An Afternoon with Tranströmer in Stockholm by Steven Ford Brown

Article by Steven Ford Brown






An Afternoon with Tranströmer in Stockholm

I first met Monica and Tomas Tranströmer in 1983, in Houston. I had left my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, to attend a graduate writing program and nominated myself to pick them up at the airport. We immediately had a connection, since I had met Robert Bly in the 1970s and published a special feature on his poetry in Aura Literary Arts Review, a magazine I edited for the English Department of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. They were delighted as their close relationship with Bly dated back to the 1960s.

The arrival of the Tranströmers on campus coincided that week with the arrival of Howard Moss,the poetry editor of The New Yorker. Ambition is very much an American trait, and most of the writing students chose to spend time with Moss on the chance he might choose their work for publication. That left the Tranströmers to me, and so I gave them a guided tour of the city. We lunched at an Asian restaurant and visited a music store where Tomas could buy sheet music for piano to add to his growing library at home. Since childhood Tomas had played piano, and he was as talented with music as he was with poetry. The rest of the week Tomas conducted a poetry workshop and met individually with students. He concluded his residency with a reading before a large and enthusiastic audience.

Tomas was aware I was a publisher, and before he left asked if I would publish a small selection of prose poems from a book soon to be published in Sweden. I said yes, and the result was then the only American selection from the book, a beautifully designed bilingual (Swedish to English) chapbook titled, Det Blå huset (The Blue House). It included the originals and translations to English by Göran Malmqvist, a prominent Swedish writer, literary critic, Nobel jurist for the literature prize, and friend of Tranströmer.

Illustrated with striking blue water colors by artist and poet David Chorlton of Arizona, the Cultural Office of the Swedish Embassy funded the chapbook. I gave several hundred copies to Tomas, and he gave them all away to audiences at various readings on his next American reading tour.

At the airport, despite just meeting them and spending only a week together, I was sad to see them go. As the plane lifted into blue skies toward Europe, I did not think of Tomas as a famous man but as good and kind, gentle in his way, perceptive as in his poetry. The connection and love I saw between Monica and Tomas made it impossible over the years to think of one without the other.

We corresponded sporadically after he left. I would not see him again until ten years later. Soon after I moved from Houston to Boston, I became a member and board member of the New England Poetry Club. Founded in 1915 at Harvard University by Conrad Aiken, Robert Frost, and Amy Lowell, the Poetry Club sponsored a regular reading series, the oldest continuous series in the country. Within a year of joining the Board, I used my previous grant writing experience to help write a successful grant of $5,000 to the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C., for support of the reading series. The NEA grant included a stipend and travel expenses to bring Tomas Tranströmer from Sweden to Boston for a reading in Cambridge.

Tranströmer read to a packed audience in one of the seminar rooms at Harvard. More than 300 people filled seats and lined the walls of the room as he read. In reading, Tomas provided explanations of his poems and used his dry sense of humor to add levity. And then there were the poems, the beautiful, luminous, remarkable poems.

The after-party was held in Cambridge at the home of Diana Der-Hovanessian, president of the Poetry Club. I made my way through the party to Tomas, and he remarked how strange it was to have previously seen me in the flat, dry landscape of Texas and now here in the snowy landscape of New England. He was in robust health, vibrant, engaged with the party people. It would be another fifteen years before I would see him again.

Some years later, I ran into Diana Der-Hovanessian on a street in Harvard Square, and she told me Tomas had suffered a stroke. The details were unclear. This was stunning news as he was still a young man in his 60s and had lived a healthy lifestyle. Details began to emerge from various sources over the next year. I did not write to Monica because I felt it would be intrusive to ask questions.

In January 2007, I resigned my job and left Boston to live in various European cities: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Dublin, London, Paris. Flights then within the European Union were cheap: $40 American to fly from Madrid to Rome. I obtained a residency at the Swedish Writers Union in Stockholm, and in March flew from Barcelona to Stockholm. I took a train from the airport and taxied to the Writer’s Union, a three-story building that included a flat owned by the Union. I had the address but could not read the sign in Swedish. The pass code for the door did not work, so I had to wait until someone came out to go in. I found the director waiting for me in a three bedroom apartment on the second floor. It was small but nicely appointed with private bedrooms and a common area. I would share with a middle-aged German man from Berlin, who wrote plays for radio and television, and a young, attractive Russian woman from Moscow, who taught at a university and translated fiction by Cheever, Faulkner, and Vonnegut into Russian. Over dinner, we discussed our different experiences in the literary world.

Once settled, I called Monica and arranged a meeting at their apartment. The Tranströmer flat was in an older building and included an ancient, creaky lift with ornamental iron gate. The apartment itself was spacious and charming. Through large windows oriented to the harbor, we could see the ferries as they departed to Finland.

When I walked into the room, Tomas became animated. I could see, however, the effects of the stroke. Paralyzed on the right side of his body, his arm was perpetually curled to his chest. He possessed very little speech. He communicated with Monica in his own peculiar abbreviated language she telepathically understood and translated for me.

I presented him with a recent book, Century of the Death of the Rose, my translation from the Spanish of Ecuadorian poet Jorge Carrera Andrade. I knew he would be sympathetic with the style of poetry. His eyes lit up, as he directed Monica to retrieve a magazine from his study. The Danish literary magazine Bogens Verden featured his photos on the cover. The entire issue was devoted to his life and work in celebration of his 75th birthday a few years before. With his good hand, he directed me to a page. The text was in Danish, but there was a list of his top ten influences and favorite poems. What a surprise! My poet Carrera Andrade was at the top. The list also included T.S. Eliot and other classic poets of the century.

With strong tea in porcelain cups and delicate pastries on a polished silver platter, we had a small party. Then Tomas played piano. Although it is true the right side of his body suffered the strongest blow from the stroke and his arm and hand were now helpless, he could walk, and was insistent he not be helped. He had spent his career as a psychologist helping accident and stroke victims with their disabilities, so he was unusually well prepared to deal with this transformative act to his body.

At the piano, Tomas played only with left hand. In the musical world, there is a whole genre written for piano for left hand. The genre of compositions evolved from handicaps of pianists who had lost an arm or hand. The German Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm during World War I, but he resumed a musical career by asking several composers to write pieces for piano that only required the use of one hand. Tranströmer had retained his musical powers, and they were now fully concentrated in his left.

The Swedish afternoon outside grew late. Through the windows the apartment gathered the darkness into itself. I thought of a line from “The Couple,” a Tranströmer poem: “They switch off the light and its white shade/ glimmers for a moment before dissolving/like a tablet in a glass of darkness.”

Tomas left to go to his study. Monica and I moved to the kitchen. She opened a closet to reveal a large collection of books. They were all the Tranströmer books translated from Swedish into some sixty other languages. The time of our meeting was exciting because new books had just been translated and published into Arabic and Chinese. There were five copies of my own The Blue House in the stack. We sat and talked. Our conversation moved to Robert Bly, now also in his late 70s, and she remembered the first time they met Bly in the 1960's. She likened their relationship during those years to young schoolboys, inflamed by the passion of their explorations in the new modernism of poetry.

Swedish poetry to an American in the 1960s was exotic, if they ever even thought of it. The hip college crowd and cultural intellectuals of the era knew the films of Ingmar Bergman and plays of August Strindberg, but no one knew anything about Swedish poetry. Then Bly began translating and presenting the poetry of Tranströmer to English language audiences. Along with his essay "Looking for Dragon Smoke," on the concept of deep image poetry, and his translations of Neruda, Georg Trakl, and Vallejo, he was creating a powerful new presence for world poetry in translation on the American poetry scene.

In 1975, Boston’s Beacon Press published Bly’s edition of Friends, You Drank Some Darkness: Three Swedish Poets – Harry Martinson, Gunnar Ekelof, and Tomas Tranströmer. The book was immediately influential by introducing several generations of poets that demonstrated the lineage of modernism in Swedish poetry. Bly translated and published early American editions of Tranströmer English poetry collections, including Twenty Poems, Night Vision, and Truth Barriers. In 1979, Ironwood, a literary magazine in Arizona published a special issue on Tranströmer with essays by prominent American and Swedish writers.

Over the next four decades an increasing number of translators published Tranströmer books in America and the U.K., as he became popular on the U.S. university reading circuit. One of the jokes Tomas told me was he was being paid so much money by American universities he had to visit Swedish tax officials to ask how to do his taxes. He was not used to celebrity he suddenly had in America, and at the time he was rarely paid large sums of money in Sweden or Europe to lecture and read.

As I departed Sweden, I thought how I had now enjoyed the company of the Tranströmers in three landscapes on two continents over three decades. It is not often in life we have the good fortune to meet someone we admire, someone who has influenced our life and work. It was also reassuring to know despite misfortune Tomas was still strong. He still wrote and practiced piano every day, and Monica was a constant loving presence at his side.

