Laying the Spirit Bare, Surfacing the Subtext: WHITE AS SILVER, poems by Rane Arroyo

Laying the Spirit Bare, Surfacing the Subtext:
WHITE AS SILVER, poems by Rane Arroyo

by Michael Todd Steffen


The poems in Rane Arroyo’s eleventh published book of poetry, WHITE AS SILVER
(Cervena Barva Press), display an abandon which is also a freedom of the swan’s and of a youthfulness perceiving the potential disorganization of the world in its intimate mirror of that creative silence and secrecy of the artist’s meditation. Odd sequences abound. Time and place lose their specificity in the poet’s far-in-reaching visions:

why

am I crossing bridges at midnight
as if a twenty-year-old again who
wants to parachute off Miss Liberty?
My America isn’t on a staid map. (“Short Version”, p. 3)


Chicago wears a burning
birthday suit. We can go,
oh, anywhere. Why not
Fisher’s where the thin
poets are all we have for
needles? (“Freed of Innocence”, p. 17)

The liberty of arranging unlikely juxtapositions bespeaks a bearably open spirit directing acceptance from within outward instead of the self being subjected to an impinging, critical environment. In so doing, Arroyo’s text, what we have before us, advances the gambols and surprises we normally only get glimpses of while reading up through the suggestions or subtext of a work. Surprising transpositions of terms spark out from this unusual kiln:

The graffiti artists are now grown-ups,
returned to childhood in prisons for
crimes not about art. Some of them
are in maximum security art galleries. (“Modern Hometown”, p. 4)


When the mortar of undertone becomes the subject, the masonry itself, the imagery of the poem, takes on a hovering disconnected quality, leading to a puzzlement of appearances:

I resist you and take a walk on
a long pier on a shrinking lake.

Women in rowboats whistle down
currents. Men build a lighthouse

for UFOs. I spend the currency of
my eyebrows and leather coat in

shuttered bars on eerie Erie Street.
Men in raincoats ply me with shots

and chagrin… (“My Sex Life”, p. 5)

Everything gets turned around here. More emphatically than most books of American poetry, WHITE AS SILVER, in its literal claim on eminence and assurance, eschews the lucid connectivity of accusative reason in a criminal character:

Under gods, under gaming stars,
under our most honest skin,
waits joy and flight from logic’s thugs. (“Listen”, p. 16)

That is a turn of mind, a sense of humor and defiance, reminiscent of Surrealism, with which Arroyo flares in his frequent use of the copulative structure for odd centaurian terms:

My shadow is a bodyguard
never to taste champagne.

The streets are a tambourine’s
autopsy. Home is a pool

made translucent by breathing
furniture and blue windows. (“Life without Maps”, p. 35)

At the sunset of his day, Arroyo exhibits a zest to demolish common structures, risking the venture of leaving his guests behind in a uniquely understood assembly of language, in his unyielding sequences that do not fail to miff and intrigue us:

A call to pray for Aaron who
is brittle with his bitterness
after seeing his buddy turn
into a bursting chandelier in
a desert darker than thought. (“Radio Evangelist”, p. 26)

Arroyo prestos an astonishing literal surface that will communicate to readers of mosaics. There remains to consider the true reader who is on the quest of acquiring vocabulary and patterns of thought that will guide her or him throughout life, even on life’s tangents, barring some event that demands rethinking and reaffirming everything learned. WHITE AS SILVER (maybe not unlike Pound’s Cantos, or The Book of Revelations, though in a very different, much more modest, personal reach) requires a certain invitation. Lacking common objectives and familiarity, it will not sing to a general audience. Though this can be one of the book’s intimate gifts.



WHITE AS SILVER by Rane Arroyo, 54 pp
available for $15
from Cervena Barva Press
P.O. Box 440357
West Somerville, MA 02144-3222
http://www.cervenabarvapress.com
Bookstore: http://www.thelostbookshelf.com

Historic Diary by Tony Trigilio

Historic Diary

Tony Trigilio

Blaze Vox [book]

ISBN: 978-1-60964-012-5

2011







“Oswald's 'Historic Diary,' which commences on October 16, 1959

the date Oswald arrived in Moscow, and other writings he later

prepared, have provided the Commission with one source of information

about Oswald's activities throughout his stay in the Soviet Union.

Even assuming the diary was intended to be a truthful record, it is

not an accurate guide to the details of Oswald's activities.”

-The Warren Commission Report-




Trigilio researches most-or-all the events that surrounded the life of Harvey

Lee Oswald. Some people remember the day president Kennedy was shot

in Dallas Texas. If the reader does not know about these events then this

book will inform and raise questions. My question is what is poetry?

I can place this book in an experimental category but some may find it

unconventional writing, that is, some may not regard the creative work

poetry. I think of this book as multi-poetic/investigative/explorations.

Trigilio melds imagination with factual information. The reader will

travel through poetic forms and factual elements.




The experimentation in this book is used as intellectual tools to expound

on what many readers may consider theories, or imagination, or cover-up.

I relate the contents to the poet Susan Howe who presented letters from a

library archive, as poetry. Howe did the research and then presented the

letters as is. The contents of Trigilio's book will intrigue and draw the

reader into a genre of poetry that is expanding its influence as a viable

way of presenting poetry, which makes it difficult to review since it is not

what one may expect of poetry. Trigilio presents events and the events

are presented as poetry. What I appreciate about his work is that he

manipulates his findings, making for a creative read.




“If something happens to...It was 1958 when...If something

happens to Richard...We drove the Skylark to Granville, Tx...

If something...It couldn't have been 1958...But how come

Tony doesn't visit his cousin Tommy, he lives in Chicago...”...




The above poem continues on for a little more than a page and is hinged

on repetition. Each verse or poem or page is full of explanations that thread

the poems together like an underground existence emerging in dead voices;

connections which seem to collaborate another world explanation.




“Marguerite Oswald




This is my life and my son's life

going down in history.




At grammar school graduation, I had the honor

of wearing a pink dress instead of a white one.




And sang the song “Little Pink Roses.”

I played the piano. We had house parties




in those days and a lot of gatherings-

and it was everything Marguerite.




I also played a ukulele.




.. .. ..

.. .. ..




Lee used to climb the roof with binoculars,

looking at the stars.




He read about astrology and knew about

any animal there was. I don't doubt




he studied the animals-their feeding habits,

sleeping habits, their secrets.




He could converse. At the Bronx Zoo.

That's where they picked him up for truancy...”







Irene Koronas

Reviewer:

Ibbetson Street Press

Poetry Editor:

Wilderness House Literary Review

A History of Yearning, by Kathleen Spivack

A History of Yearning, by Kathleen Spivack
The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, 2009 ($15)
Order at: http://amazon.com

Kathleen Spivack certainly has all the credentials of a distinguished poet. Not only has she been published almost everywhere (The New Yorker, The Paris Review, etc. etc.), she has also received numerous prestigious fellowships and grants. Heck, she was even a student and friend of Robert Lowell!


Ultimately, of course, the only thing a reader can really respond to is the work. In the case of A History of Yearning, the work is—to put it very simply—terrific.


This modest volume, published as The 2009 Sow’s Ear Chapbook Competition Winner, contains a total of 19 poems, organized into three sections: A History of Yearning, Earth’s Burnt Umber, and The Lost World. Subjects include the experience of great art, war, personal and societal loss, and moments of transcendent visual beauty that may never be captured on canvas (but are perfectly painted and framed on the page by this exceptionally gifted poet). If we sometimes read human history as a book of yearnings that are derailed, thwarted or otherwise unfulfilled, Kathleen’s beautiful little chapbook is a huge achievement in the opposite direction: every page succeeds in giving us new angles and insights, a deeper understanding of the worlds that lie within and without. As readers, this is what we yearn for. As a writer, Spivack never lets us down.


