Dorian Brooks



GEORGIA 41

Kirk Etherton



WAR AND PEACE ON THE PRAIRIE. 42

Ellaraine Lockie



HOME OF THE BRAVE................. 43

Ellaraine Lockie



RED CEDAR SWAMP.. 44

Anne Cope Wallace



WRITERS’ BIOS 45

Benefit for Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish Friday May 28, 2010 7PM