When last I saw him, I understood he had insisted on not the defeat of disability, but the embrace of the victory of an active and continuing life. He still performed piano concerts and readings, although he would now have Monica, an actor, or fellow poet read for him.

As recently as yesterday the betting odds in the London betting parlors to win the 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature were on either Syrian poet Adonis (Ali Ahmed Said) or Tranströmer. This morning in the few hours before the announcement it looked as if the odds had swung to Bob Dylan or Haruki Murakami. Several European newspapers already were reporting online it was Dylan. And then the news came early this morning: It’s Tranströmer! The Nobel announcement on European television was thirty-six seconds long. In the announcement there was reference to Tranströmer's “lumnious poems that show us all a new window of reality.”

To understand the beauty, power, and reach of Tranströmer’s poetry it is useful to know translations of his poetry into Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Macedonian, Romanian, Spanish, and Vietnamese are popular in those countries. An idea or image in a line of poetry by Tranströmer translates very well into the Arabic or Chinese heart and mind. Imagine a room of college students in Croatia, Indonesia, or Vietnam debating the meaning of “After a Death,” a well-known Tranströmer poem written after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

A typical Tranströmer poem will indeed include windows and striking images of perception that have ability to translate to a common readership across cultural, ethnic, and linguistic barriers. Thus he has become a populist poet, a traditional role in global societies that has declined in a modern world tied together by technology. Among scholars and the general reading public in countries such as China, Egypt, India, Lebanon, and Pakistan, there is still great respect for poetry and its tradition. In the West we have given ourselves over to technology, we are wired into it. Against the daily backdrop of a blizzard of words and images from the internet, we need powerful impulses to help return us to a connection to the natural world. The flickering screen of the computer consumes us. In this digital age poetry has lost its attraction. Consider that in this era, Twitter is the digital version of yesterday’s haiku.

Tomas Tranströmer is an international literary figure of great stature. With translations of his poetry in more than sixty languages, he is the most widely read poet in our lifetime. He has helped bring Sweden to the world and the world to Sweden. His poetry offers opportunities to see things in new ways, to view ourselves against the backdrop of cities and landscapes, the inner and outer worlds we simultaneously live in. His poetry speaks to all of us of what it is to live, to love, survive and thrive as a human being in this troubled world.


Prose poems from The Blue House by Tomas Tranströmer



Below Zero

We are at a feast which doesn’t love us. At last the feast sheds its mask and shows itself for what it really is: a switchyard, Cold colossi sit on rails in the mist. A piece of chalk has scribbled on the freightcar doors.

It musn’t be said, but there is much suppressed violence here. That’s why the features are so heavy. And why it’s so hard to see that other thing which also exists: a mirrored glare of sun which moves across the house wall and glides through the unknowing forest of flickering faces. a Bible text never written down: “Come to me, for I am laden with contradictions like you yourself.”

Tomorrow I’m working in another city. I whizz there through the morning hour which is a blue—black cylinder. Orion hovers above the frozen ground. Children stand in a silent crowd, waiting for the school bus. children for whom no one prays. The light grows slowly like our hair.

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Reply to a Letter

In the bottom drawer I find a letter which arrived for the first time twenty- six years ago. A letter written in panic, which continues to breathe when it arrives for the second time.

A house has five windows; through four of them daylight shines clear and still. The fifth window faces a dark sky, thunder and storm. l stand by the fifth window. The letter.

Sometimes a wide abyss separates Tuesday from Wednesday, but twenty-six years may pass in a moment. Time is no straight line. but rather a labyrinth. and if you press yourself against the wall, at the right spot, you can hear the hurrying steps and the voices. you can hear yourself walking past on the other side.

Was that letter ever answered? l don`t remember, it was a long time ago. The innumberable thresholds of the sea continued to wander. The heart continued to leap from second to second, like the toad in the wet grass of a night in August.

The unanswered letters gather up above, like cirrostratus clouds foreboding a storm. They dim the rays of the sun. One day l shall reply. One day when l am dead and at last free to collect my thoughts. Or at least so far away from here that l can rediscover myself. When recently arrived I walk in the great city. On 25th Street, on the windy streets of dancing garbage. I who love to stroll and merge with the crowd. a letter T in the infinite body of text.

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Icelandic Hurricane

No earth tremor, but a skyquake. Turner could have painted it, secured by ropes. A single mitten whirled past right now, several miles from its hand. Facing the storm I am heading for that house on the other side of the field. I flutter in the hurricane. I am being x-rayed, my skeleton hands in its application for discharge. Panic grows while I tack about, I am wrecked, I am wrecked and drown on dry land! How heavy it is. all that 1 suddenly have to carry, how heavy it is for the butterfly to tow a barge! There at last. A final bout of wrestling with the door. And now inside. And now inside. Behind the huge window-pane. What a strange and magnificent invention glass is—to be close without being stricken. . . Outside a horde of transparent splinters of gigantic shapes rush across the lava plain. But I flutter no more. I sit behind the glass, still, my own portrait.

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The Blue House

It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.

It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush from, the inside.

On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.

Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create. . .draw. ..” In order to escape his destiny in time.

The house resembles a child’s drawing. A deputizing childishness which grew forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind which the gilded frame cannot subdue.

It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life! And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.

A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.

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All prose poems rom The Blue House, translated by Göran Malmqvist, published by Thunder City Press. Copyright © 1987 by Goran Malmqvist. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.







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****Steven Ford Brown lives in Boston. He is an American journalist, music critic, publisher and translator in Boston, Massachusetts. Brown grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and attended the University of Alabama at Birmingham. After moving to Boston he worked for several local universities. For almost a decade he worked in the European Equities Department of a private investment firm in Boston's Financial District. He resigned his position in January 2006 to travel and live in Europe and pursue a career as a music critic and journalist.

Catalina by Laurie Soriano

Catalina by Laurie Soriano


Review byLawrence Kessenich

The impression I come away with after reading Laurie Soriano’s powerful first book of poetry, Catalina, is that she is a brilliant portraitist. She is like a skilled painter or photographer, who first sees the world with absolute clarity and then selects the details that will make it come alive for us. What she chooses to see most often are people and animals (though the animals are often with people or representing them), as a quick perusal of her poem titles reveals: Tim Roach, Parents, Sister, Turtles, Dogs, My Birds, Florence, Charlie’s Widow, Blessed Woman, Dogs II, Cat, Parrot, Fireflies.

But Soriano also has a discerning eye for the settings in which she and the people and animals she observes live. Take, for example, the first two stanzas of “Swimming Pool with Child,” where she moves from pool to child effortlessly:

A painting of blue and light—
white circles dappling the wall of the pool,
the sun tossing coins on the water’s surface,
the water’s aqua giggling at the bolder sky,

and a child swims the length of it, not yet four,
sturdy legs fluttering like that’s all God made them for,
eyes wide behind goggles. As she swims to me,
her mouth stretches back in a certain grin…

The words are well-chosen and none are wasted. The picture is as sharp and clear as the light of summer in that pool. We are there, in the water with the narrator and the child.

Other poems focus more on the person being portrayed, such as in “Sister”:

My little sister’s body carved itself out
this year, her legs got thin and shy,
like mine, her face took on the planes
and angles of our type of beauty, her hair
became a gleaming boast of abundance.

Or in “My Boy”:

The crack of the bat, and your torquing body
made it, and somehow nine years ago
my body made yours. Your cheeks
are streaked with manly pink,

and those blue eyes, which can glint
with the magic I’ve sprinkled in, those blue eyes
are dull steel, all about nothing
but finding the ball with the bat…

Soriano often deftly uses animal imagery when writing of herself or other people. Take for example the portrait of an aged couple in “Early Birds”:

They are hollow-boned, take their clawed hands
and guide them gently to the car…
Her hair is a puff of white, his a scattering of dry grass.
They bicker still, chirp/cheep in harmony…

Tired from the flight, they totter off to bed…

Bird imagery is again used effectively in “My Birds”:

I am knocked awake the final time;
the morning breathes through the blinds.
Birds are chuckling and singing
in the neighbor’s tree. I lie
still and listen, exhorting the timid
birds in me to call back
to the birds outside. Sing
the sunlight darlings. But my birds
are broken, their wings protrude bones.

As these poems demonstrate, Soriano’s detail doesn’t just convey physical characteristics; it’s loaded with emotional content, too. The reader gets both a vivid physical picture and the subtext of feelings. In a poem such as “Red Wine,” the powerful experience behind the imagery is even more apparent, as in “Bloody liquid, he make me fill his glass / to brimming…” or “…He fills / our glasses like love, daddy never loved me / like wine, and we start thinning our blood with this red stuff…” or “The next night he fills some glasses / so they dome with surface tension.”