It is always a luxury to read someone like Ms. Spivack—someone who has both a unique, masterful touch with language and a true intellectual’s grasp of several significant subjects. I’m reminded of Seamus Heaney’s work dealing with “the troubles” in Northern Ireland, or with the unique pleasures and trials encountered in a small farming community.


“After Night Hawks. Hopper. 1942.” is the second poem in A History of Yearning; it combines beautifully wrought observations of one work of art (the Edward Hopper painting) with images of World War II and its psychological aftermaths, plus a profound understanding of American culture during this time. The result is a multifaceted work of poetic art. In the concluding stanza, all the people in the painting

...viewed from outside
as from heaven, are frozen
before their perhaps
untarnished destinies.
The color ‘blood,” its sharp
metallic smear, is yet to
appear in this picture. In
Edward Hopper’s painting,
Night Hawks 1942, the man
with his back to us, waiting, half-
lit, has already figured this out.

In Part Three of the three-part poem “Photographs Already Fading, “ Spivack recounts her 2003 visit to an exhibit at London’s Imperial War Museum, which features World War One Poets. Here, work by famous survivors of the trenches, such as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, can be listened to on rented headphones; it is all “...read beautifully by contemporary actors.” In another section of the exhibit, presented behind glass and resembling

...perfectly sliced limes in aspic, letters
to their mothers are preserved in cases,
as when photographs are taken underwater, idealized,
the scholar-warriors made more luminous by time.
They wave to us, frond-like, going down,
as if telling us something urgent, moving away....

I could give additional quotes from the book, but I’m fairly certain you’ll get much more enjoyment from reading the poems—and this collection—in their entirety. (In a similar vein, it’s always better to be told by a friend, “You will really love this movie, because it deals with (X), and (Y) and (Z) give great performances,” than to be subjected to a bunch of five-second fragments which have been plucked from the whole film and then edited into a three-minute trailer.) So, I’ll end with two thoughts that may be of use.


1) If, for some reason, you do not enjoy the poetry of folks such as Heaney, Richard Hoffman, Galway Kinnell, Grace Paley, and Jim Schley, then you probably will be less than thrilled by Kathleen Spivack.


2) Buy a case of A History of Yearning (if chapbooks are sold by the case), and whenever you’re invited to a party, present a copy to your host. After all, there is always plenty of wine around. It’s great to open something that leaves one feeling clear-headed and invigorated. with senses heightened rather than dulled.
2009 was a very good year.

Kirk Etherton, Somerville, MA
February, 2011

Boston Area Small Press Scene/Ibbetson Street Press Exhibit at the Halle Library at Endicott College/Beverly, Mass.

Well there is a display of Ibbetson Street Books and other books on the main floor of the Halle Library at Endicott College. The display is titled: Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene/Ibbetson Street Press. And if you want to contribute a book you penned, be it poetry, or fiction, then send it to us and we will catalogue it and put in the Endicott College Poetry and Literary Arts Collection. Here are the books currently on display:


http://endicott.edu


Out of the Ordinary / Robert K. Johnson



PRESA 13 / Editor Eric Greinke



From Mist to Shadow/ Robert K. Johnson



Missing Moments/ by Robert K. Johnson



Blossoms of the Apricot/ Robert K. Johnson



Blood Soaked Dresses/ Gloria Mindock



Wren’s Cry/ Dorian Broooks



JID Jesuit / Andrew Gettler


Anytime Blues/Linda Lerner


City Woman/Linda Lerner


Entering Dennis/ Dennis Rhodes


East of the Moon/Ruth Kramer Baden


King of the Jungle/ Zvi Sesling


Steerage/Bert Stern


The Dark Opens/Miriam Levine


Living In Dangerous Times/Linda Lerner







We hope to have an extensive collection and we would love for you to be part of it. Send your donations to :


Endicott College
Halle Library
ATTN: Brian Courtemanche
376 Hale St.
Beverly, Mass.
01915
Boston Area Small Press Scene/Ibbetson Street Press Exhibit at the Halle Library at Endicott College/Beverly, Mass

The Yoga Divas by Rob Dinsmoor

The Yoga Divas
Rob Dinsmoor
Zingology Press
$15.00

Review by Rene Schwiesow

Rob Dinsmoor, a yoga teacher, tells us he did not choose yoga as a career, it chose him. The word yoga is Sanskrit, the root of which means “to yoke,” or to unite. During yoga one may find that they are “united,” with what Deepak Chopra calls, “the field” [of consciousness].

Dinsmoor is also a free-lance writer with many articles published on health and medical issues and has a background as a comedy writer with a group called, Chucklehead. Chucklehead was the subject of his first book: “Tales of the Troupe.” On the back of his second book, “The Yoga Divas,” Dinsmoor refers to an experience during a Kundalini yoga class from which there was no turning back. He goes on to say that he “became inextricably connected with the universe.”

While similar to other types of yoga, Kundalini yoga connects itself to Kundalini energy, which can be described as a sleeping, dormant energetic force that rises from the base of the spine – it is the energy of the Self and through its awakening an individual may be liberated from the constraints of Ego. I was intrigued by what I read, because I am an energy healer, very familiar with the chakras, and I have practiced yoga. I thought I was going to read about a profound spiritual journey, an awakening to uniting with “the field.”

The opening story, entitled “Kundalini Awakened,” was interesting and gave us a good look at the experience of Kundalini. He described well the pessimism that many beginners have when approaching a philosophy designed to awaken consciousness. He also described well what might happen to that individual once they complete the experience and walk out into the world again, craving something to ground them back to the earth. Dinsmoor grounds himself by eating a hearty breakfast filled with carbs and proteins. I was looking forward to the second story, entitled “Kali of the Night.” Kali, is the Hindu goddess of destruction. She is associated with time, change, removing the old and aiding one in implementing the new. Fitting, I thought for the story to follow a “Kundalini awakening.”

Imagine my surprise when I found out that the Kali Dinsmoor referred to was a woman who waked into a yoga class. A woman that Dinsmoor described as, “a feral feline. . .dark and sexy she-creature of the night.” Still I persisted in believing there may be a metaphorical connection to Kali, the goddess, and his Kundalini experience. No such luck. By the end of the story, Dinsmoor had finagled a lunch date with the girl, described their mad email liaison, and ended with their relationship drifting off into nothingness. Well, I suppose that could have a meditative angle.

The rest of the book contains other such stories, most of which include sightings of females and his interest in the curvy creatures. He offers some interesting glimpses into his travels, but only scratches the superficial surface of those experiences. Then Dinsmoor closes out the book with stories of his childhood that are not connected to his yoga. Perhaps Dinsmoor’s intent for the book was more comedic in nature, given his past writing acknowledgments. Bottom line, if you are looking for something more akin to the spiritual journey of a Yogi, you will not find that here. You will, however, find lots of allusions to the intrigue of the female form and some slightly comic romps through Dinsmoor’s life – many with a good foundation. It is a pity that Dinsmoor did not more aptly build upon those foundations.

Rene Schwiesow is the co-host of the popular South Shore poetry venue, The Art of Words in Plymouth, MA.

Review of “Gesangvoll – Songful” poetry by Hugh Fox

(Hugh Fox)




Review of “Gesangvoll – Songful” poetry by Hugh Fox

Pudding House Chapbook Series

ISBN 1-58998-812-4

$10

http://www.puddinghouse.com/


Review by Samantha Milowsky






The opening poem “Gesangvoll - Songful” is a compressed neighborhood scene on a “neolithic Chicago Street” that “became a transplanted history channel province.” The poem is an indicator of where the chapbook is headed with a tapestry of characters and narratives, employing a compressed and humorous style.



