"Poet and Polymath Hugh Fox"

I am reprinting an interview I did with Hugh Fox in 2008 that appeared in Reconfigurations magazine and " From the Paris of New England..."
Hugh Fox is in an hospice now, and is in the final stages of his battle with cancer.

"Poet and Polymath Hugh Fox"
Interview with Doug Holder

Poet and Polymath Hugh Fox: Still a Wunderkind at 76

At the Sherman Café in Union Square (Somerville, Mass.) I met poet, translator, critic, playwright, Hugh Fox and his wife, before a taping we were to do at Somerville Community Access TV of my show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.” Fox was visiting his daughter who lives in Somerville and teaches at area universities. Two of my next-door neighbors Kirk and Lucy Etherton joined us as Fox held court. At age 76 Fox shows no signs of slowing down. He regaled us with stories of his extensive travels, all peppered with his vast wealth of knowledge of ancient Aztec culture, mythology, literature, and publishing. Fox talks like a Bronx cabdriver (decidedly from the side-of-his mouth), and he is not afraid to use, to put it mildly, unsavory language. My friend described him as “Larger than life.” And so he is.

Fox, who was a tenured professor at the Michigan State for well over 30 years, recently completed a controversial memoir “Way, Way Off the Road” (Ibbetson Street) that dealt with many of the figures from the small press movement, a movement that has produced thousands of small literary magazines and books, and is the lifeblood of poets and writers of all stripes.

Small Press books and magazines are typically defined as having press runs of less than 5,000. Fox has championed a movement that gave a start from everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Mark Doty.

Fox was a founding member of COSMEP, (a seminal small press organization), and he published the well-regarded literary magazine “Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry,” (1968-1995). He is the recipient of two Fulbright Professorships and penned the first critical study of the dirty old man of literature himself, Charles Bukowski, as well as a critical study of the poet Lyn Lifshin. Fox was a founding editor of the Pushcart Prize, has written and published over 80 books and chapbooks of poetry, and has reviewed countless small press books for Len Fulton’s “Small Press Review.” Fox was the Latin American editor of the Western World Review & North American Review, and a former contributing reviewer on Smith/Pulpsmith magazine founded by Harry Smith.

* * *

Doug Holder: Hugh you wrote critical studies of Henry James and Charles Bukowski, two vastly different writers. Whom did you have the greater affinity for?

Hugh Fox: I got my PhD from the University of Illinois and my dissertation was on Edgar Allen Poe. I was raised as an Irish Catholic, and all I read was Irish Catholic literature. I had no idea what was in the outside world. I decided to take on Henry James because it would be an Americanization process and I thought I would learn to write novels. I did like James’ work a lot.

I never intended to get involved with Bukowski. I was totally academic. And then one day I was in this bookstore in Hollywood, the “Pickwick.” Anyway, I bought Bukowski’s book: “Crucifix and the Death Hand.” I got a hold of his press LouJon in New Orleans, and they told me to look him up in the phonebook. So I called him up and said: “This is Hugh Fox. I love your work. I want to meet you.” He said: “OK, come over tomorrow.” He was living in a motel in Hollywood. I talked with him a while. He took out these suitcases and there were all his books and magazines in them. He gave me five full suitcases and told me if I saw doubles to keep them. My entire way of seeing the world changed after this. Bukowski and Henry Miller were big influences of change for me.

DH: You were friends with Harry Smith, the book publisher, and founder of “The Smith…” magazine. Smith published such writers as: Duane Locke, Ruth Moon Kempher, John Bennett, Lloyd Van Brunt, Jeff Sorensen, Alan Britt, and Tristram Smith as well as my friends Luke Salisbury and Jared Smith. Can you talk about your relationship with Smith?

HF: I’ll tell you what happened. Smith had no money at all, and he meets Marian Pechak up in Rhode Island at Brown. So he marries her and her parents died and she got millions. So they move to Brooklyn Heights. They had a big Brownstone mansion. So Smith tells her he wants to be a publisher. His wife said:” Hey, we have the money do what you want to do”. So he started to publish. He had an office right by City Hall in New York City. I met Smith through COSMEP and used to go to Smith’s all the time. I went between semesters, and in the summer. I’d go for a month a year for twenty years. Smith published everyone who was anyone. I did a lot of reviews for him. He paid me—I stayed at his house—he set up the basement for me. We used to go out for lunch and dinner and his wife told the kids to call me: “Uncle Hugh.” I was closer to Smith than anyone else. Through him I met Menke Katz who was a great Yiddish writer.

DH: You edited the groundbreaking anthology “The Living Underground,” that our Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish was in. How did you get this collection together?

HF: It was formed due to my connection with COSMEP. This was the “Committee of Small Press Editors and Publishers.” Len Fulton and others formed it in the early 70’s. Len Fulton still runs the magazine “The Small Press Review” and “Dustbooks Publishing” in Paradise, California. COSMEP used to have annual conventions around the country: St. Paul, New York, and New Orleans. Every convention had a huge reading and almost every small press editor in the country was there. I got to meet all the writers and all the publishers and I got to know people in Boston, and of course Sam Cornish was in Boston, and as it happened he was included in “The Living Underground…” Cornish was at the convention in Boston.

DH: What is an “underground poet?”

HF: Someone who is not published by the big New York publishers.

DH: What was “groundbreaking” about the anthology?

HF: We had living, contemporary small press poets. We had folks like Charles Potts, Richard Krech, and many others. We had a reunion almost forty years later in Berkley, Ca.

DH: How did you get involved with the small press literary award the “Pushcart Prize?”

HF: I got involved through a COSMEP conference in New Orleans. The Prize doesn’t have as much impact as it did in the day. I go to a Barnes and Noble today and nobody is buying anything, everyone is there with his or her computer. Everyone is having coffee with his or her computers.

DH: Hugh you are the most prolific reviewer I know. How did you get involved with reviewing books, and why do you spend so much time on an activity that doesn’t provide you with monetary compensation?

HF: I became good friends with Len Fulton of the Small Press Review. Now, every four months or so I get a package of books to read. It’s good for me because I get to find out what’s going on with the poets. It influences my style—all these poets I read. It helps me get my name in the Small Press Review all the time. I want to be involved.

DH: Your are the doyen of the short review. How are you able to get to the essence of a book with such few words?

HF: Before I go to bed I always read a few things. Then I just react to it. It’s funny it is like I listen to an inner voice. The inner voice tells me what to write. The reason I got a degree in American Literature was really to learn how to write reviews of books. To react to books. My first draft of my Poe dissertation was horrible. My advisor said as much. He told me that I was going to write his way. He said: “You are going to react, feel, and so forth. I learned to react. I learned this from academic teaching.”

DH: You said you always considered yourself a wunderkind, a boy genius. How about now at 76?

HF: The same at 76. I haven’t aged mentally or psychologically. I’m still 26. I may have cancer of the prostate, arthritis, but my mind is the same. When I was in California recently I wrote 100 poems in two weeks.

DH: What do you want your legacy to be?

HF: I haven’t thought about it. I would like to see other people do the same thing. I want them to react to the world around them.

Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish’s ‘dead beats’: The magic of joining words

Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish’s ‘dead beats’:
The magic of joining words

by Michael T. Steffen

Words set together, that’s all poetry needs. Sam Cornish finds just two words, the title,‘dead beats’, to magnetize and entertain our attention, evoking foremost, for readers of poetry,the Beat poets of the 1950s and 60s, notably Ginsberg and Kerouac (and Marlon Brando and Thomas Wolfe!) whom Cornish visits in poems throughout the book.

But look back at that first word, ‘dead’. For poetry that loves paradox, reversals, contrariness, surprises, over- and understatements and everything turned around and on its head, the word ‘dead’ hints at something terribly vital. For poetry it does. Ever since David Ferry—hold on a second!—ever since Gilgamesh, Odysseus and Aeneas, long before Dante and Hamlet and Ezra Pound and Robert Pinsky, poetry has been sourcing from talks with and about the dead. Maybe the way all life does. Only poetry comes right out and says so.


Put the two words together, presto of the true ring of a commonplace term, and the next time you’re called a “dead beat” (poets and readers of poetry often disguise themselves as such to the perception of this agitated worldly world) have Sam Cornish’s book in your pocket and share the secret compliment with your smile. (“Beat,” also, is the word partner of “heart,” with which Cornish’s writing is always in rhythm.)

I wanted to walk readers to the front door of this book, not through the house. Yet here’s a peak at the poem, in astonishing phrases, ‘Getting a Life’ dedicated to Robert Creely:

the truth

on the floor
like scenes cut

from a movie
you miss them

there is nothing
to hold the

poem together
but his breath…

So Cornish’s magical ‘dead beats’ published by Ibbetson Street Press, those two words, the title wagging the dog (would poetry have it any other way?) held the book together and resonated from poem to poem as I read with relish.


‘dead beats’ by Sam Cornish
is available for $16 from
Ibbetson Street Press
25 School Street
Somerville, MA 02143


To order online go to http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress

Somerville Writer Tracy Strauss: Gets By With A Little Help Of Her Cat

Somerville Writer Tracy Strauss: Gets By With A Little Help Of Her Cat

By Doug Holder

Even though Tracy Strauss no longer technically lives in Somerville, (she is just over the border in the Republic of Cambridge); she is at heart a Somerville writer. She is an accessible woman with an open face and no discernible literary affectations. She lived in the 'Ville for 5 years, won a Somerville Arts Council fellowship for her poetry, and she continues to pound the keys of her laptop at the Diesel Cafe in Davis Square. Her work has appeared in the LYRICAL SOMERVILLE in the The Somerville News, as well as Somerville's independent literary journal IBBETSON STREET. In regard to her use of the Diesel as a writer's retreat of sorts she told me for some reason the din of the cafe helps her writing, " Chris Castellani, the director of GRUB STREET in Boston writes there all the time too. Maybe it is something about the atmosphere in which all these writers are present writing and creating throughout the cafe. It spurs us on I guess," she said.

Strauss, who recently completed a 5 year teaching stint at Emerson College in Boston will be teaching Writing at the New England Conservatory this fall. She is an accomplished writer and has been published in such journal as Solstice, Briar Cliff Review and Drunken Boat, to name just a few. Strauss had a residency at the prestigious writers' colony BREAD LOAF as well at the NORMAN MAILER WRITER'S COLONY, and is currently working with the best selling literary agent Kent D. Wolf of Global Literary who is shopping her memoir: HANNAH GRACE: HOPE, HEALING & A RESCUE CAT that involves healing from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome with her real life rescue cat Hannah.

Strauss has been the victim of sexual abuse when she was much younger and a cat she brought home helped her heal. Strauss said: " Hannah had been traumatized in her past as well and was afraid of people. I was afraid of animals, especially dogs, so we both dealt with our issues through our relationship. "

I asked Strauss how hard was it for her to get an agent. As you would expect it ain't easy. She said: " I sent out 100 query letters. I networked at writers' conferences, I networked on Twitter, and on my blog. At one point I met Kaylie Jones (the daughter of James Jones " From Here to Eternity") and she helped me get the manuscript in shape to be marketed."

Although Strauss is concentrating on memoir writing she loves writing poetry. She finds it a great way to express herself. "It is a foundation for my prose," she reflected. "Poetry has a musicality to it and so should all writing to some extent."

Like many Somerville area writers Strauss is a hustler: teaching, writing, giving readings, her fingers dancing on the keyboard at the Diesel, and loving every minute of love it. I always say if you have passion for what you do--you are living a charmed life indeed.







From Here



I am able

to overlook



the track

where the



people run

in circles as



I have done so

many times



now



I rest, I breathe deeply

aware my knees have unshut



I sit on the

metal bleachers



high above

freed



for a moment my eyes

my mind transcends



I look out



beyond the rooted trees,

the American flag half-staff



tied to its hard silver pole

the chaotic city, my life’s upset



all so distant, all so close

my fingers fit between



each other, my knuckles

spread, I am able to



bend without breaking

my tightened frightened



cramped hands, open myself

as much as is possible



to this world given my body

and spirit’s painful past



my elbows slowly, shyly

show their pale, naked selves



my arms stretch forward, up

I reach for the sky –



the clouds are like closed eyelids

the lashes spilling streaks of light.


--
trace elements # 52 & # 830:
----------------------------------
"By associating with a cat, one only risks becoming richer." - Colette

"Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened."
- Anatole France


http://thehannahgracebook.wordpress.com/

Review of AGING HEAD IN THE CLOUDS, chapbook by Alan Holder

Review of AGING HEAD IN THE CLOUDS, chapbook by Alan Holder, Finishing Line Press, PO Box 1626, Georgetown, Kentucky 40324, 27 pages, 2010

Review by Barbara Bialick

“Aging Head in the Clouds” is an “I can’t believe this is me” little book about aging on into your 70s by a long-time academic professor and writer. However, there is little that is academic in the book, which has the incredulous theme that he himself really has to grow old and die, just as his parents did before him. He goes to the hospital, the cemetery, and to his own private space to come to terms with this most human predicament.

The book starts right out on theme: “Jesus! Who is that geezer?” he exclaims in the first poem, “On Being Shown a Recent Photo of Myself”. “It’s bad enough having to view/the daily man in the mirror/…did I need to look at this cruel product/of a camera apparently featuring/a fast-forward gizmo,/did I need to take this appalling peek/into my future?”

But as the saying goes, “the future is now” so being a poet, he put together this chapbook about aging. It’s a quick read and does not get bogged down with symbolism. Yet by the end, I did think, to myself, Oh no will this be me, too?

In the poem, “Dead Parents”, he quotes Satchel Paige, who said “Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.” He replies, “Don’t look forward either,/for you are surely gaining on them…/just by taking a walk, watching TV,/brushing your teeth/…just by breathing, for God’s sake.” He points out that at age 77, he’s already ten years older than his father was. “Will my dead parents know my face/if they see me in heaven?”

He paints a natural yet basic impression of watching himself grow old and born to die… But while he has a good, readable style and voice, he has apparently let go of all that academic language he most certainly must have used in his past. Because this is it!

Born in Brooklyn, New York, he got a doctorate at Columbia University. He taught for 40 years at a number of colleges and universities, including Hunter College of the City University of New York. He also taught at Columbia, University of Vermont, University of Southern California, and Williams College. At present he teaches an adult-ed course on poetry in the Ridgefield, CT public library. He published four books of literary criticism, and other works of nonfiction and poetry in a number of journals. Finishing House, his publisher, also published another chapbook, “Opened: A Mourning Sequence”. He currently lives in Westchester County, New York.