“Red Wine” also brings us to the pain that permeates many of Soriano’s poems. This is a woman who has paid her dues, and who, like all great artists, uses her art to transform her suffering into something of beauty—terrible beauty in some cases, but beauty nonetheless. She sees life with a clear eye, and by conveying her own truth in an honest, powerful way, she transcends her pain and helps us transcend our own. This is a poet to watch.

The Speaker’s Progress:Sulayman Al-Bassam Theatre: Written and Directed by Sulayman Al-Bassam

The Speaker’s Progress
Sulayman Al-Bassam Theatre
Written and Directed by Sulayman Al-Bassam
October 12-16, 2011
Presented by ArtsEmerson
Playing at the Paramount Center Mainstage
Special Post Performance Discussions

For information and tickets:
www.artsemerson.org
617-824-8400

Review by Amy Tighe



At the end, the stage is chaotic. The sand that has been flowing from the rafters to the stage has stopped, time is gone now, the unused costumes whisked on stage during the liberation are still neatly hung in a dangling makeshift closet while the costumes that were used, are strewn all over the broken lab equipment. The sail boat has crashed in center stage, and I am not sure if the colleague who was a car mechanic, then a Tourist Board Director, then betrayed his co-workers, then was caged and tortured, is still in his cage. Two women are talking in a soft poetic rhythm. It’s up to the audience to decide what just went on, and in fact, after the play ends, there is a strong hesitation throughout the audience before we start to applaud. I think it’s because we don’t know if we have, indeed, witnessed the end.


Strangely enough, this ending is easier to watch than the beginning of The Speaker’s Progress. The beginning is like walking with a third leg which is not level with the other two—you limp, you regain balance, and then in the next step, you lurch left. You take a few good steps, you understand what is going on and then, without warning, you get unbalanced again and lurch to the right. It’s not arabesque --it’s just unsettling.


The Speaker’s Progress, presented by ArtsEmerson and showing at the Paramount Theatre in its New England Premiere, is written, directed and performed by the Kuwait-based Sulayman Al-Bassam Theatre. Showing for one week only, it is an uncomfortable experience of witnessing censorship, coercion and creativity through a retelling of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. It is definitely worth seeing. Written like nesting dolls that don’t quite fit right, it is a world within a world within a world. Choices in one world stressfully impact all the other dolls, and choices are made frequently throughout the play.


Performed in Arabic with English subtitles, the piece exposes audience members to many facets of Arabic culture. I had the good fortune to sit next to one of the few Arabic speakers in the audience. She told me there were many nuances and exquisite images I missed as a Westerner. I knew I had felt haunted throughout the entire performance and so I simply believe her. Tom Ashbrook, who moderated the discussion afterwards, said this piece breaks stereotypes that many of us in the West may have. Good to know.


The Speaker, our disingenuous guide for the evening, as well as the main character, starts the play from his podium. He explains how Shakespeare’s work was pivotal in building an empire for the British and this can impact Arabic culture as well. Although the play is performed in Arabic, The Speaker speaks flawless English. We rely completely on him to tell us what we see. As a Western audience, we are allowed in to witness Arabic repression and political inertia.


A 1960s performance of Twelfth Night is used to instruct us on current censorship guidelines. Actors playing actors recreate the 1960s version. But inexplicably, mid-scene, an actor, who is playing the car mechanic turned Tourist Board Director, motions subtly to the Speaker, who is still at his podium explaining scenes to us. The two quietly and viciously walk off stage and when The Speaker returns, he recants everything he has just so eloquently said. We witness him participate in his own silencing and we are lost.


In another scene, The Speaker cautions us to cover our eyes—we, of course, still want to believe in him. Bright spot lights are turned on us, O! Innocent Audience, while verses from the Koran are flashed on the screen which we are forced to watch. I think I might be being brainwashed. This is not an easy night of theatre to experience.

In the post performance discussion, Al-Bassam says several times that the ability to express oneself is the first thing to go in a repressed system. He is asked “Who is this written for?” and he laughs. At first, he says, he wrote it as a cry of despair and frustration. But now it is a tribute to the Arab Spring and “the undreamt-of leaps of change that have been made in the Arab world, and that are still to come.” He continues, “For an Arab who is 18 -- to live these last few months alters that 18 year old’s life forever…”

I can’t help it. I think of occupyboston, literally just 6 blocks away. I have been quietly donating to them. The evening at ArtsEmerson has been uncomfortable, but I am getting used to it. Our local and global political and environmental landscape is changing and old forms are falling. I want forms, but which ones? Will the next script have A Speaker who changes in a way I don’t accept? What am I supposed to do?

The placards that the occupiers write are intimate accounts of a system that is deeply unbalanced. “When I am in debt, I am alone. When I occupy, I am with all of us.” “Are you in control of the state we are in?” “I have a job. It’s not working. Now I have an occupation.” “You’ve got money. Use it right.” “I am the 99%.” It makes me clear to myself. I am the 99%. I am here. Just, where the hell is here?

Tonight at the General Assembly the occupiers are discussing what their message is. They have been criticized for not having a clear message, or a list of specific demands. They know they are creating a new language and a new form of community, but they don’t know what it will look like in the end. They know they are willing to occupy their lives to learn and to create. I know I am a witness to democracy gestating. This time it is not a theatre production.

At the post performance discussion, Sulayman Al-Bassam is pointedly asked “What is your message?” He says, “We worked hard to remove a message. This is about getting beyond prepared answers. We actors even used our own names in the play. We are finding a new territory. We are proud that the Kuwaiti government supports this production.”
ArtsEmerson’s motto is “The World on Stage.” Shakespeare said “All the world’s a stage.” Al-Bassam challenges us to see that on and in every stage of our common human pursuit for self expression, there are infinite worlds of possibilities. As a playwright, he asks me to accept this challenge. I do.

My favorite sign at occupyboston is “The beginning is near.” Through a profound performance by Arab artists at the thoughtfully resurrected Paramount and presented by ArtsEmerson, and at the General Assembly by the fragile tent city at Dewey Square, the unscripted expression of human courage and what we all can create is alive in the cement heart of our city. I hope you can enjoy it.

Mass. Poetry Award Must Read Poster 2011

( Click on Picture to Enlarge)

Compartments: Poems on Nature, Femininity and Other Realms by Carol Smallwood

Compartments: Poems on Nature, Femininity and Other Realms by Carol Smallwood (Paper, $15, ISBN: 978-1-937-53600-8, LCCN: 2011912611, 146 pp, 6x9, August 2011, Anaphora Literary Press)

Review by Dr. Christine Redman-Waldemeyer

If there is one thing that vexes a woman, it is her sewing box. Carol Smallwood is the sorter, a poet who can enter a poem and untangle thread. "The Sewing Box" is only one example of how Carol uses language and listing to empty and separate the compartments of our lives. Paying attention to detail she enters myth and the mundane with the same eye. Echoing in Carol's poem, We Are Told, is "It is Beauty alone that remained in Pandora's Box when she opened it-not Hope as we are told." Both poet and practitioner of this understanding, Carol relocates a spider from a gas station to Queen Anne's lace in her backyard, considers ants and their inherent sense to venture out of their home, takes the risk of comparing the tiny creatures to Lewis and Clark and ventures herself into topics that question our femininity. She pushes back, wags her finger at women concerned with Avon or who have masked their voice as a man, revisits her childhood centering on women's ability to gang up on one another, and enters the house behind the "white picket fence." She flips our trained understanding of violence on women towards an understanding that cancer is just as violent. She never ceases to remind us of the ugliness that pervades society that keeps us from loving our neighbor and even seeps into our relationships with family. In A Need to Know Basis she puts a spotlight on our human instinct to look away. Carol can envy and love what is wild. She can shed light on what is cultivated and domestic where there is rain and gray sky. She does not disappoint and will keep your ear tuned to what is outside your window and what enters.

****Dr. Christine Redman-Waldemeyer, founder and editor of Adanna Literary Journal; author of two books of poetry with Muse-Pie Press

Singer/Songwriter Jennifer Matthews brings 'Tales of a Salty Sweetheart' back to Somerville, Mass.

Singer/Songwriter Jennifer Matthews brings 'Tales of a Salty Sweetheart' back to Somerville, Mass.