In the poem “Always,” there are surprising assertions such as “Incas spoke Arabic,” and a questioning of identity, what informs it, especially with different ethnic groups and cultures living together and mixing languages. The speaker humorously ponders “maybe they should call it The United Wanderers from Everywhere instead of the United States of America.”



There is joyful, neurotic rambling in the poem “Afraid,” asserting “I’m not afraid of DEATH, because I believe in reincarnation,” which leads to questioning what the speaker may be reincarnated into. Perhaps “a beauty next time…or an Einstein…Ein, one, Stein, stone… lots of pebbles in that head.” Or perhaps reincarnated into a disembodied nirvana with “pizza forever, no weight to loose.” It is an acknowledgement of the power of belief, at least to quell fear, while also being a bit funny about it.



There is enjoyable wordplay throughout. In “Quarter to Nine,” there is apocalyptic humor in “Planet Earth is about to implode in/on itself and then move from/im/to/ex?” and in “Leaving,” the sarcasm of “getting Rest in Peace tickets to what’s the noseless, eyeless, breathless difference?”



There are also painterly translated poems of the poet’s. In “Sendo Felix/Being Happy” the poet extols:



Being happy, only this, nothing

else, nothing out the future or

past, nothing about “isms” or

“atics,” pre- or almost- human bones,

kings, the hungry, only the aggressively

green hills, the clouds, birds floating

between the clouds like butterflies,

miniature paintings, flying over the

hills themselves.



I recommend Gesangvoll - Songful for the achievement of scope in short poems, the rich narrative of a multi-cultural experience, the humorous contemplation of life and aging, and the beauty of the poems’ lines

REVIEW OF “SO FAR, SO GOOD” poetry by Karen Alkalay-Gut

REVIEW OF “SO FAR, SO GOOD” poetry by Karen Alkalay-Gut, c. 2004, Boulevard Books/Babel Guides, 71 Lytton Road, OXFORD OX4 3NY, 127 pages. Author’s website: www.karenalkalay-gut.com

Review by Barbara Bialick

Karen Alkalay-Gut is a professor of English at Tel Aviv University who came into the world on the last night of the Blitz in London. She grew up in Rochester, New York, where she completed a Ph.D. at the University of Rochester. Since 1972, she’s lived in Israel, where she teaches and raised a family. The reason I give you the bio before the review is because part of what makes this book interesting is her worldly point of view. It is not encrusted with imagery and symbolism, but it is full of independence, curiosity and commentary with a little of the supernatural thrown in. As it says on the back cover, she “casts a seasoned eye over existence in our particular dangerous, stimulating moment.”

The front cover shows a black and white café photograph with one mysterious figure painted orange. To me, that represents Israel, where the terrorist can suddenly appear, but didn’t explode in this photo. Hence, “so far, so good” as the cover poem, dated Tel Aviv, 2002, says. Even so, after 9-11-2001, she ran for safety in Ireland, where she couldn’t find anything Jewish.

One of the strong themes in this book is that aging women are often still the same inside. In “Friends” she writes “I know women who do not sleep at night from desire/a fire licks at their aging thighs/despite their wizened skin.” But in the poem “54” she thinks back to when her immigrant mother was that age: “I remember my mother at my age now-/old and foreign and wholly unequipped/for the revolution of my world./…But here I am at 54/still feeling like a born orphan/wishing my mother at my age/had been able to take me as I was.”

I was particularly interested in her narrative of looking for an apartment in Tel Aviv, Israel. It gave me a sense of intimacy of Israeli everyday life: “The façade is always unfathomable,/a united front of blinds closed to the street,/at least at midday when we arrive to weigh/the possibility of living on the inside, to be/part of the scene…Once inside, it is much easier. From each window we can view/a different family, busy with their lives/and ours. Friday afternoon and the mother/of the soldier is hanging his weekend fatigues/…She leans/a bit further over the clothes line than she needs to/so she can see us evaluating the empty bedroom…”

And so on goes “So Far, So Good,” which one can probably find on Amazon.com.
In addition to teaching, says the bio on her website, she chairs the Israel Association of Writers in English, is Vice Chair of the Federation of Writers Unions in Israel, is a board member of the Yiddish Writers Association and is a coordinating editor of the “Jerusalem Review.”

At the Concord of the Rivers by Anne Ipsen

At the Concord of the Rivers
Anne Ipsen
Ibus Press, Newton, MA
$25.00 Hardcover; $18.00 Paperback

By Rene Schwiesow

What better place for a doctoral student of history to wake up in than the past. Which is exactly where Anne Ipsen’s protagonist, Abigail Walker, finds herself in Ipsen’s most recent book, “At the Concord of the Rivers.” Abigail is a stressed student in the 1950’s whose professor believes that women will always quit their education to get married. And, indeed, Abigail is pulled between the work on her doctoral thesis and planning a wedding. Frustrated by her mother’s demands for the necessity of dress alteration appointments and an angry phone conversation with her fiancé, Abigail takes off for the Natick Historical Society and the haven of research.

However, a deer, a pothole and rain-slicked roads cause an accident that prevents Abigail from ever arriving in Natick. Instead, after a tree limb falls and renders her unconscious, she wakes to find herself in the 17th Century and mistaken for a young lad.

Is Abigail’s time travel to become a blessing or a curse? She vacillates between the good fortune of being immersed into the very way of life she had been researching and wondering how she will ever be returned to the 20th Century.

Ipsen’s own research serves her well in the telling of Abigail’s tale. With the turning of each page, we are drawn further into the life of 17th Century New England. Maps appear in our minds as Abigail and Paul Hosmer, a young part-Indian man with whom Abigail begins a relationship, traverse the countryside on horseback. The relationship that Paul and Abigail forge and the love that they find could prove dangerous to both of them once it becomes public knowledge. But, “At the Concord of the Rivers” is far more than an interracial love triangle that spans centuries. The ease with which disease may have spread in the 1700’s is evident as Abigail struggles to teach both healers and lay persons the necessity of cleanliness. The suppression of women, the ideology that denies them an education, rumbles beneath Abigail being offered a teaching position. The rigidity of Puritan Concord and New England springs to life through the clergyman, Tedious Thatcher; services at the Meeting House; and through discussions about the Salem Witch Trials. Ironically the kind, elderly woman who takes Abigail into her home practices herbology and employs what may be considered holistic measures in her healing of both New Englanders and Natives alike. Midwife, healer, and intuitive, Hannah is the pivot around which Abigail’s life now turns.

“At the Concord of the Rivers,” is indeed a historical work. Yet Ipsen’s creation of fictional character allows the history to unfold in a way that grants us our own experience with the 17th Century. Facts on education, politics, religion, and a woman’s place, become the undercurrent for the daily flow that binds the people to the land, their God, their prejudices, and to each other.