Improbable Music: Poems by Sandra Kohler

Improbable Music
Poems by Sandra Kohler
Word Press
Cincinnati OH
Copyright © 2011 by Sandra Kohler
ISBN: 9781936370368
Softbound, 114 pages, no price listed


Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Sandra Kohler is an interesting poet for her dreams, which occur with regularity in this book, perhaps explained in the poem “Alpe di Lune.” In v. she reveals “The buildings of childhood live in us,/recur, unchanged, in our dreams.”

Indeed there are recurring dreams throughout this book dreams and realities of death, loss, the violence of war and its resulting deaths, roads of loneliness and failure that do not reach dead ends but continue on through life.

In fact when Ms. Kohler sticks to these themes her poetry seems strong and reality based despite the crutch of dreams. However, when she wanders from her emotional roads into the highways of religion and politics, she will lose all but the most ardent reader and everyone who does not agree with her views on these two subjects that a fraught with failure for one who does not handle them carefully, perhaps delicately, perhaps with more thought for the ones she seems to criticize and the reasoning behind greater things in life
(and death) than she seems to grasp.

Perhaps, as the ending of “The Cup” her poems are written with “The cup of ego, the cup of emptiness.” And, frankly, if you are not prepared it may weigh you down. However, if you like this kind of poetry – and apparently there are many who do – you may really get into this book and find in it, if not joy, perhaps some truths.

Athletes by Kirby Congdon.

Congdon, Kirby. Athletes. Rockford, MI: Presa Press, 2011. Print.




Review by Emily Braile

Kirby Congdon chose an ambitious theme for his short volume of poetry, Athletes. As indicated by the title, most of the poems Congdon has compiled are about athletes and athletics. However, he deviates from this theme in several poems to explore comic book characters and motorcyclists, leaving the volume feeling a bit disjointed and unfocused. His poetry also lacks a subtlety and refinement common to sophisticated poetry, evident in lines such as:

Their leather torsos,
riding iron bulls,
intimate and crouched,
intense in the lover’s act,
copulate with their hot machines.
Blood and oil are one.
They eat and digest
death (Motorcyclist 21).

Perhaps Congdon intended to use such raw language to reflect the raw nature he sees in the athletic world. I understand and appreciate the rugged, even primitive energy of athletics, but I also see a grace and power in sports that I find myself wishing was reflected in Congdon’s writing. At the end of the volume, I’m left unsatisfied, wanting something more, or maybe less.
Within Congdon’s poems are ideas that, again, are ambitious, but could be clearer. The poem “Swimmers” opens with the lines:

Before their oceans,
swimmers inhale,
select their wave
and, charging, dive.

The beginning is straightforward, but then becomes a bit ambiguous in lines five to seven:

The liquid birth
rehearses in reverse
that of death’s flat curse.

Thematic clarity and consistency are aspects generally missing in Athletes. For instance, the poem “Figure” seems to explore the theme of death rather than athletics, comic book characters, or motorcyclists. Congdon again displays a lack of subtlety in lines such as:

His firm figure
is erect
and from that phallic silhouette
the language flows,
free and fertile as a brook…

The poem ends with:

Death does not come to us;
soon or late,
men ready
their manliness
for that final state,
and, walking,
steady and direct,
march straight on
into the end of it.

The idea that people reach a point where they, knowing it’s their time, go to “Death,” rather than have “Death” come to them, is again an ambitious theme. However, the lines quoted above feel a bit over the top, most likely because of the phrase: “men ready/their manliness…” Lines like these, scattered liberally throughout Congdon’s writing, display a romanticized machismo unnecessary in elegant poetry. The lines quoted above illustrate such machismo and an aggressive sexuality, as do lines such as:

burn tire tracks
though my guts;
roar, exhausting,
under rearing buttocks;
cut corners
across my taut chest;
like roving lovers,
leave me, strapped,
silent and stranded (Motorcyclists 28).

And:

Hard helmets and high boots
tumescent in the sun,
got-up in rubber skin
and leather hide,
black, strapped, laced,
buckled with grommets,
chrome and brassy-eyed,
their dress itself is an act of sex… (Daredevil 29).

“Daredevil” is an interesting piece in that it clearly, and more gracefully than many of the others, expresses its theme. The poem is a comment on how men who ride motorcycles for sport entertain a higher chance of sudden, young death, but at least they die with their boots on, as opposed to people who spend their lives behind desks and doors, too afraid of death and pain to really live. The word selection and phrasing could be tighter, but this piece shows promise.


Athletes requires an overall tightening. The many poems that deviate from the stated theme of the collection hinder the effect I, as a reader, assumed Congdon wanted to communicate. The poetry is weakened by the way Congdon presents it with his over-the-top sexualized machismo and loose, unclear phrasing. I would encourage Congdon to write and publish more prose than poetry. He included one piece of prose, “The Speed Track,” opening it with the simple, clean, descriptive statement: “But we saved the machine.” Congdon’s one example of prose is more eloquent than his poetry and was, in the end, what I wanted more of.


**Emily Braile is an English major at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. This is another in a series of book reviews by Endicott College students presented by the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.

Love Song: playing at the Charlestown Working Theater

Love Song
playing at the Charlestown Working Theater
Presented by Orfeo Group


Reviewed by Amy R. Tighe

The brain, they say, is the organ most useful for sexual pleasure. But what is it in ourselves that calls us to even want connection or desire? What part of the brain tells us we want any kind of intercourse, whether it be social, sexual or spiritual?

Love Song is a terse, fitful and thoroughly enjoyable exploration of a man seeking and finding connection but the play begs the question: with whom?

Produced by Orfeo Group, a local and vibrant Boston-based nonprofit theater company, and playing at the Charlestown Working Theatre through August 27th, Love Song brings you to the edge where the only choice you have is to fall, in love.

Bean is an isolated man with some sort of psychological illness ( the playwright does not tell us which, exactly.) His extreme yuppie sister and her equally extreme husband try to help, tolerate and care for him with various degrees of success. One night a female burglar breaks into his dark room and catapults him on a search for connection.

The uber yuppie couple are wonderfully played by Daniel Berger-Jones and Liz Hayes. Harry is a dream, plying his wife with logic and at the same time, too much wine and Joan, his wife and Bean's sister, shows us that insanity can indeed run in families --it's just that some people are better making a living at it than others. Daniel Berger-Jones doubles as a waiter, and shows us a solid range in his performances. In one scene, Harry breaks down from his rapid fire responses to Joan's neediness and it's one of the better moments in the play--it's a real moment where you experience the beginning of a real falling.

Joan, played by Liz Hayes, has a more limited range. She is believable as a woman stuck on high maintenance and few nuances, and Hayes brings us into the character with humor, skill and ease.

Bean, the brother, is a very complex character and Gabriel Kuttner gives a wonderful performance urging us into the slow, steady and smart logic in Bean's very skewed thinking. Kuttner portrays the sanity and insanity of reaching out while living in a world that threatens you without logic. Molly, the angry and tortured burglar who invades Bean's home and mind, is intense and heated. Georgia Lyman invites you into a harsh character and shows her transformation flawlessly into a love puppy and then a warrior-like Muse, which allows us to hope that even we can find love. Lyman is stunning as a guide to the edge of love.