Interview with Doug Holder

Somerville musician Jennifer Matthews was in the words of Willie Nelson, 'on the road again' for the past several years, and she has brought home 'tales of a salty sweetheart.' The sweetheart is not exactly flesh and blood, but her new album to be released in the spring of 2012 based on her experiences across the country, and in Europe. I met Matthews a number of years ago, and I was impressed not only with her musical acumen, but her strengths as a wordsmith. Later the Ibbetson Street Press published a chapbook of her poetry "Fairytales and Misdemeanors" that is in the library collections of Harvard and Brown Universities, among others. Matthews agrees with me that Somerville is great burg to be an artist, and I have had the privilege to interview some fine musicians like Audrey Ryan, Kristen Ford, Allegra Martin, Yani Batteau, Lucy Holdstedt,(of the Women's Musician Network), and others. So it was good to have dinner with Matthews recently in Union Square and see what she has been up to.




Doug Holder: You have lived in Somerville on and off for years...and now after a 3 year stint touring Europe, living in Alaska, New Mexico and Austin, Texas you have come back to the Paris of New England --is it good to back home gain?

Jennifer Matthews: Yes, it is interesting to be back after traveling to and living in these other places. Somerville does have a great creative energy and definitely a very progressive flow, which I can appreciate more now having experienced so many other cultures and towns. One of the significant differences I see is in the world of poetry. Here in Somerville there is a lot to offer for writers on all levels.

DH: Can you tell us about the Female Revolution compilation you were involved for ACM artists? I hear a song of yours is included in a soundtrack for an independent film?

JM: ACM records is a label based out of NYC and they signed on my record 'The Wheel' soon after it was released in 2005. They are a record company that really focuses on placing music in movies, TV, etc... I fond out what they were doing with my songs off that record after the fact... so it is always news to me too. I also found out recently that they placed one of my songs in a movie as well, which also has not yet been released.

DH:Your songs are often nature-based--and you seem to be open to what non-human and even inanimate objects are telling us if we stop and listen. Did this take conscious practice or do you have a natural poetic sensibility?

JM:I am a very nature based person... so everything I do tends to flow in and out with the rhythms of life and nature and at times what is unseen but felt through the veil. I tend to naturally tune in to the natural world around me. This tends to reflect in my poetry and lyrics and something as simple as the markings on rocks, or water, sky, ocean, tree can spark a song and filter through the music.... for example in one of my songs 'a dream of you' the lyric is .... "and there was music of a carnival, and you were waltzing under a silky moon and when you spoke the sky would turn from twilight into a haze of water falling blue" ....I am very drawn to the big mountainous areas which has led me to live in such places as Colorado, Alaska, and New Mexico. I like to be deeply in nature as much as possible. It speaks to me on all levels and provides a freedom and space to create. I think that is where the rootsy style of my music comes from... it reflects strength and peace at the same time....just like a mountain.


DH:You lived in Austin, Texas for a while, which is known as a last bastion for the bohemian, the low rent artists, and the alternative music scene. Give me your impressions of the town?

JM:Yes, Austin is absolutely more affordable than most places I have been for artists!! Lower rents, lower food and gas prices... and audiences that LOVE original music. I had a great time and really enjoyed playing shows there. I found that the audiences truly appreciate the craft of singing and songwriting!! As for what is surrounding there is Barton Springs that runs through the town of Austin and the actual springs are heavenly... pure water that regenerates itself every day.... lots of cool turtles floating around as well... but that Texas sun does burn blazing and mighty hot for half the year.


DH: How have the thematics changed in your songwriting since you first hit the scene. Has wisdom tempered some of the fire or is it now more a powerful but controlled entity?

JM: Yes, still fire, but perhaps a quieter, more reflective one. I have been writing songs for what feels like all my life... so when I write now it feels like an old friend... even though each song is born new, there is a deeper sense of familiarity... and when a great one comes through, it resonates very loudly and deeply.....





DH: Can you tell us about your upcoming new CD coming out?

JM: This record is a special one for me as it was written over the last three years as I was living a very different life style, on and off the road...traveling extensively.... some days feeling richer and luckier than ever and some days not knowing where my next penny was coming from... missing the loved ones that I am close to here. Through that time I was living the dream in some respects. I was living off the grid on a New Mexico mountain in an artist hand built house made of mud and stucco....we had no running water, only an outhouse.... but was surrounded by gorgeous views, endless freedom, sounds of howling packs of coyotes at night and nature abounding... Other songs were written on the road while on tour playing shows in Alaska, also rural area of Florida, in Italy as well as other states in between that I spent some time in and played shows like Louisiana, Texas,and Arkansas.

This record, I am having a great time with... it is as if I am recording it on my own. I am engineering all of the basic tracks on my 8 Trk Tascam home studio. I have some great local musician friends of mine whom I have played with and recorded with in the past who are adding color to the tracks .... Russell Chudnofsky is laying down some guitar magic as well as Rohin Khemani on drums/percussion and Matt Glover on mandolin and an exotic Bulgarian instrument.

The beauty of this is that it allows me all the time I need to lay down each song in its own time and not have a clock ticking behind me.... and in turn it has a really sweet magic to it in vibe and sound.

I think this collection of songs is one of my best and I am very excited to have it released and share it with the world. Each song has a strength of its own, a strong message and hook ... it has me at my best I think as a singer/songwriter... it is clearly an acoustic, rootsy rock album... of course with a poetic sensibility.

It is entitled 'Tales of a Salty Sweetheart' ... and am working for an early 2012 winter or spring release.



For more information about Jennifer go to http://jennifermatthews.com

In the Shadow of Al-Andalus: Poems by Victor Hernandez Cruz

In the Shadow of Al-Andalus
Poems by Victor Hernandez Cruz
ISBN 978-1-56689-277-3
Coffee House Press info@coffeehousepress.org.
Distribution: 800-283-3572


Review by Dennis Daly



Like cubist paintings, the words and the cadences of these poems insist on taking you elsewhere. The Caribbean, Moroccan Africa, and Andalusian Spain are divided and sub-divided into sparkling shards of history and sensuality, then arranged within Cruz’s poetic themes. His poem, The Dance of Blood, begins surreally with the cello of Pablo Casels walking down an Antillean street, answering to the name of Sonia, a black haired Spanish beauty, who is filled with Berber music and historical connections.


“The Mexican composer Agustin Lara wrote the song “La Malaguena” without ever stepping foot in Spain,” says Cruz in his luscious poem, Malaga Figs. “Did he sail his mental frames through the blood rivers of his mestizo bones,” the poet asks. The poem answers in metaphorical music that the physical connections between geographical planes are inherent. As I read this poem I was reminded of D.H. Lawrence’s overtly sexual poem, Figs.


Cruz’s lines are irregular, but rhythmic and often intersect in a geometry of cultural sensuousness, each plane distinct but connected. In his poem, “North Africa,” the San Juan sky is “filled with polvo dust that floated from North Africa: the orgasms of the Sahara.”



New York City in the poem, “Manhattan Transfer,” becomes a “simultaneity of places”, where a rivalry of languages exists, and where Spanish fixtures, such as the picture of San Miguel above the family’s apartment door, encourage accented English. Accents to Cruz are lacerations and scars from the battle of these languages.


Evoking his family history in the poem, Clan, Cruz recalls his young life as “a collision with a new language.” He also recounts the derailment of his Puerto Rican family into an unsettling “new time and dimension.”
The continued richness that Cruz’s unique cross-cultural poetry exhibits in this book is both a rewarding and a timely feast of exploration.

Review for Emerson Presents/Emerson College Faculty Film Series Boston, Mass.

(Paramount Theatre--Boston)




Review for Emerson Presents/Emerson College Faculty Film Series Boston, Mass.

Oct7, 2011.

By Amy R. Tighe


Turns out, I know more than I think I do. When I got assigned to review the Emerson Faculty Film series called Emerson Presents, I was a little concerned. I admit it, I don’t really know the difference between a film and a movie. I probably never will. But I love to learn, to talk to artists about their work and to see film that I might otherwise not have access to view.


Emerson Presents offers monthly screenings of films made by faculty, local filmmakers and scholars who are available to talk to the audience after the screening. Viewers have immediate and personal access to the artists and experts who discuss up close their work in an atmosphere of inquiry and insight. We get to see the Wizard behind the curtain and learn more about OZ. It’s a perfect way to learn.


The kick-off film of the season was “Scum of the Earth.” It’s a sexploitation film, made in 1963, when film was rising as a mass media form while at the same time, societal sexual standards were changing. Presented by Professor Eric Schaefer, the film is a great example of the era. Big cars, small cityscapes, bumpy camera shots, blunt dialogue and simple characters. In a short clip prior to the film, the producer, Herschell Gordon Lewis, tells us that the trailers for his films were brilliant because they enticed people to come and that he made lots of money off of them. Overseeing his museum, in his garage in the South, is his main work now. We watched a trailer, it was full of T&A, lots of full frontal and nude shots of women, no nude shots of men. Sort of uninteresting, but I wanted to hear what the experts thought.