Rene Schwiesow is the co-host of Plymouth’s The Art of Words

"Meeting Matisse" by Leo Racicot

"Meeting Matisse"

by Leo Racicot


Other than a lifelong attraction (beginning
with a French class field trip to Boston's Museum
of Fine Art with our teacher, Mary Ann Manning
Kennedy, in my sophomore year) to Impressionist
and Expressionist painters, Monet, Manet, Renoir,
Degas and van Gogh, I am hardly what you would
call an art hound, although once an older woman
and her much younger paramour in Chinatown's
Little Hong Kong told me I looked like the
Russian, Marc Chagall and tried to entice me
into a threesome but all I wanted or needed from
that little, magic eatery on that cold and lonesome
night was the egg foo young (no gravy). And I never
recall feeling one way or the other about the Fauvist,
Henri Matisse. So I still do not know what compelled
me to take a chance and a bus to see if I could get into
the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Henri Matisse exhibit.
This was in about 1993, and winter because it was bitter,
bitter cold; no gloves or hat or extra sweater were of any
use to me as I stood in the freezing cold of Fifth Avenue
and 82nd Street hoping to get a gander at what all the
cultural world was a-buzz about. At best, I expected an
attractively put-together package of the artist's output,
nothing more. When a line monitor announced to the
crowd that the exhibit was reaching capacity limits for
the day, I was so angry, I spit. And I know that something
cosmic charged me to stay in that line, something well
outside myself, and to shiver and stomp my feet against
the frustration and ennui for what seemed like days praying,
actually praying that I would be one of the lucky ones to
make it through the door and land a ticket.

* * * *

Words come slowly for describing "Madame". She had
a pouty, lipsticked mouth that formed French words the
way a vagina forms enticements. Her eyes were shimmering
lapis lazuli, sparkly, alert, still the prettiest blue eyes I have
ever seen, and her soft, brunette flip -- so popular then --
lent her a "Coffee, Tea or Me" "Come Fly Me" 60s stewardess
air (on flights going only to Paris, of course!), as did her winsome
figure which she always decorated to perfection with fashion skirts
and clicky dress-up shoes. My crush on her went way beyond
sex, for it extended its arms around the language she was
teaching. I am sure as a summer's day is long that it is only
because she was my high school French teacher that I later
chose French as my major in college.

Not only was she my French teacher my freshman year
but oh! Eureka! my sophomore year as well. My ticket stub
to heaven could not look any better than did that September
sophomore class schedule with her name once again printed
on it though this time around she was "Mrs. Kennedy", not
the "Miss Manning" of the previous term. It was a happy
but sad year that year; "Madame" became pregnant ("enceinte")
almost right away and announced a leave of absence that was
to extend past the end of the school year. So no more "Madame".
All of the color went out of the sky, and the classroom as
> in walked Doris H.R.H. Bourgeois-Herlihy, a looker, too, and
a genuine eccentric but not "Madame". I was devastated,
as young boys who understand themselves little, and Life
even less, will be. For when I waited outside her classroom,
in the darkened school hall of a late fall afternoon, hoping to
be able to say goodbye, and miracle of miracles, she put out
the light and emerged, pretty as a package, carrying in her
frilly, little arms a bouquet of cherry-red roses, and smiled
widely at me, "Hello" and then "Au revoir", I felt a thunder
of revelation in my stomach; I loved her not because
she was female but because I was female, and that my
real colors bled for men, not women.

"Madame" disappeared down an empty hall, and I
knew that all my future was to be taken up in the
pursuit of and ultimately failed attempts at bedding
unattainable men.

* * * *

In the year of the Matisse exhibit, no less than three
infatuations had come crashing down on me, all of them
aborted in mid-flight, unconsummated, and all of them
for musicians who it took me years to realize make glorious
music but are usually totally fucked up in the head when it
comes to romance. I needed healing, and I needed to find a
way to live again...

Had I opened myself to it, I might have shared a collective
ecstacy alongside my fellow museumgoers but I walked away
from that and convinced myself I was alone with my joy.
Here, inside the exhibit hall, my eyes, overcome by rapture,
swallowed the colors the way Madame Kennedy's mouth
had swallowed French. I never knew colors could have such
sound, such bold and unceasing reverberation.
The walls radiated color. I was covered in it.
It was lifting me up off the ground Life had thrown me down on.
I even saw my darling mother resurrected for me, as a twin in the picture,
"Woman Before an Aquarium". I was brought back to some forgotten
garden of feelings, blossoming with ghosts both living and
gone, and it was springtime again in me. Matisse had
a secret in his throat that he was more than willing to tell:
"Live! And live joyously!"

"There is no more to be said for loving another person
than for loving the whole world", my friend, Quentin
Crisp, wrote me in a letter, to try to mend my broken soul.
There is maybe no lasting bandage that romance can make,
no white knight on a white horse to lift you from the saddle
to his arms. But we can love ourselves. Again and again,
if we open up to it, there is art and language and literature.
Creators and what they create are our safehouse against
self-destruction.

Again and again, there is resurrection!

Again and again, there is Matisse.

Famed Poet's Theatre Comes to Somerville!

Famed Poet's Theater Comes to Somerville!

With Doug Holder

Richard Cambridge, who incidentally lives in the Republic of Cambridge, has moved his much lauded Poet’s Theater to the Arts Armory in Somerville, Mass, from Club Passim in Harvard Square. I first met Richard Cambridge when we were part of a group of poets working on an anthology “City of Poets: 18 Boston Voices” organized by Don DiVecchio in 2000. I ran into Richard recently at the Armory, and well, here is our interview:


Can you talk about the “Poet’s Theatre” at the “Club Passim” in Harvard Square, Cambridge, that you revived?




When Club Passim went into receivership and had to be reformulated; Tim Mason, a friend and a booking agent for the Club, called and asked me if I wanted to do a ‘Poet’s Theatre” there. I had been doing poetry theatre before then on the local scene. So I jumped at the chance. I really enjoyed doing it. Back when “Passim” was “Club 47” they has a “Poets’ Theatre,” and it was very political. They were really enmeshed with the issues of the day: Civil Rights, Vietnam, etc… It faded out. I started it up again in 1995.

I always looked at poets as something other than someone doing a feature or poem. I came from the performance-poet tradition. But I wanted to move towards something larger. I tried to find people in the community who were folk singers, dancers, and comedians to help me put together poetry theatre. Our first feature was the poet Sebastian Lockwood.


Why have you moved Poet's Theatre to Somerville?

I had been at Club Passim for fifteen years, and it was a great run. The club took a hit in donor contributions after the financial crash in September, 2008, and needed to maximize earnings, even on the off nights.

Have you had any Somerville connections over the years?

Living in mid-Cambridge for so many years, my path winds in and out of Somerville nearly every day: cafes, restaurants, venues, kitty care. New current favorite for me:
Neighborhood Café in Union Square. Long time favorite: the Wine Cask is tops. I miss the open mike Licia Skye and Ryk McIntyre ran at Redbones.

Any new developments in your own poetry life--school, books,....

I’m enrolled in an MFA program in fiction at Stonecoast, U of So. Maine.
I’m polishing a novel about a hitchhiking journey I took in the Nineties.

Can you talk about your view of poetry as a force for change?

I wonder if we are not doing enough, for I see little effect for good in the greater, public arena in our country today. Sure, on a local level, on a personal level, poetry— all the arts are a force for healing, and can and do profoundly affect peoples’ lives.

Split This Rock is a festival that happens every other year in DC. It calls for poets and writers to witness with their words against injustice. I am excited about it because its a gathering of writers who are marching on the White House, not just political activists. Perhaps if word and deed can unite and grow we will be able to effect more change for the good.

I ask myself, okay, what level do I have to write at for the government to take notice and ban my words. Here's an example: Years ago NPR asked Martín Espada to write a poem for "All Things Considered." He wrote a poem about Mumia Abu Jamal, the Black journalist on Death Row. The government calls up NPR and says you can't put that on the radio, so NPR censors the poem. Espada wrote an essay, "All Things Censored" as a response.

In other countries poetry has been a huge force for change. I think of Pablo Neruda who wedded poetic vision with public service all his life, was targeted for many years in Chile for stinging the rulers with his verses. He had to go underground in 1947 to complete his Canto General to avoid arrest and imprisonment.



Will the Theater present on a regular basis?


The second or third Friday of the month. Rockabetty is up next, Feb 21, CD Collins & part of her band.