The acting is strong, the characters are clear and the troupe plays off each other with lemon sharp precision. John Kolvenbach's writing is bright, intelligent and speedy- no sleeping on this road or you will miss entire villages of conversation. The pacing is electric, which was fun for the first 2/3 of the play, but after that, I was getting burnt out. Bean's mental illness, played by a lamp and ceiling, was interesting at first, but by the third episode, was not impressive.

I loved the setting of the Charlestown Working Theatre for this performance. To get to my seat, I had to cross the stage-- talk about intercourse! The theatre itself is an old firehouse, and feels cozy inside a storm. The set design was crisp, and brought an immediate intimacy to the performance.

Orfeo's mission is to "thrill" and maybe I am not sure what that means. This was not a thrilling piece of work, to me-- it was solid, enjoyable, rich and ripe. I loved the message Orfeo sends as a company: Risher Reddick, director of Love Song, announced that every Thursday night was free ticket night, Fridays are "date nights", Saturdays are surprise nights and after Sunday performances, there is a BBQ. Orfeo as a company wants to "reduce the distance between people through shared experiences of audacious art." What I enjoyed most of all is a talented troupe taking on a primal quest and asking us to not be a witness, but to fall with them, into the journey of connection. Definitely go see it.


Love Song
written by John Kolvenback
directed by Risher Reddick
presented by Orfoe Group
at the Charletown Working Theatre
from August 4 to August 27, tix $20, some free tix available
call Ovation Tix at 866-811-4111
Thur, Fri, Sat 8 pm, Sun 2 pm.
www.orfeogroup.org
www.charlestwonworkingtheatre.org

Mostly Redneck by Rusty Barnes

Mostly Redneck
Rusty Barnes
978-1-934513-32-3

Reviewed by Timothy Gager

I’ve known Rusty Barnes for close to eight years and I previously have read every one of the stories found in Mostly Redneck. After absorbing the book cover to cover, my first reaction was how heavy the plots, the prose and the words were. Also, don’t let the title fool you, as rednecks are stereotypically viewed as unintelligent, Barnes is a word craftsman of the finest kind. Language, pace, place, conflict and plot are carefully considered within each story and I found myself comparing the author to writers such as Andre Dubus II and Raymond Carver, masters I respect greatly.

Story wise, if you can take a punch in the face and be able to brag about it, this is where it’s at. Teen pregnant lovers kill the fathers of their babies. People party and have sex in the woods. Scores are settled in complete beat downs. Women compete against each other for men and their own self-worth. Men want women that are unavailable or they hit the road and never come back, leaving others destroyed.

Two of the stories which stood out for me were “Rick’s Song”, where the main character, Jimmy starts a new life, one torn apart from a car accident, by taking a crappy job at a Chinese restaurant. The other story I loved was, “O, Saddam”, a fine satire, completely different than the rest of the book. (Note: The mostly in Mostly Redneck). Here, a tour guide in Boston becomes involved with Saddam Hussein, who is hiding out as a nut vendor. Barnes creates a brilliant display of humor and heaviness intertwined within the set up.

Mostly Redneck, packs a wallop and as mention full of excellent writing. The denseness of subject matter was in stark contrast to the physical length of the book (153 pages) and the smallness of the font which were both, in my opinion, too small.

Sept 13, 2011: Newton Free Library Poetry Series--Mnookin, Mazur, Triedman, Helfgott-Hyett

(Click on Poster to Enlarge)

http://newtonfreelibraypoetryseries.blogspot.com


Newton Free Library 330 Homer Street Newton, Mass Poets of "Poets for Haiti" anthology to read..... Host: Doug Holder

Spared: Poems by Angie Ellis

Spared
Poems by Angele Ellis

Main Street Rag
Charlotte NC
Copyright © 2011 by Angele Ellis
ISBN: 978-1-59948-277-4
Softbound, 39 pages, $10

Review by Zvi A. Sesling


Ms. Ellis’s volume of poetry may be slim, but it is packed with punches from the opening poem “Mauches,” a polemic on ethnic prejudice that burns into any immigrant group which has contended with what Ms. Ellis experienced as a young girl. The same prejudice that exists today from liberal Massachusetts to gun-totin’ Arizona – being different or yourself does not conform to the norm.

In “Spared” good is bad, bad is good, escape (being spared) can turn nasty, can remind one of another person, while “On The Corniche, Beirut” shows the heartbreak of war,or civil war, how death comes up suddenly, how it never ends and leaves “the hole in the heart of the afternoon.”

Spared can also mean the reader is spared superfluous words, unneeded similes, unnecessary metaphors. Can it also mean being spared excess explanation or over dramatic verbiage resulting in a hollow ache inside.

While we are spared a lot in the relatively short poems, there is the feeling we would like to know more, but with good taste she lets us know in “World Of Glass” When language runs clear,/no explanation is desired.

About midway through the book you will find “Strike Sparks” an erotic homage to sex, to a lover any male would want to be, to be in that place of hot jungle love and sex, or is it all failure, all imagined, all hope or all true? Ah, Ms. Ellis can light the fire and our imagination does not want to put it out. Does she? Grab this small volume as you might her and hang on.

Somerville’s Allegra Martin: part of an ‘Anthology’ of singers.

Somerville’s Allegra Martin: part of an ‘Anthology’ of singers.

By Doug Holder

The scene—a middle-aged community newspaper journalist—the Sherman Café in Union Square--one delectable oatmeal scone… a paper cup of strong coffee to wash it down, and add one mezzo-soprano—Allegra Martin. All but the last item I was familiar with. Allegra Martin, who joined me for a morning repast and an interview is a Winter Hill resident and a member of the singing group “Anthology.” According to the website of the group it consists of “… a professional quartet of enchanting women’s voices. Their expansive variety of music is presented with the fine polish of classical training and an effervescent whimsy that arises from an enthusiasm for all styles of performance.”

Martin met at one of my favorite haunts to discuss her group and their music. Anthology consists of: Vicky Reichert, who is a soprano, Anney Gilotte a soprano, and Michelle Vachon, a mezzo-soprano, and Martin, a mezzo-soprano. All four of these accomplished singers live in Somerville.

Martin, a native of Lexington, Mass. told me that she naturally gravitated to Somerville. She smiled: “It’s a great town. Not too expensive. There are many of my peers here--fellow geeks, musicians, and a strong geek culture that includes gaming, sci-fi groups that feed their obsessions at the Diesel Café in Davis Square.” (Where Martin stops by now and then), she said.

“Anthology” is a cappella group so they do their stuff without musical accompaniment. Their range is impressive; they cover the waterfront of hot jazz, classical, renaissance polyphony, world folk traditions, and incorporate the works of contemporary local Boston composers. Martin listed Erin Huelkskamd and Michael Veloso as a couple of local composers the group admires.

Martin, like many Somerville artists works several jobs to keep her going. One that caught my interest was her work with the Urban Voices Program. This program was started by the Met Opera in New York City—and it has spread to Boston. It serves schools that don’t have a music program. Martin goes to the Mission Hill/Roxbury School in Boston and teaches kids K to 5.