When we finally saw the feature, it was about a sweet young thing being coerced into having bad photos taken of her when scantily clad, and bad guys gaping around her. Yep, lots of schlock, lots of clichés. There are two murders, a few rapes (off camera) a graphic beating with a belt (on camera) and a suicide.



I was hoping for a discussion afterwards of what we had seen. How did camera angle, use of lighting in a limited technology, black outs and white outs on the screen become an integral part of the action in the film? The role of women as objects, specific techniques the filmmaker used to make us, as viewers, actually become voyeurs, and to ask ourselves whether a rape off screen was more violent than on screen -- to me, these would have been great topics. We didn’t get to any of that, which was a disappointment. The room was clearly full of intelligent and insightful people and an excellent discussion was completely available. We just didn’t connect. Too much T&A, not enough Q&A.



I will probably never see another sexploitation film from the 60s. But I most definitely will continue to come to this film series because I learned there are other ways to value a film, and to discuss how a film reflects and impacts its culture. I may stop going to movies. It’s more filling to watch the filmmaker in the room talk about their work. You can’t do that with most of what’s out there in movie land. Public discussion of public art is satisfying and ARTSEMERSON makes this happen for the seasoned and the novice.


The next film is October 14. Associate Professor Kathryn Ramey will present a program of her work, starting with her recent video Yanqui WALKER and the OPTICAL REVOLUTION, an exploration of the obscure American expansionist and military dictator William Walker. On November 4, Assistant Professor Hassan Ildari, a screenwriter and director originally from Tehran, Iran, will show his 1989 feature film Face of the Enemy, based on characters related to the 1979 Iran-US hostage crisis.
Tickets to Emerson Presents screenings are $10; $7.50 for members and seniors (65+); and $5 for students. The series is presented in the Bright Family Screening Room at the Paramount Center, 559 Washington Street, Boston, and will continue through April 2012. Check the website for screening times www.artsemerson.org or call 617-824-8400.


As an aside, I must say that the Paramount is a total sensory delight. If you go to the movies to escape, then come here. The restoration is entrancing. It’s better than having a fairy godmother. Upon entering, you’re transported into an Art Deco dream, suddenly adorned with diamonds and your sensible business suit has become a glistening gown. If you are not careful you might start dancing in the foyer. But that would be just grand because the staff is totally professional, accommodating and gracious, they might even dance with you. And if you go to movies to learn something new, again, come here. Overall, ArtsEmerson has an innovative and inviting program. Rarely seen films and prints of Katherine Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin, a collection called The Marriage Circle, portraying “the comedy and the awfulness of marital strife” are a few of their offerings. I’m bringing my 10 year old niece to see at least two of the matinees on the Big Screen.


Built in 1932, the Paramount has had many lives. It opened as a Palace, succumbed to decades of urban decay, and became another victim of the Combat Zone. Emerson College has thoughtfully and thoroughly embraced this history, and offers us a way to understand where we have been, and also, through its programming, where we can go. Definitely a Boston gem!

Reflections In A Smoking Mirror : Poems of Mexico&Belize by Paul Pines

Reflections
In A Smoking Mirror
Poems of Mexico & Belize
Paul Pines
Dos Madres Press 2011
ISBN 1-933675-60-2

Many of the poems seem to take place when seafaring
men jump out of their boats with sword in hand, ready to conquer
the enemy with the clash of weapons and political demise. Someone
has to lose but it is not the verse. These poems are similar to a
Keith Jarret Concert. They can rip your heart out and leave the reader
defenseless. So we have the ancients and the jazz musician combo:

“...Ollin
saw him coming
and warned his orchestra

-when the wind speaks
don't answer or you're lost

Robed in yellow red & green
they sat in silence...

until the Wind
began to sing

and they couldn't help
but accompany him

the above poem is a hymn that traverses the early story telling, chorus
and ancients collide on the page with a combination of mighty warrior
and old hags:

“a hag among young whores”

or

“descended
to find Mother Earth
a many – limbed monster
moving over water...”

Ahh. Not much changes. We kill and confiscate, claim as our own
the spoils of war and his 'him' dominates:

“Two days
after Blizean Independence
and almost all foreign visitors
have left...
in fact
there were so many
a West Indian P.M. Kept asking
where the Belizeans were
(many of whom had been reduced
to peeping through the fence)
It rained on Saturday
as the Belizean flag was raised
to a 21 gun salute
fired by a frigate
off shore
but the firework display
was scrubbed
after attempts to light it
failed
and it was clear
most of the population
had stayed home...

The poems are well written, informative and many readers will
revel in their myth and reality:

“...while Carib girls pace
the streets

coal black
in tight slacks
hair in corn-rows

smile at me
by the River Front Hotel
where I wait for the truck
to Mango Creek...”

Review of MUD SEASON, by Pamela Annas

Review of MUD SEASON, by Pamela Annas, Cervena Barva Press, PO Box 440357, West Somerville, MA 02144-3222, www.cervenabarvapress.com, 41 pages, $7, 2011

Review by Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES

MUD SEASON is an elegantly written chapbook that comes out when the author is nearing retirement—and deserves a wider audience in the military, civilian and literary realms. It’s written by a professor and associate dean of UMass-Boston who has previously written about poetry, but in a more academic sense. She is hereby encouraged to take off from this selection from her worldly childhood up through when she became a mother and an academic and began to work for peace and feminism. Just saying traveling with her “Navy” family is not enough. What specifically was she building on, let alone rebelling against, if anything, from that? We don’t know. What we do know is she writes about her experiences from one city to the next in imagistic detail, one word picture after another, until each poem is a succinct block of beautiful language by a world traveler.

One example of her style is the poem “Talking With Trees”. She writes, “For years at a time I forget/the slow liquid language of trees, touch talk of fingers caressed by bark./…This morning…/I stopped to put my hands one on each side/of a weathered spruce and felt its delicate/meditation of sap and water/a language of vowels mostly/though the occasional sharp crack/of a consonant throbbed into my skin/…I..then walked on, hands on fire.”

This was written by a “Navy Brat” who grew up with “saluting in the family car/prefab green housing/trampled dirt of the playground/Armed Forces Day—cotton candy/and climbing on tanks:/It’s a hell of a note/when you’ve spent your life/teaching peace…”

Her memorial poem to her father is well-done, dense with word pictures. Called “After the Fact” (for F.A., 1923-1989), it begins “My father’s eyes were bitter chocolate/my legacy thick Greek hair that Sappho/might have braided with rosemary/and sweet clover, childhood on the slope/of a smoldering volcano. Still the savor--/fava beans in olive oil, dark bread, thick coffee, blackberries and yoghurt on the balcony/of a hotel near the grand bazaar…/Dolphins leap/in the wake of the ferry to Istanbul…”

In her Bio, Annas writes that “She singlehandedly raised a child who’s now in college and is herself a professor and associate dean at University of Massachusetts, Boston.”

She is also a member of the editorial collective of the THE RADICAL TEACHER, author of a DISTURBANCE IN MIRRORS: THE POETRY OF SYLVIA PLATH and co-author of two textbook/anthologies, LITERATURE AND SOCIETY and AGAINST THE CURRENT. She “looks forward to taking up blues harp in her retirement…”

Our Daily Words by Bernard Horn

Our Daily Words
Bernard Horn
Old Seventy Creek Press Poetry Series 2010
ISBN 1450526004


It is impossible for me to not love these poems when in the first poem
'The Smell of Time,' emits beauty and turtle shell hard as rock to knock our
heads against, the poems are at once our home and the author's home:


“...time enters the mind on waves of odor:
in chills and songs, in turtle eyes
that are sharp black dots
on warm jade, in the tastes
we remember, we relive
and get recaptured by our old attachments...”

We read each poem in this collection, because,
it considers how far we dig to find a complete sentence, one that holds
the earth, our experience, our dreams, then when the sentence ends, we
feel complete, and only in a poem our daily refreshment:


“the old familiar talk, that
everything passes, that nothing
passes or is certain, that language
itself only yearns, can never inhabit
this earth that recedes from articulation
like a calf forever just eluding
the red hot iron, the insistent
talk, last night, of Chekhov’s words and life
rang true, and yet, snowed in
in Framingham a Tuesday workday,
school day, Hedya and I
tramping, sculpting, repeatedly
sledding a long run in the thick snow
on thin plastic sheets, one red,
one blue, while Gabi and you
prepare the first full lunch
we've all sat down to together in longer
than any of us remembers:
Hebrew National salami on rye,
Campbell's salt-and- wonton soup,
cucumbers, scallions, hot spiced cider, words
knocking against words, and Hedya dancing to
Isn't She Lovely in her long johns,
aching for her seventh birthday, so filled
with pleasure, she calls her pal, Prageeta
and bursts into laughter before she finishes
dialing, while Gabi, darkly gorgeous today,
alternately three years older and younger
than twelve, suddenly, formally,
rises, walks around the table
plants a kiss on your cheek,
walks back to her chair, sits,
shoots a grin at me, and now,
from her bedroom yells
for the spelling of “science” but presses
against my left side at this desk before
I get to the “I,” while Hedya leans in,
hangs around my other side, writing, “aske,”
“dabe,” “eat,” “fed,” on labels for me to read
out loud before she sticks them
to the back of my sweater, while you're
on the phone with Bev, and then,
lunchtime, and now, at my desk, and now, and
now, I'm almost crying, thinking of
Max von Sydow with the juggler's family
in the clearing eating wild strawberries...”