I don't have a website for this, but am open to ideas. I do have Facebook



****The Center for Arts at the Armory, 191 Highland Avenue, Somerville, MA 02143 | (P) 617.718.2191, (F) 617.718.1755 | (E) info@ArtsattheArmory.org

Citizen Somerville: Growing up with the Winter Hill Gang by Bobby Martini and Elayne Keratsis

Citizen Somerville: Growing up with the Winter Hill Gang
Bobby Martini & Elayne Keratsis
Powder House Press
$16.95

by Rene Schwiesow

“It’s not just another mob book. It’s my life,” Bobby Martini says at the end of the trailer for his book “Citizen Somerville: Growing up with the Winter Hill Gang.” The book was released in December, 2010. Martini wrote the book based on a series of interviews, including interviews with reputed Winter Hill Gang Boss, Howard “Howie” Winter. The trailer and a clip of a videotaped session with Winter can be found on You Tube and provides interesting viewing as companion to the book.

During an interview with Martini, Ellen Brogna, Winter’s wife, speaks of her struggle with anxiety and fear that began as an adolescent and continues even now – “but you build walls and you learn to deal,” Brogna ends. Martini goes on to say, “We are all professional wall builders. I’m one myself. I don’t even think it’s a conscious choice. The booze, the crime, the violence comes out and the walls automatically go up to protect childhood as much as possible. Once they’re up, they rarely come down for the rest of your life.”

Certainly many of Martini’s readers can identify with building walls. It is his ability to deconstruct a portion of his own walls that makes his honesty palpable in his writing. He allows others access not only to the history of Somerville’s “Winter Hill Gang,” but also to the stories of the families whose lives were interwoven behind the public discussion of organized crime.

“Citizen Somerville” is a historical novel, a memoir, and a sharing of a culture made public through news media reports, movies and literature, but rarely seen through the eyes of family. Martini brings us into his living room and into the living room of Howie Winter in a way that reminds us that “family” has a universal understanding, perhaps reminds of the dysfunctions and foibles we deal with, and offers a reminder of the love we have for those we hold close. He weaves family through the stories of crime, murder, mayhem, loss and sorrow so that, at times, we can very nearly see the eyes of those living through the dangerous times of the Irish Gang Wars during the 1960’s in Somerville and Charlestown. While the writing does not always follow chronological order and Martini’s insertion of his own experiences in italics can make the story line difficult to follow, the book, nevertheless, is a page-turner. In fact, the way in which the story is told and Martini’s commitment to using New England vernacular add to the authenticity of the tale.

The story could not be told without writing in Steve “The Rifleman” Flemmi and Whitey Bulger. Bulger had moved into Winter’s garage in the 1970’s with his own bookmaking and, while Winter was away, began to overtake the Somerville enterprise. Nor could it be told without discussing the way the FBI had been in bed with both Bulger and Flemmi. It’s history, and as I mentioned, this book is historical. However, Winter, the man John Kerry once referred to as the “Number Two Crime Boss in New England,” now often referred to as “The Gentleman Gangster,” wants to make it perfectly clear that neither Whitey Bulger nor Steve “The Rifleman” Flemmi were ever part of Howie Winter’s Winter Hill Gang. Today, in his late 70’s, Winter is no longer affiliated with organized crime in New England, both he and Martini consider themselves Somerville survivors with a deep love for their city. And that is clear in the telling of their stories.

Rene Schwiesow is a member of the Somerville-based Bagel Bards.

The Secret Admirer by Kyle Flak

The Secret Admirer
by Kyle Flak
Copyright 2010 by Kyle Flak
Adastra Press
Easthampton, MA 01027
Softbound, 20pages, $16.00
ISBN 10: 0-9822495-8-6
ISBN 13: 978-0-9822495-8-1

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Some of the best poetry around is put out by small press publishers, among whom Adastra Press ranks as one of the best. Having read several of publisher Gary Metras’ offerings I was enthused to receive The Secret Admirer by Kyle Flak for review.

Once again Metras has not let me down. Flak a Michigan native who was educated at Northern Michigan University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. As a poet Flak falls somewhere between Jim Carroll and Charles Bukowski: tough, gritty, direct, honest (?), a few drinks and some drugs thrown in and sometimes sentimental but almost always an exciting adventure to read.

Most of the poems are culled from Flak’s apparently adventuresome life opening with “When We Were Both Sixteen” and following with titles such as “What Grunge Was About,” “Guys Night Out,” and the title poem, “Secret Admirer,” among others.

My personal favorite is “After A Stay in the County Jail”

It was hamburgers & dill pickles
all over again. You in a
gingham skirt high above
the knee, squirting
ketchup in the
picnic sunshine. “Look!
five seagulls are
hopping over
this way!”
you said, and I just spooked
them off with a
big, red kickball, laughing.
Laughing because it’s so nice
to finally have a
problem that isn’t
really a problem.

There is also an absolute favorite: “Amherst, Massachusetts”

Emily Dickinson calls me up at midnight to
ask if I want to really get stoned and
watch old wrestling videos.

“Just let me
put some pants on, Emily. I’ll be
right over.”

My car is a yellow Camaro.

There are French fries all over
the floor.

I turn on the headlights.

And zoom on over

to see the only girl in town
who still know what poetry

is all about.

Anytime you can take the iconic Ms. Dickinson, throw in Ms. Maryjane you have a poet who also (in addition to the attributes I mentioned earlier) can conjure up some fun reading.

Methinks Gary Metras knows what poetry is all about and his meticulously handmade books of which this one is letterpress printed, sewn and bound by hand by Metras (with some help from the author). The production takes about three months and is worth keeping not just because there are only 200 copies and this is a first edition, but because
the whole shebang is a true work of art.

Review of ACROSS STONES OF BAD DREAMS by Zvi A. Sesling

Review of ACROSS STONES OF BAD DREAMS by Zvi A. Sesling, Cervena Barva Press, P.O. Box 440357, W. Somerville, MA 02144-3222, cover art by William J. Kelle, 39 pages, 2011, $7.

Review by Barbara Bialick

This great chapbook is about the giant dumpster of memory in the realm of past loves gone dead. The image of death carries right into the end, where Sesling imagines heaven as a welcoming place with a beautiful aquamarine sky like his mother’s ring…and yet there are his mother and father and relatives still instilling guilt and criticism and where “Piles of ancestors like old newspapers in the basement/will present themselves as headlines for me to acknowledge,…the sun yellow as the stars my aunts, uncles, cousins wore.” Only “Dogs from my past will bound forward through green fields,/tails wagging a quick metronome to their happy bark…”

That’s a heavy ending, and yet the sad, angry, sardonic but wry, and rye light touches of getting dumped by or dumping his past loves, even a son, carries you to the end with the voice of an experienced and knowing writer’s careful use of language. This whole collection works.

Back to the dumpster. “In this dumpster are all the dumped people, lovers, wives/husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends/old friends, acquaintances,/parents, children/,,,crushed like grapes…waiting for a chance to be rescued, dumped again.”
Sesling even feels dumped by the brother he does not have—“The brother who does not/exist is the shadow that/follows in the streets/or the rooms I enter/he never cries for me”.

Zvi Sesling, who recently published “King of the Jungle” (Ibbetson Street Press), is the editor of the “Muddy River Poetry Review”. He has published poetry in “Midstream”,
“Saranac Review,” “Voices Israel Anthology,” “Cyclamen and Swords” and many others. In 2007 he received First Prize in the Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition.

To buy this book, which I hope you do, go to Cervena Barva’s bookstore at www.thelostbookshelf.com.