Martin, who got her undergraduate degree from Williams College in Physics and Music, thought about engineering at one point but realized music was her primary interest. She teaches at Lassell College in Newton, Mass—where she hopes to grow a seminal music program.

The other members of this band of musicians and friends work as voice teachers, choral directors, and other gigs to keep in their field.

Allegra Martin is a hustler, and has to worry about the next gig, the monthly health insurance payment—you name it. But she is hopeful, and with good reason, that things will move to a more stable lifestyle, and she will be able to follow her passion in the years to come.





For more information go to: http://anthologyvoices.com

Forced Continuities by Miriam Walsh

Forced Continuities by Miriam Walsh


Reviewed by Adrienne Drobnies


My first reaction to this book is either that the continuities are too forced, or not forced enough. On the one hand, it seems a journal of everything that cropped up in the poet’s mind, and interesting as much of that is, much of it also felt superfluous and inadequately revised. On the other hand, the seeming need for the poet to document everything in her experience made the poetry seem too forced, as though no random thought could go unrecorded. Nonetheless, there is a sense of abundance or plenitude to the book, some original language, and some great titles: “mating ritual,” “optivore,” “decoherence,” “lazuline,” “utopiaries.” The references to mathematical and scientific phenomena were engaging elements to the work (e.g., “Wigner’s Friend” – recalling a thought experiment by Schrodinger involving his hypothetical cat and friend, the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics, and the mind-body problem):
“The quantum
plays as fireflies
and my hairs
stand in reverence
to their electricity
against the night.”

I would prefer though that she use language that refers more precisely to the firefly’s bioluminescence rather than use what seems like an unconsidered word: “electricity.”

There are some nice images in the work, e.g.,“umbrella lidded eyes.”

I am most attracted to the poems that stress the link between personal emotional and universal experiences of wonder.

“I place
my hand upon your chest
to somehow
reset myself
to the rhythm there…

my lips pressing
upon your temple
here
I found a place
to worship.”

The author is also a visual artist, and the interesting cover and arrangement of the words on the page attest to her skill. The hallucinogenic quality of the cover reflects a similar tone in the poetry. There is, however, too much exhortation and philosophizing for my tastes. The title poem on the back cover says:
“The moment comes and we must follow, though it makes no guarantee that those that follow will be any easier. For all our poetry and hope, sometimes life is just forced continuity.” There is much to enjoy, some to dazzle, but too much of the forced for me in Walsh’s book.

***Adrienne Drobnies received her doctorate in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley and now work as a research project manager at the Genome Sciences Centre of the British Columbia Cancer Agency. Her poetry has appeared in Canadian literary magazines, including Scrivener, NeWest Review, Waves, Poetry Canada Review, Poetry Toronto. Some of my poems have been included in anthologies New Voices (Mosaic Press 1984), From Sinai to the Shtetl and Beyond: Where is Home for the Jewish Writer? (Hamilton Jewish Literary Festival 2009), and emerge (Simon Fraser University Writer’s Studio 2009).


********

"Night Flight” by Kenneth Frost

"Night Flight" Kenneth Frost
Main Street Rag Publishing Company
Charlotte, North Carolina

Reviewed by Alice Weiss

Kenneth Frost is a native of crowded New York and environs who in moving to Maine and staying there, has become a poet of solitude. His chapbook, “Night Flight,” is a publication of the Author’s Choice Chapbook series and the recommending author is Jonathan K. Rice, the editor and publisher of the Iodine Poetry Journal. Frost’s poems of winter and night, darkness and transformation compel by their play of syntax and metaphor. Everything is chilly, drawn through a winter’s night and the source of light is reflected or occasional, the moon, or fire or lightening. The poems are brief, the lines are short. Many of the poems exhibit an underlying grim humor in their syntactical games.

“When the forest had burned down
to a cathedral

smoke
evensong

one branch kept falling
whistling to itself in the dark”

In a poem about trains, “Country Crossing”, he identifies train tracks as “last century’s flat ladder/to paradise.” Indeed upending natural and human things that ordinarily operate in a horizontal universe is one of the constants of his poetic imagination. So coyotes float out of the trees, a flotilla bowing and twisting, “A heartbeat walks/on the moon’s plague of eggs,” or “The heart jumps over the moon/time and again trying to teach/a cow to be a hundred sheep.”

Not content with nature only, he peoples the poems taking us into glimpses of the imaginative worlds they inhabit for him: Mandelstam in the gulag, Wittgenstein in Norway, a senile aunt who does not recognize the figure in the mirror as herself and waves.
Take this example of concise exploration of a dark figure in our cultural life:

The Assassin

lays
one
hand
on
the
clock,
pets
its
daggers.

The simple comparison of the minute hand and the dagger is transformed by the picture of the assassin petting, suggesting an attachment both sexual and affectionate and reflecting an important aspect of what is strange about our current moral universe.


The poems do indeed take us on “Night Patrol” sifting through images of loss and disfigurement and moral distress. He grieves that “Extraterrestrial life/is answering terrestrial life/ No one should be here or there.”


And yet the bleakness of this last quoted line does not, in fact, operate as the last word. Frost takes us into darkness with a commitment to an operating ideal of call and response. Images act on images, everything is connected by the interplay of language. Verbs are especially empowered to conflate disparate objects. Take the poem “Blizzard.”

Snowflakes tear
their rags deep
inside alphabets
searching for vowels
to beat into
wilderness,

long hollow notes
finding a home
in a wolf’s throat
where the wolf
before a bleeding
mirror drinks
each crack.

The verbs: tear, search, beat, find, bleed, drinks take us in surprising ways from unnatural nature through language into sound, finally expressing its mournful howl in a bitter synthesis of matter, animal and mineral.
Frost creates small dramas that have a large reach but not everything works here. There are poems in which the structure is rickety or the images banal, or the poem should have ended sooner. Sometimes the poet appears to wish the language worked better than it does. Writing for example about spiders he refers to their “tutu/ legs en pointe,” which I found coy rather than arresting. But the truth is the tiny forms he uses throughout the book exact a hard discipline which he often turns to good use and the larger impression is that the book succeeds.

Review of SUNSET AT THE TEMPLE OF OLIVES, POEMS BY PAUL SUNTUP

Review of SUNSET AT THE TEMPLE OF OLIVES, POEMS BY PAUL SUNTUP,
Write Bloody Publishing, Long Beach, California, www.writebloody.com, 97 pages, $15

Review by Barbara Bialick

I think all you small press readers should buy a copy of this book SUNSET IN THE TEMPLE OF OLIVES so the author, Paul Suntup can impress on the public that he is worthy of fame in the greater poetry world. Billy Collins already took note of him in his book 180 MORE EXTRAORDINARY POEMS FOR EVERY DAY, 2005, by choosing “Olive Oil”, which also appears herein: “If there were olive oil cologne, I would wear it and if/there were olive oil goldfish, I would have two in a bowl on the/table For some reason, it is also a man swallowing lighter/fluid because the pain in his belly is bigger than the Kalahari/Desert….and sometimes it tastes like Brigitte Bardot...in the scene where she is sunning naked in Capri, an impossibly/blue ocean wrestling with the sky in the distance.”