All the words in the world cupped into a book. This is without a doubt
a “must read” book.


Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor:
Wilderness House Literary Review
Reviewer:
Ibbetson street Press

DEWITT HENRY: PLOUGHSHARES and other ‘Sweet Dreams’

DEWITT HENRY: PLOUGHSHARES and other ‘Sweet Dreams’



Interview with Doug Holder



DeWitt Henry is an acclaimed essayist, and fiction writer. He is the founding editor of Ploughshares literary magazine. Ploughshares is perhaps the most influential literary magazine in the country. Henry has a new memoir out, Sweet Dreams, that covers his youth, his time at Harvard, the formation of Ploughshares, and his coming of age as a writer and a man. I spoke to him on my Somerville Community Access TV show: "Poet to Poet to Writer to Writer."





Doug Holder: You are one of the most educated men I know. You have a PhD from Harvard and completed course requirements for an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop.


DeWitt Henry: I wanted to avoid the draft (Laugh).


DH: You came from a Philadelphia Main Line family, but your childhood was far from idyllic. Your dad was an alcoholic, a racist, and he abused your mom. Some people would retreat into drug abuse, mental illness, etc... in reaction to all this. Do you think literature was the elixir that saved you?


DWH: I was a child when this was going on--so I had an innocent perception of things. My father was a decent man; he tried to make up for what he did. I was the baby of the family; my older siblings experienced the brunt of it. But really--I don't think anyone has a so-called totally "happy" background.

Yes. Literature was a shelter for me. My mother was a writer and artist. During the trauma caused by my father she had her own nervous breakdown. My mother hooked up with a prominent psychiatrist--and later on she became a sort of psychiatrist's assistant. She helped my father and in a way protected me. In retrospect I grew up in a protective environment. My sister and mother promoted reading. My sister was very literate and a good writer. She encouraged me to read stuff over my head. So in eight grade I was reading Crime and Punishment. I probably didn't understand it!

DH: Your father was a successful candy manufacturer. What did he think of your desire to be a writer?

DWH: He wanted me to be a candy maker. I considered it--we all did at one point. He himself was second generation. My grandfather started the company. He sent my father to business school. My father got into chemistry which was sort of the high tech of the day--very in vogue. This was in the 1920's. He worked for DuPont for a year, then briefly for the family business, where, during the depression he attracted the attention of a chemist at Walter Baker Company here in Boston. One thing led to another; he was hired by Baker, and before I was born, he was moving up in the Baker management. But then my grandfather had a heart attack, and begged him to come home and take care of the family business. He essentially sacrificed a corporate career for the sake of family.

DH: You got your PhD at Harvard and you also attended the Iowa Writers Workshop where you studied with Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road among other novels. Was Yates' background similar to yours?

DWH: Well, he was born in Yonkers, N.Y. His mother was socially pretentious and ambitious. She appeared in many different guises in his fiction. He was 14 or 15 years older than me--but both our families had the drive to rise in society. The Main Line Philadelphia society where I grew up was very socially stratified. It was worse than the Boston's Brahmins. It was the kind of a place if you went into a dry cleaner or a Woolworth's, within five seconds they tried to place you . So we had that common background of parents dreaming of gentility.

DH : Was there elitism prevalent in the Boston literary scene when you arrived?

DWH: When I arrived there was a literary stratification between the establishment and the young and unknown writers. The big Boston publishing houses, Harvard, were not interested in the newer or younger people. They did not encourage community. They were just the opposite. It was a Brahmin culture.

One thing about starting Ploughshares at the Plough and Stars Pub in Central Square, Cambridge, with the co-owner Peter O'Malley--was that it was Irish. Behind it was tradition of the Irish against the Boston Brahmins, against Harvard, against the established order.

DH: Is a pub a good place to birth a magazine?

DWH: I'm not sure I would recommend it, but there is the Irish tradition of the literary pub. It goes way back to William Butler Yeats and the Irish Renaissance. The literary pub has a tradition of readings and publishing broadsheets. The tradition was inherent in the presence of Peter O'Malley . O'Malley is still around--you will probably find him having a drink at the pub to this day.

DH: The memoirist Malachy McCourt told me that when you write a memoir you should not get bogged down with facts. Memoir is more about impressions.

DWH: The kind of memoir I write is more like fiction--rather than literal fact. You have to look hard for details for your writing. I tell my students to look for artifacts around their homes that are unexplained ... kind of bizarre. In my family we have these bear skin rugs--bear skin rugs--how do you figure that? You really have to use your imagination to make things come alive.


DH: How important was the founding of Ploughshares in your development as a writer?



DWH: As I say on p. 196 of Sweet Dreams, the venture of starting Ploughshares lent me social identity as a writer...I was taken seriously by writers my age who had themselves managed to publish books and land teaching jobs." I needed that because my first novel was such slow going. The magazine also exposed me to contemporary poetry and fiction, and to the emerging writers producing it, like colleagues, and I felt both in my editing and my writing that I was talking back to them in "the cultural conversation." I think of Tim O'Brien, Andre Dubus, Fanny Howe, Thomas Lux, James Tate, Jim McPherson, Sue Miller, Frank Bidart, David Gullette, Joyce Peseroff, the list goes on. The magazine helped to forge my sense of literary enterprise, combining editing, writing, and teaching. It also proved to be the credential--more than my PhD--that helped me find my place at Emerson College and the Creative Writing Program there. Of course, in the long view back, I had been writing and producing magazines since my school days with a toy printing press, and later a basement print shop, and then in college editing the Amherst Literary Magazine. My love of reading, writing, and publishing had been one love for most of my life.

Mike Amado’s "The Book of Arrows"

Mike Amado’s The Book of Arrows


reviewed by Alice Weiss



Mike Amado’s posthumous fifth book of poetry, The Book of Arrows, edited by Jack Scully and Nancy Grace Cunningham, gives us a chance to do two things, consider his poetry as Amada himself said, “In all its beginnings. . .its blooming. . .its endings,” and to consider his position as a poet in a community.


It is this last that I want to consider first. I never knew Mike so when Doug Holder asked me to review the Book of Arrows, one Saturday morning at Bagels with the Bards, I began asking other bards about him. Many said as a reader he was unmatched, electric, spiritual, performing so fully his empathy strengthened his listeners. He was, they said, a healer. Although a slight man when he performed his voice was deep and projected, reaching the whole room, taking on a different character with each new persona. There was a selfless quality about his projection that said, “not me, but you. . .I speak of your experience.” It seems as if he was the heart of whatever community he felt himself to be part of. As such he filled an oracular role, like Isaiah or Homer. He told us stories about ourselves and in so doing healed us.

It is in this context that I consider his poems. First the communities the poems create because to be the heart of a community is also to create it. It may be that until you hear the poet’s voice you do not even know you have a community. At its root and maybe at its most powerful, Mike’s poetry creates the one community of which we are all members: we mortals.

Mike’s mortality is a restless one. He wants “to be reborn/Reborn as a gun that shoots sound.”

He morns his friend Philip “His Body lies—But Still He Roams,” “You know I’m not a bad son [this addressing his mother], just a dead seed.” In his meditation on the Iraqi war, “Yes, dead don’t forget:/Their eyes stand open like curses.” Mortality is intimate, indeed intimately connected with his dis-ease: Life, he says
is a journey of forgetting.

"Every cough that barrels from my chest tires to erase
the ill from my body but it keeps growing.
I don’t believe in fate,
but now I remember who I am.” [Misrepresentations]

Who he is, as I have already implied, is also a matter of community, but the issue of identity, as opposed to mortality turns him back to human institutions. So his first community is his family and inextricably his connection to his Wampanoag forebears. But also to the confusion that race and color causes for him personally and for the larger community. In “I Love Rock-N-Roll…” he says “I’m playing around with colors in words/until I can find the color I own.” Mike’s narrator in the Rock-N-Roll poem begins in the middle of a dance, sister and brother in the mirror. The detail of the mirror, which doubles the number of dancers, also works as a complex metaphor for what we see. “She smiling into a coarse bristle brush,” and then the next line, “The kind my hair is too fine for,” requires us to see that the mirror is reflecting more than the dance. It’s allowing the speaker to meditate, even in all that noise and movement, on how he and his sister are different racial mixes. The lines that follow pinpoint his dilemma,

“I, like alabaster. I always thought
that I was adopted."

but the poem finds a release “both of us are day-glo under the black light, shrieking. . .”