Cambridge Community Poem: Bringing Poetry to The People

Former Cambridge Populist Peter Payack sent me the introduction to his book project (Cambridge Community Poem) that should be released in Feb. 2011. I am very pleased to be included:


INTRODUCTION
Bringing Poetry to The People

As Cambridge’s first Poet Populist, one of my first initiatives was to create a poem, by the people of Cambridge. Instead of me writing about Cambridge, my idea was to let the many voices of Cambridge write a poem about their town. The result is now in your hands.

What makes this collection, this poem of 231 parts, unique is that it is not written exclusively by poets. It is written by the very people who make up Cambridge itself.

This volume includes poems by octogenarians, third graders, college presidents and professors, city workers, Pulitzer Prize winners, elected officials, Grammy Award winners, teachers, All-Americans, All-State athletes and a five-time NFL Pro Bowler, comedians, street performers, carpenters, high school students, scientists, researchers, lawyers, actors, doctors, artists, nurses, coaches, bicycle mechanics, marathoners, Poet Laureates, firefighters, pharmacists. And even poets and writers, if you can imagine that!

I put out a call asking for poems with up-lifting themes of city life, peace, community spirit, and the past, present and future of Cambridge. This was followed up with several news stories including a front page piece in the Boston Globe (February 20, 2009). I received hundreds of poems, from people down the street to people around the planet.

I attended various city events, like the Cambridge River Festival, the Revels RiverSing and Fresh Pond Day, went to visit the Kennedy-Longfellow School, Cambridge Rindge & Latin, and Haggerty schools, gave numerous poetry readings and talked with people that I ran into on the street.

Then out of the blue, the idea itself was endorsed by one of the living legendary poets of our time, John Ashbery. When on a visit to Harvard to receive the University’s Arts Medal, he said when asked in the Boston Globe: (Q) “Cambridge’s Poet Populist, Peter Payack, is asking residents to submit a few lines of poetry for a ‘community poem.’ Do you think this is a good idea?” And to tell the truth, I held my breath wondering what Ashbery was going to say! (A) “I like the idea of many voices contributing to a single poem. The 19th century proto-surrealist French poet Lautreamont once wrote that poetry should be made by everybody, and that sounds like what this project is carrying out.” Phewww…. But, I already knew the answer, anyway.

For forty years I have made it my mission to bring poetry out of the hands of strictly the academics and bring it back to the people, where it belongs. I have done this with a number of projects starting with Phone-a-Poem, The Cambridge/Boston Poetry Hotline, (1976-2001), which some weeks would receive up to 50,000 calls. And most recently Poet Populist Peter Payack’s Poetry Cookies that you can still buy at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop. (Find complete list of my major public poetry projects in the addendum.)

Cambridge has always been seen as a special place. And what makes Cambridge that special place is the people who have at one time or another called it their home, from the Wampanoag Tribes, the first European settlers who re-named the area Newtowne, George Washington and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, to our venerable senior citizens and our school children of today.

As intended this collection, this poem, has a symphony of voices. I tried to give artistic freedom to each writer and so did very little stylistic editing. These are Cambridge voices through and through.

I hope the Cambridge Community Poem brings some poetic light to the special place we call home.

Peter Payack
January 29, 2011
Cambridge, Massachusetts

What May Have Been : Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G-- By Susan Tepper & Gary Percesepe

A BagelBards Book Review

“What May Have Been”
Letters of Jackson Pollock & Dori G
By Susan Tepper & Gary Percesepe
Cervena Barva Press, Price $15

Reviewed by Paul Steven Stone

“What May Have Been” is an epistolary novel chronicling the passionate clandestine relationship of Jackson Pollock and a younger, Vassar exile named Dori G. Reading at times like a poetic skirmish in the courtship wars, “What May Have Been” has all the color, energy and brilliance—not to mention abstract logic—of one of Pollock’s paint-spattered canvases. The language is rich and (on Pollock’s side) fevered and scatological; the novel’s energy propelled by a heady mixture of raw desire and intimate longing.

Rendered by two writers who clearly enjoy crafting lives and ideas from words, the novel is even more remarkable for the fact that each of the authors gave voice to the character of the opposite sex. Their efforts succeed so well it is impossible to detect one false step or inappropriate allusion in this rigorous literary challenge they set for themselves. And so, throughout the novel and its artfully drawn relationship, the voices ring true.

“What May Have Been” portrays the shadow life of an iconic modern artist through letters fanciful, impetuous and most of all, richly entertaining. It is highly recommended.

REVIEW OF “WHAT TO DO WITH A DYING PARAKEET’ by Corey Cook

REVIEW OF “WHAT TO DO WITH A DYING PARAKEET’ by Corey Cook,
17 pages, Pudding House Press Chapbook Series, Pudding House Publications, 81 Shadymere Lane, Columbus, Ohio 43213, www.puddinghouse.com, 2009, $10.

Review by Barbara Bialick

I love this perfect little chapbook, for each poem is succinctly edited, has excellent imagery and symbolism, and taken as a whole, the book expresses how death can’t take away the charmed images in his mind that affected his growing up and his coming of age. He considers not only the law of nature and the life cycle, as regards his grandparents, but the changeable stuff of American popular culture that went on at the time. He also manages to make one consider the morality of interfering with death in nature, as is symbolized in the poem “What to Do with A Dying Parakeet” and also “Spring”.

This would be a good book to bring to a poetry class or workshop to study or remark on. They actually have a “how to publish” ring to them. All the poems were first published in literary journals, then they were brought together in this book, which is just long enough. Each poem can stand on its own; it is not just a story told in a series of poems.

I agree with the publisher who writes to the reader: “You selected language art that took as long to create as paintings or other fine art.”

The first poem, “Sunday Mornings at Grammy and Grandpa’s” is full of detail “of floral couches and chairs, Grammy humming above a sizzling pan, spatula clacking. Meant/rubbing bare feet on the braided rug, Charles/Kuralt, Grandpa’s presence veiled by a robe/and the Valley News or the latest issue of Popular/Mechanics…”

But in “Thanksgiving” we learn of “the graveyard where Granddad is buried,” right near his house where “Grammy perches in her chair,/her back to a series of windows which look out/into the adjacent graveyard. She sits and smiles,/smiles and laughs in front of the windows, the family/headstone an unyielding omen behind her bald head.”

Corey Cook edits “The Orange Room Review” with his wife, Rachael. They live in Contoocook, New Hampshire with their daughter.

Daniel Kimmel: The Critic of Ball Square

Daniel Kimmel: The Critic of Ball Square

By Doug Holder

An amazing thing happened at the Diesel Café in Davis Square on a Saturday afternoon—I actually secured a seat. Amidst the happy din of people taking shelter from a cold winter’s afternoon; I met with TV and movie critic Daniel Kimmel. Kimmel told me that after his marriage broke up he left Brookline, Mass for the balm of Ball Square, Somerville. Kimmel, 55, has written for a variety of publications during his long career including “Variety,” “The Worcester Telegram & Gazette,” “The Jewish Advocate,” "The Boston Globe," "The Christian Science Monitor," to name a few. He has also met or interviewed celebrities like Gene Roddenberry, Edwin Buzz Aldrin, Jonathan Winters, and John ,John Cleese , among many others.

Kimmel has five books in print including “I’ll Have What She’s Having: Behind the Scenes of the Great Romantic Comedies.” His book about FOX TV (“The Fourth Network”) won the Cable Award for the best book about the TV industry in 2004.

Like many a transplanted writer in our burg Kimmel has not had to look hard to find the charms of Somerville, Mass. He said Ball Square is the “Breakfast Capital” with such eateries as “True Grounds” to satisfy the Somervillian gourmet or gourmand. The only thing that Kimmel bemoans is the lack of bookstores in Somerville, and mourns the loss of McIntyre and Moore in Davis Square.