Paul Suntup’s voice has elements from Billy Collins, Charles Simic and others who are even more surrealistic and bizarre, who I can’t quite name. The voice he is most like is himself, which includes funny, weird, dangerous, and surrealistic. His little “stories” remind me of those bizarre little John Lennon books we of a certain age used to covet. In “Amputee”, he writes, “Judy was born with a tiger at the end of each finger. When she was six, the tiger on the tip of her right index finger bit off the two middle fingers of her left hand one night while she was sleeping…” For the upshot of the story, I say, buy the book.

Here’s another one, “In a Black Sky”: “There’s no relaxing here. The one they call Van Gogh empties the/salt shaker for the second time today. Small white planets are counted,/then arranged in miniature orbit around a Medjool date…The first thing I’m going to do is think/the world out of existence. I’ll start with the trees, then move on to/animals…Water can stay until I swim to Africa…find the bones of my ancestors, then I’ll/make them disappear too. I’ll keep going until there’s nothing left/but orange swirls in a black sky.”

I hope u can get a general idea from these clippings from his literary plant. He seems to have had some interesting life experience as well. Originally a native of South Africa, he currently lives in Southern California where he is a freelance web designer. Oh did I mention this book was nominated for a National Book Award? In our world where money is so hard to keep, I would like to think Paul Suntup’s book is worth the fifteen dollars

Friend Request: Garden XV Literary Journal of the Boston Conservatory

Friend Request: Garden XV
Literary Journal of the Boston Conservatory
A SGA project

Review by Rene Schwiesow

When you think Boston Conservatory you probably think: music, dance, theater – performing arts. But at The Boston Conservatory the students are looked at as “whole artists.” For this reason the Conservatory offers its students a wide range of programs both in and out of the classroom designed to enhance their lives. A student literary magazine is one example. Recently, I spoke with Judson Evans, advisor for “The Garden.” Judson has an affinity for the Japanese poetry form “Renku” and he teaches the form to his students. But in keeping with the ideology of the “whole artist,” Evans does not leave Renku in a classroom. I was intrigued by the fact that the students often have Renku ongoing in their dormitory rooms.

What is Renku? It is a series of linking Japanese verse. Each can stand on its own, but also links with the next verse. Typically a Renku is a 5-7-5 verse followed by a 7-7 verse. When a student in the dormitory of The Boston Conservatory begins a Renku, other students may drop by at any time and add a consecutive verse to the string of poetics. Traditionally Renku is a collaborative work.

The 15th anniversary edition of “The Garden,” entitled “Friend Request,” contains examples of this Japanese poetry form as well as other poetic works. A poem entitled “Fourteen Days After Treatment” addresses hair loss as a result of chemo treatments. A friend of mine recently finished a round of chemo. This work hit home for me:

And when people ask, I’m always honest.
What did we do this weekend?
We shaved my mom’s head
and then got ice cream.

Several pieces speak to the social networking aspect of the title. A work entitled “Logged In” is one of them:

I live in mini-feeds,
friend requests,
event invitations,
status updates,
video links,
comments,
profile pictures,
chat sessions,
and game requests.

The connections people can now make over long distances gets a nod in “Skype:”


wanting to grasp
the person I can’t touch
one click brings
a pixelated bond

For students living in dormitories far away from their homes, today’s social networking offers the opportunity to remain in touch with family and friends and, as “Friend Request” shows, social networking can lend itself to inspiration. Judson Evans offers the opportunity for Conservatory students to express themselves through the written word in addition to their music and dance. “The Garden” helps to fulfill the Conservatory’s commitment to the well-rounded and articulate student.

For more information contact Judson Evans/ c/o Liberal Arts/ The Boston Conservatory/ 8 The Fenway/ Boston, MA/ 02215

Rene Schwiesow is the co-host of the popular South Shore venue: The Art of Words. Rene can be contacted at: duetsdove@yahoo.com

Somerville Poet Harris Gardner: Bringing his poetic passion to the Paris of New England

Somerville, Mass. Poet Harris Gardner: Bringing his poetic passion to the Paris of New England

By Doug Holder

Somerville poet Harris Gardner is many things. This fairly recent transplant to our town is a substitute teacher at Somerville High, a real estate broker, and founder of the much lauded poetry organization “Tapestry of Voices” that has put on the Boston National Poetry Festival for the last decade at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square.

Many of Gardner’s students at Somerville High refer to him as Einstein because of his curly halo of gray curls, and he is a genius in his own way. Since 1999 he has created a literary community of readings that span from the soon to be defunct Borders Books in downtown Boston, to the Liberty Hotel, the former home of the infamous Charles Street Prison. Currently he and Somerville poet/publisher Gloria Mindock host a poetry series that meets every third Tuesday of each month at the Arts Armory on Highland Ave. ( 6:30 PM) in our burg. The readers of the series has included many Somerville poets like Lloyd Schwartz, Ifeanyi Menkiti, yours truly, and others.

Gardner who has lived on Beacon Hill for many years has not only organized poetry readings but he is a well-published poet with credits in the Harvard Review, Midstream, Ibbetson Street, Aurorean and many others. He has a number of collections under his belt, the most recent: “Among Us” published by Somerville’s Cervena Barva Press.

I asked Gardner what he thinks about the lack of interest of the powers-that-be about creating a Poet Laureate in Somerville. Gardner opined: “I think Somerville is slow to pick up on what 23 cities in Massachusetts have already. I was on the Committee for the Poet Laureate in Boston that selected Sam Cornish, as well as working with the city of Cambridge to establish their Populist Poet. This is a very worthwhile… to bad the city can’t realize it.”

Gardner, like me, bemoans the fact that a number of independent bookstores have closed in our city—most notably McIntyre and Moore Used Books—a long time icon in Davis Square. Gardner believes that Porter Square Books is a great store, but it is really in Cambridge, and they don’t sell used books. “I really think we could use a bookstore in Somerville that sells new as well as used books”, he said.

Gardner is also a co-founder of Somerville’s Bagel Bards, a literary group that meets every Saturday at 9A.M. at the Au Bon pain in Davis Square. I asked him if he writes when he is at the group. Gardner smiled: “I wrote a poem while coming up from the Davis Square subway. I write everywhere. If I did write in a café regularly I think Bloc 11 in Union Square would have the right atmosphere.” I pointed out that Sherman Café in Union square was equally as good a writing spot—he took notes.

Gardner has recently been appointed the Poetry Editor of Somerville’s Ibbetson Street Press, and in that capacity he has attracted such noted poets as Diana der Hovanessian, Richard Hoffman, X.J. Kennedy, Maxine Kumin and others. So even though Gardner has been in the Paris of New England a short while; he has already accomplished more than some have in a lifetime in our city—welcome aboard!



Who?

This stoned cat puffs fragile rings
in my face. He’s pretty pushy, he is.
Asks imperiously, “ Who are you?”
You better believe that stops me on the spot !

Who am I? Starts right off with the tough question.
Am I in jeopardy if I reply? I stall to buy a number.
He starts to do a fade, already bored.
He blinks, yawns, ready for a snooze.

I volley it right back, barely clearing the net.
Who are you to ask who am I?
What’s next, “where are you?”
That should be my question.