It is through his grandmother that he is connected to the Wampanoags.

My native name is Spider Song
Spider is my guide,
a strong Medicine woman.
Spider Grandmother wove
the world and I live to sing about it; [Name]

It seems that Spider Grandmother wove more than the world; I found the two poems about his grandmother, elegies really, “6-13-1916 11-13-2006,”and “Talisman” to be among the most moving in the collection. But then there are the poems, or poetry, or Mike as word smith. “Like my Native blood,” he says, “poetry is a live fish, un-caught.”

The watchers around me are Baudelaire, Blake and Bly;
Shaman and Storyteller. Just to be alive with a found soul

is all the test I have time for.

We are bones swimming in soil-waves,

We emerge with a sunken jewel. . .[Test]

This collection tells the story of a guy who struggled mightily to express beauty in his life despite his long and desperate illness. There are some very angry poems about doctors and their failure to acknowledge his fellow humanity, much less save his life, and a few angry political poems. But what jumps out at me are the moments of simple lyricism:
He smiles in the bathroom mirror,
knows it looks cool with his safety-pin ears.

That thin sheet of paper
On a table cloth of pastel flowers.
Sitting in the kitchen, after dinner,
her voice the voice of God.

Prayer is her rock, fire, wood, and water.
Her whisper calls in the dawn.

You don’t have to hold my ashes.
Return them to the earth.

It is almost as if you can hear the drums that gave him his first artistic experience still drumming the poems past his time, here.

Lawrence Kessenich: A Somerville Bagel Bard with a flair for “flash” playwriting

Lawrence Kessenich: A Somerville Bagel Bard with a flair for “flash” playwriting.

Lawrence Kessenich is a member of Somerville ‘s Bagel Bards and was an editor at the prestigious Boston publishing house Houghton Mifflin. During his time at Houghton Mifflin, Kessenich recruited W. P. Kinsella author of “Shoeless Joe,” Rick Boyer’s “Billingsgate Shoal”, a mystery that won an Edgar Award for best mystery novel of the year, “Confessions of Taoist on Wall Street,”by David Payne, and “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton,” edited by Diane Middlebrook. Here Kessenich writes about his experience in a 10-minute play competition…this piece should take you about 5 minutes to read!







10-MINUTE PLAYS: THE POETRY OF DRAMA

The first company to have an official 10-minute play festival was the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1977. Since then, such festivals have sprung up nationwide, usually associated with competitions that draw entries from around the country – and even from around the world. Boston has one of the most extensive festivals I’m aware of, every May at the Boston Center for the Arts. It’s called The Boston Theater Marathon – eight solid hours of 10-minute plays, five per hour – and it’s entirely captivating. Very few of the plays are boring, and when one comes along that is, it’s over in 10 minutes, anyway!

If your response to this is: “10-minute plays? What can possibly be conveyed in 10 minutes?” you’re clearly not a poet. Though ten minutes may seem like a short amount of time for a play, it’s an eternity for a poem. Heck, many of us have had group readings where we got 10 minutes total to read our poems – and we’ve said a lot in those 10 minutes.

What are these plays about? I’ve seen one about an old boyfriend and girlfriend meeting on the street in “the hood” years after the woman had moved away. Another was a socio-political satire about people shopping at The Hate Store. A third was, believe it or not, about a pair of mismatched socks talking about their relationship – and it was delightful!

You have to be good with dialogue, of course – or with conveying ideas through movement (as in one I saw about a bird that falls in love with a human that relied mainly on dance moves).

When I decided to start entering plays for the Boston Theater Marathon, four years ago, I was blessed with a lot of experience writing dialogue in novels (novels that remain unpublished, sadly, but they were good practice), and I always enjoyed writing that dialogue. I’d also been an amateur actor and had written one play adaptation in college.

But being a poet was probably my biggest advantage. In an essay on the Boston Theater Marathon website, BU playwriting professor and co-founder of the Marathon, Bill Lattanzi, writes: “It's been said that the theater is really closer to poetry as an art form than it is to movies, television, or the novel. It's a form that relies on artful compression of events into a single small space; that makes strong use of imagery, often spoken, to carry the day.” So, there you have it, poets. You’re half way there!

I find it a great joy to write plays. A new friend of mine, poet and playwright Lynne McMahon, tells me that she thoroughly enjoys the freedom that play writing gives her. “So liberating after the rigors of the poem,” she writes. “ Or rather the rigor is of a new and different order so it feels liberating – that's probably a temporary hallucination . . .” Okay, so maybe the sense of liberation isn’t permanent, but it makes a nice change from writing poetry.

I’ve also been fortunate enough to mine my poems for 10-minute play ideas. For years, people had been telling me that some of my poems were like little stories. So, I went back them and, lo and behold, found four that did seem to contain the seeds of something longer. I’ve turned all four of them into 10-minute plays.

After entering a number of plays in the Boston Theater Marathon, I decided to enter other 10-minute play competitions. And this year I finally succeeded. My play “Ronnie’s Charger,” based on a poem I’d written years ago, was shortlisted for a new festival in Durango, Colorado. The play is a series of monologues (with one brief interaction in the middle) spoken by a couple who lost a son in the Vietnam War. The Charger of the title is a Dodge Charger their son bought after high school graduation and enjoyed for the summer before going to boot camp. It becomes the metaphor for Ronnie’s life while he’s away and after he is eventually killed in Vietnam.

The play was given a dramatic reading with the five other finalists in May. The grand prize went to a play by Lynne McMahon, my new playwright friend, and mine won “The People’s Choice Award,” which is voted by the audience. Both plays, along with three other s, were performed at a festival in Durango on September 17 and 18, and I was fortunate enough to be there.

It’s quite an experience to see your characters embodied by real human beings, to hear your words come out of their mouths as if those words were their own. It’s a very different experience from reading a poem out loud at a reading, or even from hearing someone else read it. The work literally comes alive.

So, dust off any “story” poems you might have, or give an original 10-minute play a shot. And consider entering your play in one of the many national competitions. The writing is a lot of fun, and seeing you work performed is deeply rewarding. It’s an experience I highly recommend.

Somerville Writer Alan Ball: Working with kids after work and after-school.

Somerville Writer Alan Ball: Working with kids after work and after-school.

Interview with Doug Holder.



Alan Ball has worked 25 years as a medical journalist. He moved from NYC to Somerville in 1978. Since then he has worked with school kids by organizing after school creative writing groups at the A.D. Healey School, and formed the student newspaper. He founded the print and online magazine Happening Now!everywhere-- run by a collective of young writers that produces an online and print magazine of literature and art that is read worldwide. I talked with Ball on my Somerville Community Access TV Show " Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."

Doug Holder: You started your first novel at age 12. What was it about?

Alan Ball: Well I wrote one page and that was it. It was about an abandoned house that kids took over. I never finished it.

DH: Did you come from a bookish-literary background?

AB: I grew up in Freeport, N.Y. I didn't come from a bookish family. My dad was a supermarket worker--my mom was stay-at-home. I later figured out that she was an artist but there was no outlet for women then. I remember reading E.E. Cummings in school and he made me realize you could become a writer and not have to worry about all the formalities--you could experiment.

DH: You said you were grateful for the education your kids got in Somerville, Mass. A popular misconception is that Somerville schools are less competitive than some of our more affluent neighbors. How do you answer that?

AB: My kids got a great education here, and I am grateful. It had to do with me wanting to give back to the community. I know the controversy--it is a big misconception. The high school has always been a fine place. A lot of high powered people have come out of Somerville High. My kids did well-- both got into Boston College--and they are able to pursue their chosen careers.

DH: As we have mentioned you have taught creative writing to young children. Aren't kids natural creative writers--they view the world through fresh eyes--and there is still that fascination with everything?

AB: Absolutely. That is why it is enjoyable. The creative writing classes I teach are part of an after school program centered around the school newspaper. We teach creative writing mostly from the point of view of journalism. We jump around a lot. I look forward to do more "classroom" stuff but right now I am focused on publications. The kids do it all: read, write and research.

DH: Tell me about your magazine HappeningNow!everywhere--which consists of a collective of young writers.

AB: We started out in print, but we wanted to extend our reach. So we went online because the Internet is worldwide.