I asked Kimmel if he found Somerville a “cinematic” city. He said: “The Rosebud Diner in Davis Square is very film noir and Ball Square’s Kelly’s Diner would be a perfect fit for a 1950’s film.”

I had to ask Kimmel what his favorite lawyer movies are, since he was once a practicing barrister. Surprisingly he said: “I didn’t like "The Verdict” because I know enough about how the courts run that I could see the flaws in the movie.” However, Kimmel was very positive about my favorites “Twelve Angry Men,” and “Inherit the Wind.”

Of course, being a lover of Boston-based cinema I asked Kimmel what his favorite films were in this genre. He didn’t think all that much of my choice ”The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” but was very up on “Mystic River,” and” Gone, Baby, Gone.”


Kimmel wears many hats to make a living—one is a teacher’s cap. He has taught Film at Suffolk University in Boston for many years. He tells his student charges to get to know a genre of film like Westerns—so they will become intimate with that genre’s elements and writing about it will become second nature.

The critic quotes Mari Puzo, (the author of “The Godfather") “Don’t bore them” when he teaches writing. He said if the writer is bored with his own work he or she can be sure the reader will feel the same way. And like most accomplished scribes he believes in multiple revisions and drafts.


Kimmel is also a Science Fiction aficionado and counts Philip K. Dick as one of his favorite authors. In fact the ever prolific Kimmel has a new book coming out titled: “Jar Jar Binks Must Die... and Other Observations about Science Fiction Movies.” Now if you can make heads or tails of that title my hat is off to you!

Dan advises aspiring writers to teach, write for a number of publications, but most of all hustle, in order to develop a career in this market. Kimmel has hand in a lot of things, but he impresses me with a man with a passion for his work—and he is a lucky man indeed.

Press of the Real: Poetry of the Working Class By Don Winter

I want to share this essay from small press poet Don Winter. I became acquainted with Don through a magazine he was a contributing editor to " Fight These Bastards." I had a couple of reviews in the journal and I became familiar with his visceral, and evocative work.


From 1999-2008, Don Winter’s poems appeared in most small press (and many “academic” press) journals. Small Press Review called him “One of the best poets in [the] small press.” Working Stiff Press released Saturday Night Desperate: A Retrospective, 1999-2008, in August 2009.


Don has taken a break from the poetry world, but I can only hope he will reappear.



“One of the most trenchant, insightful overviews of American Poetry ever written.”---Small Press Review



Press of the Real: Poetry of the Working Class
By Don Winter

Working class is. It is the vast majority of us in America “who must live by the sale of [our] labor power, and [who] have no other life sustaining forces” (Line Break 12). It is those of us who perform jobs that seem boring, routine, banal, trivial, pointless, who as sociologist George Ritzer points out, “do the same thing every day. It is boring, it is bad, it is dehumanizing, but the green stuff seems to alleviate the boredom, at least once a week” (47). It is the man who worked at the power plant in Jack London’s John Barleycorn. It is those who labored in Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, “people who were caught in traps…They felt their lives were being wasted. And they were right” (142). It is the man and woman in James Scully’s “Enough.” It is those who suffer jobs destructive to human existence, jobs underscored by the ideology of Frederick Taylor’s Scientific Management, which has gained force in recent years, driving the expansion of the post-industrial service and information economy: jobs in consumer services, adjuncting, wholesale, and retail. It is those displaced industrial workers who must endure forced entry into the lowest levels of that service economy: jobs in domestic, food service, clerical, and telemarketing (Coles & Oresick xvii).

In Niles, Michigan, the working class town where I grew up, you were educated (euphemism for “socially managed”) for docility: conformity to the rules, obedience to authority, and receptivity to rote learning. Spontaneity and creativity were not rewarded. Niles High School produced submissive, malleable adults who were eager for jobs that would set the schedule. A good job meant Clark Equipment Company, or Simplicity Pattern, or National Standard. Work became the fabric of life, providing for a family the work ethic. That work ethic, the working class ethic, prized the functional and the practical. Conversation was direct, sometimes blunt, purposeful, but not reflective, and truthful, but you kept that truth in the family. You learned to laugh to survive; you passed on stories of family and town history, you passed on your values. Often you felt rage, bitterness and denial at being exploited by those you could not even name. You had difficulty in seeing multiple perspectives, but you felt others should be treated fairly, so you stood up for the “little guy.” And at home you made do, you sacrificed, you supported each other. Patriarchy ruled home, ruled the workplace. Often violence exploded in both. Education was fine, as long as you didn’t get too much of it, as long as you didn’t forget “where you came from.”

No, that’s not quite. Resistance to willed amnesia is a myth. You wanted to rise, through the accumulation of money and its power, above who you are and where you began, and then to marginalize, obscure, silence that beginning. But without intergenerational money, upon which middle class society rests, most settled for upwardly mobile versions of themselves predicated upon a pyramid of consumption, formulated not so much on the need for a particular object as the desire to own it to distinguish themselves socially: the idea that a Mercedes is a status symbol that places you above the one who owns a Volkswagen, even though you may be a paycheck or two away from homelessness. As Linda McCarriston notes:


Analysis of class in America is approached by different thinkers with
different standards of measure, but it’s safe to say that status—objects, jobs,
reputations—is not the same as class. Take Thomas McGrath dying in a
single room in Minnesota with a black mitten on the hand that could never
get warm after the VA surgery on it, a handful of books around him. He
NEVER was middle class. But he was educated, brilliant, and famous. The
academy threw him out and McCarthy—which should concern us all today—
finished him off. People are called, and call themselves, middle class when
they have no safety net beyond the next paycheck, no leisure in which to
learn and reflect upon their fate, no job security, no secure medical (and
dental, of course). What they have is an education and enculturation in which
they’ve learned to look down their noses at themselves “before,” in their
past notions of a life

The first lines I wrote, at age 40, evidenced some of the rage, bitterness, and denial I felt in my working class poor life: “For years the land worked us, planned/ our cities like shotgun blasts.” Plain spoken, private lines I wrote sitting on a bar stool in Niles. Here in my first attempt, in many ways brute, “snake brain” writing (I had no critical terminology to describe what I wrote), there is inner will, inner power, and social vision—also that rage—of a worker who realizes he is of a larger group that is, by-and-large- exploited, and who refuses to be silenced, to be extinguished. In the books I’d begun to read, such as The Branch Will Not Break; To Bedlam and Part Way Back; Not this Pig; Chicago Poems; Ariel; American Primitive; What Thou Lovest Well, Remains American; I discerned a reticence about the working life. I mean, there were a few Levine work poems, and several of Frost’s. And of course Sandburg’s, but as Williams observed in a letter to Moore, Sandburg’s “work” poems are a “drift of people, a nameless drift for the most part.” Why was it that poems from the position of the working class poor, from that life and that labor being economically exploited, seemed to not be a powerful strand in American Poetry? Why was the voice of a defined social class—whose condition has long been the subject of study by sociologists and political scientists—as absent or misrepresented in American “academic” poetry, as that of African-Americans had been until recently?