Only his face hovers, can’t see the strings;
the rest is buried in a billow
of deconstructing rings.
Aging memories bruise like pinched fruit.

“Who are you?” Seems simple enough;
however, it’s complicated.
Who will I be when I remember?
If I could answer that riddle,

It would prove my genius,
like solving the sphinx..
Whose family lives under my roof?
What is my proof?

Who am I, a part of your dream?
When I pinch you awake, I fear
that I, a wraith, shall simply disappear.

Harris Gardner

Review of IN THE CARNIVAL OF BREATHING, a poetry chapbook by Lisa Fay Coutley

Review of IN THE CARNIVAL OF BREATHING, a poetry chapbook by Lisa Fay Coutley, Black Lawrence Press, Aspinwall, Pennsylvania, www.blacklanternpress.com,, 31 pages, $9, 2011

Review by Barbara Bialick

Every now and then I read a baffling book that has the unique complexity of a droll and yet lyrical voice. This volume, winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition, is composed of 24 poems whose lines transform into disparate oppositions of themselves, from the beginning of each poem to the end. You may think you got it right away, but don’t be disappointed that you didn’t. This is a book that would appeal to people who like demanding poems you have to figure out, yet which has poems with such interesting images, you can also just like it as it is.

For example, the poem, “Transplant”: “These aren’t his slippers, and this isn’t his/robe or his morning, its dark shade hung/against wet brick, against a TV’s low-sung/story of an uptown subway burning/…Let my wrecked lung be swaddled in hay./In this chest: tangerines, a fistful of lilacs./Today is purple, today is orange. Today/a subway caught fire and I wasn’t on it.”

I also like the imagery in “Errata”: It begins “As the story goes, the raven’s wings/aren’t black. They’re waves, capping /dark omens. Crows with curtained throats/…and continues, “I’m sorry you won’t see your son, his skin/peeling its white scarf through blizzards…” and ends up as: “Listen: my heart’s a gutter of ravens tugging at the firmament.” Interesting book. You may want to read it…

And one last example: The poem “My Lake”, which was included in BEST NEW POETS 2010, and begins: “My lake has many rooms and one, which is red/with a door that’s always open but chained./My lake owns boxing gloves. She owns lingerie./…She has been classically trained in lovemaking./…She freezes just before she murders her own shore…”

Lisa Fay Coutley had another award-winning chapbook from Articles Press in 2010,
BACK-TALK, in the ROOMS Chapbook Contest. She holds an MFA from Northern Michigan University, where she was poetry editor of “Passages North”. She lives with her sons in Salt Lake City, where she is a doctoral fellow and poetry editor for “Quarterly West” at the University of Utah.

Poet Kathleen Spivack: Boston as a Literary City

Boston as a Literary City

By Kathleen Spivack

Boston is a historically literary city. The beauty of Boston for writers today is that it is manageable, friendly, diverse, and non-hierarchical. I am sure the reverse is equally true, of course.

Whether you are a young aspiring student or an established writer it is easy to meet and speak, read your work and share ideas. Boston is non-intimidating and, despite its variety of poets, very democratic actually. There are numerous presses and as well as many writing centers that encourage our work. Our long winters help: we huddle together around the metaphoric campfires and warm our hands on writing.

In 1959 I came to Boston on a fellowship to study with poet Robert Lowell, both in his famous workshop and in private tutorial. He introduced me to other poets. They included Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, Basil Bunting, Jonathan Griffin, and others. Later, writers Frank Bidart, Andrew Wylie, Robert Pinsky, Jonathan Galassi, Lloyd Schwartz, Fanny Howe, Gail Mazur and James Atlas; to name only a few, gravitated to Lowell as well. Lowell championed his writers, and the experience of working with him changed lives.

The Grolier Poetry Bookshop has always been a historic center for poetry, and survives today under its new owner, Ifeanyi Menkiti. Founded by Gordon Cairney, it was a home for the young T.S Eliot, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Richard Wilbur, and later for Margaret Atwood, Robert Creeley, Gerard Malanga, James Alan McPherson and many others. Its roster of patrons mirrors aspects of our literary heritage. It is lined with photographs.

The young Louisa Solano who had worked at the Grolier took over the store when Gordon died. She brought it into the 21st century. One of the legendary dedicated great booksellers in America, Louisa’s knowledge, taste, passion, width of book buying, and her reading series reflected the whole span of American poetry. She also sponsored prizes for young poets.

Seamus Heaney was in Boston during that time and often at the Grolier. He inspired us with his poetry and also with his open generous nature. The Woodberry Poetry Room, at Lamont Library, Harvard University grew under the directorship of Straits Haviarias. The Woodberry Poetry Room opened to all members of the writing community and had a vast collection of recordings, books and little magazines. The Voices and Visions series was one of their projects. Christina Thompson, Don Share, Christina Davis and others continued with the Woodberry Poetry Room to make its archival material available. The Henry Wadsworth Longfellow House in conjunction with the New England Poetry Club, sponsors readings on its patrician grounds. The Boston Public Library hosts several festivals for writing.

And on the grassroots level, the Bagel Bards as well as many other community writing groups welcome local writers, editors, and publishers to weekly networking sessions. There are similar groups in other parts of Boston. Our city is small and multicultural and there are many opportunities for writers of diversity to come together. First Night, a city wide New Year’s celebration, began in Boston in 1976 under Clara Wainwright and Zaren Earles. It opened its doors to literary readings from writers from every community.Later Patricia Smith was instrumental in bringing the Poetry Slam here, which helped youth of all backgrounds to hone skills in writing and performance. Poets in the Schools started in the 70’s as well, and linked writers working in schools with each other, and with the diversity of Boston’s school population. Sam Cornish, Boston’s current Poet Laureate, a writer and scholar teacher and former bookstore owner, has been tireless in his efforts to encourage poetry. We’ve seen many Boston area literary festivals blossom.

Under its recent ownership of the Grolier, the warm and wonderful Ifeanyi and Carol Menkiti have brought a specifically multicultural approach to the store and it is once again a lively magnet for the poetic community, with its own ambiance. Theirs is a labor of love indeed and we love them for keeping this historic bookstore alive. We also cite the presses of Steve Glines, Doug Holder, J. Kates, and others. The work of Harris Gardner and Jack Powers. Sajed Kamal at the Fenway. There are many links between the writing circles in Boston. We are lucky to have the resources, the dedicated bookstore owners and teachers and administrators, the open heartedness of our poetic institutions, the diversity of community, and the manageable size of greater Boston’s literary landscape to support our writing life. Generosity is the word that best describes Boston’s literary scene.


*******Kathleen Spivack is the author of A History of Yearning, Winner of the Sows Ear International Poetry Prize 2010, first runner up in the New England Book Festival, and winner of the London Book Festival; Moments of Past Happiness (Earthwinds/Grolier Editions 2007); The Beds We Lie In (Scarecrow 1986), nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; The Honeymoon (Graywolf 1986); Swimmer in the Spreading Dawn (Applewood 1981); The Jane Poems (Doubleday 1973); Flying Inland (Doubleday 1971); Robert Lowell, A Personal Memoir; (forthcoming 2011) and a novel, Unspeakable Things. She is a recipient of the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award 2010, the 2010 Erica Mumford Award, and the 2010 Paumanok Award. Published in numerous magazines and anthologies, some of her work has been translated into French. Other publications include The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Massachusetts Review, Virginia Quarterly, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Agni, New Letters, and others. Her work is featured in numerous anthologies. She has also won several International Solas Prizes for “Best Essays.”