The print arm of our project is much smaller--we print around 100 copies of the magazine. The kids sell it--we go to public events like The Somerville News Writers Festival last year to sell our publications. We also have published poetry books. We published a small collection: " Poets for Haiti." It was a response to the tragedy that befell Haiti--we raised 800 dollars.

DH: Where does your funding come from?

AB: We recycle old print cartridges. We take donations--or we ask people to buy any number of our books.

TO find out more about this project go to: http://12zine.com

Mortal Terror: A Play by Robert Brustein

Mortal Terror
A Play by Robert Brustein
At the Modern Theater, Boston MA.

Review by Zvi A. Sesling


Robert Brustein’s “Mortal Terror” is more a comment on contemporary life than life in the Shakespearean era it portrays. It is also an expression of the universal theme “what goes around, comes around.”

Using the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, Brustein presents seven characters who represent not only 1605, but happenings 500 years later, perhaps even 500 years before. The use of this revolt is Brustein’s vehicle for expressing his feelings about war, terrorism, torture and much more.

Brustein, who is a Founding Director of the American Repertory Theater, delves into the mind of writers. As Shakespeare (Stafford Clark-Price) is writing “Macbeth” his friend Sir John Harington (Dafydd aps Rees) suggests he write a play critical of the king. Shakespeare’s desperate response is, “I am a dramatist Sir John and dramatists do not take sides. Their characters do. I simply record the discord in blank verse.”

Many novelists and playwrights have uttered that line: “It’s not me talking, it’s the character.” But is not the character merely a creation of the author? Do they not think or feel that which they are writing, even if they try to show both sides? Brustein poses this question as he does questions of the integrity of authors.

From Brustein’s perspective, Shakespeare’s writing of Macbeth is less creative inspiration and more monetary necessity and appeasement of royalty. In one of the more comical scenes King James I (Michael Hammond) commissions Shakespeare to write a play that includes witches for a tidy sum that will keep the author financially secure for a time.

King James I, played superbly with varying portrayals of anger, humor and cold blooded dictator, is the king who orders the revision of the bible while at the same time authoring a book about witches and the supernatural. Perhaps this is Brustein’s way of saying that we are all driven by competing forces. James, who is in a loveless marriage and accused by his Queen of having numerous affairs, has no knowledge of her affair with Robert Catesby (Christopher James Webb), an overly serious, scarily staring revolutionary who leads the Gunpowder Plot. The king also has little knowledge of the growing friendship between his wife and the Bard. Here again, Brustein makes a morality statement. When Shakespeare learns of the queen’s affair with Catesby he chooses to spurn her and return to Stratford-on-Avon.

Ben Jonson (Jeremiah Kissel) is perfect as the sarcastic, insulting, vocabulary filled friend of Shakespeare, jealous of the Bard’s talent and ability to procure women, is even more so when he discovers the friendship between the Bard and the Queen. If there is a fault with the casting it is that while Jonson was eight years younger than Shakespeare, Kissel’s appearance is that of an older man, which brings to mind the fact that Shakespeare was 41 years-old during the Gunpowder Plot, but Clark-Price, without beard and moustache, looks to be much younger.

Nevertheless, Kissel’s performance rivals Hammond’s as star of the show. And then there is Georgia Lyman as Queen Anne. In one scene, when the King announces the execution of Catesby, Anne’s face turns into a tortured, silently weeping woman, with no tears, but obvious anguish. Discovering her lover Catesby, despite a promise to spare her son, had planned on including him in royalty’s destruction, the devastation in learning of the betrayal is clear. And when she first appears at Shakespeare’s room and removes her hat to reveal flowing hair and a beauty unseen in her queenly garb, she commands attention not only for her acting, but her startling good looks.

Sir John Harington is an excellent wise elder dispensing advice and criticism. He is every bit the knight striding the stage of the period piece not only in appropriate attire, but manner as well.

Marston/Guy Fawkes is well acted by John Kuntz. Marston is Jonson’s sidekick, while Guy Fawkes is one of the lead perpetrators of the Gunpowder Plot. Kuntz in his dual role presents a well nuanced balance between humor and drama.

Directed by Daniel Varon the play moves quickly through its roughly two hours, the actors playing their roles flawlessly and the director deserving as much credit as the actors for the success of the play.

In “Mortal Terror” Brustein has written a play of contemporary themes based on 500 year-old themes perhaps even older which replay throughout history so that as you watch
Brustein’s retelling of Jamesian England, the parallels to today’s America are unambiguous. It is an enjoyable, enthralling play which does not have a slow moment and, stripped of most Shakespearean language, is accessible to everyone.

Review of THE POSSIBILITY OF SCORPIONS by Connemara Wadsworth

Review of THE POSSIBILITY OF SCORPIONS by Connemara Wadsworth,
Winner of the White Eagle Coffee Store Press Fall 2009 Chapbook Contest, 24 pages, White Eagle Coffee Store Press, PO Box 383, Fox River Grove, IL 60021-0383, www.whiteeaglecoffeestorepress.com

Review by Barbara Bialick

It’s easy to see why this chapbook was a winner. It’s trim, neat, and organized.
It’s well on the mark as a travel memoir of a seven year old American girl from Boston who voyaged with her parents and brother on an architectural Fulbright grant to Baghdad, Iraq from 1952-1954, whose vivid images are interpreted by her status as an older grown woman who has since traveled to other foreign places such as Nepal and Kenya. These other places sometimes glint with a memory of her trip to Baghdad, but, she explains, “I see Iraq now like an old photo/yellowed, torn. Only moments of a story/survive. I hold lost images under my skin./Think of crazy quilt patches/of a flowered dress worn only twice.”

I think it would be a disservice to the author to tell you more than a brief imagery of the rude, yet intriguing place she was happy to leave again. For she reveals her secrets slowly and carefully, bringing you through a these experiences in exactly 24 pages. The cover, a close up on a young girl’s “mary jane” shoes on a strange rug, from a wood block print by April Kendziora Smith, sets the stage perfectly. These experiences were to her “like beads found under a radiator…” with voices “from tinny radios, I begin to take/comfort in the music’s new familiarity…”

Beware of what can happen when familiarity is not really family at all. Observe the brutality with which a donkey is beheaded to feed circus animals. These incidents and more make the book a bit painful to read, but is well done.

The author notes, “I began writing about our lives there long before the onset of the Persian Gulf War and our current ‘war against terror,’ both of which rekindled many more memories. Living in a vastly different culture…laid a foundation for a deep sense of a wider world and led to a commitment to exploring other cultures…”

Connemara Wadsworth graduated from Friends World College, an international program. She studied education and later became an elementary school teacher, after first working as a weaver. Her poems have appeared in Ibbetson Street, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, and others. She has three grown children and lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

If I Take You Here by Martha Carlson-Bradley

If I Take You Here
by Martha Carlson-Bradley
Copyright 2010 by Martha Carlson-Bradley
Adastra Press
Easthampton, MA 01027
Softbound, 34 pages, $18.00
ISBN 10: 0-9822495-9-4
ISBN 13: 978-0-9822495-9-8

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

In reading chapbooks from Adastra Press, Gary Metras’s publishing house in Easthampton, MA, I have never been disappointed by the poetry they contain and If I Take You There is no exception. Martha Carlson-Bradley has woven together poems of appealing and clear images that churn up visuals as you read.

If I take you here
what do I hope?

that our eyes will focus
in the same direction –

low hills, for both of us,
edging in the field?

Or here, inside:
why should you

witness the sofa
too formal to sit on
Victorian horsehair –

or the Times watch
as it ticks on the bureau
the tips of its hands

green with radium?

My grandfather’s bedroom
narrow, long as a freight car,

holds its one note:
half warning, half lament


Here is another example:

Something broken grates underfoot.

Chilled, with my hands in raincoat pockets,
I study the Last Supper

my family discarded.

Disciples hold their sudden gestures –
fist on money bag, a finger point.

Tender flesh of a palm


Here, like DaVinci, the moment is captured, the action frozen as today, money is the key to the moment, the trapdoor of action, the sale of life. Religion broken down to its monetary base, its evil. Even at the end of a life, someone must make a profit, though not the victimh.

Here are scattered lines from other poems:

• A drip from the faucet; a tick of the clock
• Only winter birds a speaking
• a shot glass is lying; knocked on its side
• Exactly the hue of old photographs
• the world outside like flame

These are just five examples of what I think are creative images, clever use of what might be everyday things that we tend to overlook, even as poets, because we are too busy with our own lives, our own language to notice the obvious and make it not only creatively accessible to a reader, but provides a quick, Oh, I wish I’d thought of that. It is this kind of “fun reading” one can usually find in a Metras published volume of poetry.