There is, and has been, the resistance of the “academic” literary canon to “those below,” certainly those of the working class. I believe this resistance arises out of a failure to appreciate, or react against, the class content of the poetry. That there isn’t a clearer concept of the “working class” is a big issue. Why can’t I justify my working class poems in the “academic” environment? Largely because the working class environment and real voice lack the political, social, and economic naming that might make them dynamic. Rarely gathered together as a locus of critique, the elements of a sociological poetics uncover the terms and uses of most “literary theories” as taxonomies of taste and/or group identity, joustings for a higher rung on the status ladder. And there simply is no cogent “working class” theory. The project of trying to place the importance of poetry in my life as a writer of poems becomes problematic as I realize how antipathetic to my poetic the “norm” is, and how few, scattered, and out of print are the theoretical materials I need to defend and articulate it. There is in American “academic” poetry a poetry of the “working class” that is all costume and no content. Most “working class” work that is acceptable to the digestion of the American “academic” poetry norm is not politically conscious. It’s nostalgic, romantic, soft focus. Anybody can sling dialect and dress his or her speaker in denim or leather or rags. Much of what American “academic” poetry loves as “working class” and “poor” is voyeuristic. So to situate the importance of poetry in my life as a writer of poems is to point to this dominant academic tradition (normalizing discourse) AND the (my) dissident tradition, both ever present and in dialogue, though the “dominant” tradition avails itself of the false prerogative of refusing to talk with its other as equal.

Dominant tradition be damned, I knew when I began to write I wanted to embrace, not exclude, the working class poor in my hometown. I wanted to express and claim my belonging, my sameness to them. I felt that in traveling to the deepest parts of myself, and my experiences in the localisms of Niles, in other words the particulars of my working class experience, I might touch the deepest parts of the working poor in Niles, and elsewhere. My exemplars, McGrath, Scully, Boland, and McCarriston, as well as Charles Bukowski, Phillip Levine, and Gerald Locklin, are radically awake in their writing, something any poet should aspire to, quaky-kneed beginner or experienced connoisseur, with a consciousness fiercely engaged by the particularity of this world, peddling hard as it can to attend to and honor each moment in that relentless flood of disparate sensations, experiences (and memories about sensations and experiences), and ideas which is contemporary life; and they write with an authority of voice rarely achieved by either man or woman. They have begun, along with writers like Jim Daniels and Fred Voss, to clear a space in American poetics where “forbidden voices” such as mine can exist and persist as an urgent place for utterance of consciousness, to speak for my class as well as myself, a poem of self “made valid for all” (des Pres 164). They have not forgotten their class, in fact have become bards for it, and they have been taken seriously.


Works cited
Bukowski, Charles. Post Office. California: Ecco Press, 1980.
Coles, Nicholas, and Peter Oresick, eds. For A Living: The Poetry of Work. Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Des Pres, Terrence. Praises and Dispraises: Poetry and Politics, the 20th Century.
New York: Penguin Press, 1989.
Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of American Society. Arkansas: Pine Forge Press,
1988.
Scully, James. Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice. Seattle: Bay Press, 1988.
Taylor, Frederick W. The Principles of Scientific Management. New York: Harper &
Row, 1947.

Ballroom by Lyn Lifshin

Ballroom

Lyn Lifshin

March Street Press

ISBN 1-59661-1421

2010.…$9.00



"it's like tuning into

distant stations. Or

an SOS alert, indelible

as lips or skin. Call

it ESP. If I didn't shudder,

your tango moving

toward me like a

brand, each place your

fingers touched,

indelible, a stain I

can't let fade"



Even the title is ambiguous. I suggest you do not "go into the night

lightly," Lifshin's poems dance us into/with a mad waltz, dipping and

the hesitation step the pauses ignite. Yes. I think of Bukowski, I also

think of Gertrude Stein and the women poets trying to partner, trying

to lead. But in actuality there is no one who writes like Lyn Lifshin.

Maybe a poet has written a few poems that have similar expressions

but there is no one who sustains, has the living focus or experiential

mood in varied effects within so many poems and each poem holds

the moment, provokes eternal, "…like a woman composing her self

like a licorice mare…" Our great grandchildren will be reading her

work. Lifshin parades her self in front of us and we can either except

or sit on the side lines while she dances without apology:



"TONIGHT

ON THE METRO

I FELT LIKE A NUN



they must imagine, I

mean even if they'll

never see what's

mysterious as the

mystical. Could

they not wonder

about that bracelet

of dark hair around

the bone. Or even

wonder about hair

around the other bone.

Even married to

Jesus wouldn't

they maybe even

dream what's under

some man's dark

jeans or cotton

as I can't help but

feel the outline

deep in tango,

so close bodies

move as one"



This book is a testament for and far more than any other woman

writer today she speaks, what we fantasize, think, how we feel,

especially, about freedom of expression without the vulgarities

of being specific:



"water pools in the

roses. My head's

under water in the

rouge blues. So

it's not raining

but it will be. This

blue Friday, a

roach I can't

escape without

a wall of them

burying me"



The first time I read Lyn's work, about five years ago, she sent a

packet of about fifty poems to the Wilderness House Literary Review,

as the poetry editor I was overwhelmed with her prolific writing, her

profound disregard for what anyone thought (?). I loved her poems

immediately. Even though I kept a tight boundary about submissions

and still do, I let Lifshin slid, knowing I might lose her if I didn't give

her free reign. There is no other way to read her work, be open and



allow yourself to be seduced:

"…Years from now,

when the hotel is plowed

under

and only pieces of stained

glass

drift up when a child

digs in clay. Or maybe

a ruined couch frame.

Or the glass or even

buttons from the coat

of the man who became

more and more confused,

wandered thru others'

bedrooms, dazed in

the lobby will float

past the cash register

and the eerie voice of

the buck-toothed

screeching guest will

echo up from earth,

cut night like an

ambulance siren."



The reader will never regret buying this 286 page book of poems

with a full orchestra playing in the background, twirling you

through the night. Bravo



"about to leap, bite

the neck of her prey,

put everything she has

into him. She is wild to

paralyze him, keep

him as her slave.

Don't call her Jezebel

or Medea, don't

look at her with a

sneer. She's been

waiting. his body a

taunt, a lure. It's

nature, it's not fair.

And even if she has

to die soon after,

she will have him

on the sheets

of paper"



Irene Koronas

Poetry Editor:

Wilderness Literary Review

Reviewer:

Ibbetson Street Press

Review of COWBOY WRITES A LETTER & OTHER LOVE POEMS, by Elizabeth P. Glixman

Review of COWBOY WRITES A LETTER & OTHER LOVE POEMS, by Elizabeth P. Glixman, 36 pages, Pudding House Chapbooks, 3252 Parklane Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43221, ISBN 1-58998-932-5, $10

Review by Barbara Bialick

In this chapbook, the author shows a developing talent in intriguing imagery, which at times seems a little too obscure. She shows the reader that marital bliss is not totally blissful, but at the same time she can laugh at her own part in that, as she does in the first poem, “Husbands, Wives and Chocolate.” How could a chocolate addict hiding in the basement eating the ears of six chocolate bunnies have married a dentist! “In the pre-nuptial I agreed not to eat candy—I agreed that all that would/be sweet in my life would be him…”

The fun gets heavier as she moves the reader along. In “The Dividing Line” she’s with her husband in their bedroom, “When you spoke in Zeus like tones/If we had children I would devour them/Do away with irreverent reminders…”

But she shows she really gets something about marriage and motherhood, when she writes of herself as a blue baby born to her mother Bessie in “Bessie’s Blue Baby”: “Bessie promised everyone/I would grow to be a real beauty/even though I was blue/awkward entering life early/before my nine month trip was done./The family believed Bessie’s omniscience./She was the goddess of the house/the mother of all grandmothers/who said no before you asked a question/You wore your underwear on your head/if she said boo…I am perfect my hair is blonde/and my voice is lady like/as quiet as a lie.”

Elizabeth P. Glixman has a BFA in Studio Arts and an M.Ed in elementary education from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. This is her second chapbook from Pudding House. The first was “A White Girl Lynching” in 2008.

Check out her blog at http://elizabeth-in the moment.blogspot.com/