Kathleen Spivack has been a visiting professor of American Literature/Creative Writing (one semester annually) in France since 1990. She has held posts at the University of Paris VII-VIII, the University of Francoise Rabelais, Tours, the University of Versailles, and at the Ecole Superieure (Polytechnique). She was a Fulbright Senior Artist/Professor in Creative Writing in France (1993-95). Her poetry has been featured at festivals in France and in the U.S. She reads and performs in theatres, and she also works with composers. Her song cycles and longer pieces have been performed worldwide.

-Kathleen Spivack-_--

Review of Dead Beats by Sam Cornish

(A Young Sam Cornish)







Dead Beats by Sam Cornish, Ibbetson Street Press, 2011. $14



To order send $16 includes postage and handling to Ibbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143 or go to http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress



Review by Hugh Fox







Dead Beats is a vivid trip back into the world of the Beats. I mean you’re there, Cornish brings them back as alive as they’ve ever been, all the little personal details, here come William Burroughs, John Wieners, Robert Creeley, Margaret Lockwood,William Carlos Williams, Kerouac and Ginsberg….tons more. The little details are what really get to you: “the Poet looking for cigarette butts/in the gutters of Common//wealth Avenue is not a bum living alone on Joy/Street he’s John Wieners//his friends in poetry will speak well/of him after he’s dead at MIT the Blacksmith reading/reciting//but see him now and then/out of his fucking mind//he will be okay he’s dying his poems are collected/in a signed limited edition//that poets cannot afford.” (“Dead Respectability,” p.41).



I mean you’re there, all the wildness, the rule-breaking, the interior word/feeling wars surrounding you. Let’s get liberated, free, say what we want to say, feel what we want to feel, and screw the restrictions of the world around us. You want to get inside the wild sanity of the Beat world, this is the best place to begin. It’s the world Cornish grew up in and it totally and forever dominated his whole world-view: “These were the days of my young/America in the pages of City Lights//and the Evergreen Review/ Allen Ginsberg recalling the days/of his naked youth being policed by Time/ Magazine the lovers of J Edgar Hoover//America Sacco and Vanzetti/ the Scottsboro Boys rotting//in history Ginsberg lost/in his poems…” (“My Young America,” p.9).







And there’s another special touch here too, Cornish being black, seeing the white world through black visioning: “the jazz/man beats//his drum/like he whips//his women his/black face//purple with rage//my jazz



man/ with his nigger/face//wants to/marry//me my horn/player//jazz man/plays a sunny/day/something back//blows /his horn//like he/got/his thing/in me//his music/is he/jungle/in the city/bars/stompin’/his blues/into me.” (“My Man,” pp.14-15).





One of the most powerful books of poetry ever, ever written. In the Ginsberg-Kerouac mode, telling it as it is, but somehow, with ALL the academic writing-rules tossed away, you’re there, it’s not just writing but time-travelling back into Cornish’s reality that we can all identify with because we were all back there too, even if we never got so totally inside it as he did.





**** Hugh Fox is a founding editor of the Pushcart Prize.

Margaret Young: A poet who uses all the trappings of the world as material.

Margaret Young: A poet who uses all the trappings of the world as material.

By Doug Holder

Poet Margaret Young uses costumes, food, old pop songs, as well as nature, and just about everything else on this world stage for material for her writing. Nothing is too insignificant or marginal: she gives a voice to it all. As her mentor the poet Gary Snyder taught her, poets should give voice to that cannot be voiced; this includes everything in the human world.

Young is a poet and a professor at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. Her latest book of poetry is “Almond Town.” She earned an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis, and co-founded the Open Door Theatre Company. I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet Writer to Writer.”


Doug Holder: You have an extensive background in theater. Does this inform your work?

Margaret Young: I kind of grew up with poetry everywhere. My father is a poet, editor; he is a theater teacher, and Shakespeare professor. We went to plays all the time and it was really when I started teaching theatre myself that I started to feel as though I was an artist. I was good at writing and other aspects of the theater. But something happened when I was doing children’s plays. I was working with little kids that didn’t have a lot of stuff in their lives. It was sort of out of the comfort zone for me. But I started to do it and it gave me all the belief in the power of art to change lives. In a way this is what I wasn’t able to achieve as a poet for many years. This maybe because there are not as many opportunities.

DH: Has your theater background helped you when you read from your work?

MY: When I first started reading I was at UC/DAVIS. We had a reading series. As things turned out I signed up to read last and I saw all my friends and colleagues read before me. And they would do what beginners do. They would get up and read their work, and they would sound a little scared. And it finally hit me—of course they were scared. Of course you don’t have confidence, etc… So I learned to use my acting skills and pretended that I had all this confidence. And I got up there and everyone said “Wow!” I tell my students about this. As you know teaching is all about acting too.

DH: You got an M.A. in Creative Writing not an MFA. What is the difference?

MY: I wish someone told me about the difference. I know now it is considered a less complete degree. But this was the early 90’s, there was an internet, but I didn’t have access. I really didn’t know anyone studying in these programs. So I got some brochures from three or four places. I didn’t notice which one had the “F” and which one didn’t have the “F.” The program I chose might have had more an English emphasis than the MFA programs. We wrote a creative thesis. Each thesis had to be grounded in reading. I was taking classes with English students, which made for a richer experience for me.

DH: You have written about clothes and costumes. Do you feel the role of the poet is to strip away facades such as these and get to the meat of the matter?

MY: He or she can. But the poet can also pay close attention to what the clothes mean. We all pretend that they are meaningless and invisible. The essays I wrote about this subject took certain theatrical costumes that were associated with characters. One of the jobs of poetry is to look at the overlooked. Poetry should reexamine and refocus.

DH: You teach a course on Popular Culture at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. Tell me about it.

MY: It is the trivia. It is the frivolous stuff. It is what surrounds us all the time. Examining this stuff is important in any undergraduate’s education. Why are we surrounded and obsessed with all these trappings of pop culture?

DH: You seem to have affection for food in your writing.

MY: Yeah, I always figured why not study the stuff you consume every day. When I write about food I am writing about love, connection, and place.

DH: In the poem “Pastoral” in your new collection “Almond Town” you seem to imply that we separate ourselves from nature. Does poetry help you connect?

MY: To me one of the primary acts of poetry is to reconnect. So it always deepens my connection to it.

DH: Now… you lived the Boheme life and now you are a mother and wife. How has domesticity affected your creative life?

MY: I was very relieved when I had my first book -child before my first child-child. I felt I was ready. I had two books to mess around with while I was learning to be a mother. It would have been hard to balance them both earlier. It is a different life. But I also have new subject matter. For instance I can use the concept of ‘play’ and how that is aligned with the creative process.

DH: Your husband is a philosophy professor. Do you two complement each other in terms of each other’s work?

MY: We read poetry together. And when we encounter art works together I like having that very different prospective. It is one that is logical. We think differently. I am glad that he spends his thought time in a different place. When we do come together we have great conversations. He is a better poet than I am a philosopher.