Secrets No One Must Talk About: Poems by Martin Willitts Jr.

Secrets No One Must Talk About
2011 Dos Madres Press Inc.
Poems by Martin Willitts Jr.
Loveland OH
Softbound, 31 pages, No Price
ISBN 978-1-933675-44-4


Review by Zvi A. Sesling

There are places, like a dust storm, we cannot avoid.
They prick like cactus and sting of scorpion rains.
They hold secrets better than a poker game.
The people in this place have to know how to survive.
It is a scrap-by living, full of possible dangers, yet they survive.
This is such a place.

What a way to begin a book of poetry…this is but the first of six stanzas of Willitts’s Introduction, the first poem in this short, tidy volume the first few of which remind me
in some ways of Spoon River Anthology in that Willitts channels a knife sharpener and a peddler. He echoes the best of the best poets who wrote in Spanish: Vallejo, Lorca and Neruda. He bases poems on the photographs of Consuelo Kanaga. Yet his best poems are those he conjures from the deep within himself like these lines from At the Funeral:

Men fear their own tears
like they were forbidden and
shameful. So they so inwardly like rain.

Or some lines from Joshua Trees:

They reach out into the endless desert skies
for some answer that never comes. The silence
is arid, dry as a belief no one believes.

Willitts’s poems a mostly brought up from his inner self, from his observations of life, of
people and we are left to determine for ourselves whether his “observations” are those he
makes of other people or if they might be autobiographical. We care which because as one line in the Slaughterhouse of the Crows states: “We did not understand this obsession.”

Willitts is a librarian as was Philip Larkin, and while I do not attempt to compare the two, I find it interesting that they both write poetry that cuts a path of enjoyment for the reader.

Martin Willitts Jr. presents us with a strong, fearless volume of poetry that dares to be obvious and mysterious at the same time, that takes mythic songs and captures the heart of experience.

let it be now by robert collet tricaro

let it be now
robert collet tricaro
Finishing Line Press 2011
ISBN 1-59924-927-8

"Life's theme is accretion, sapling
and fawn. Each seeking to add..."

The poems in "let it be now" is a Spartan chap book of couplets; they
reach for the quiet tones:

"As though taking hold of the ends of a rope
we jump at a pace that builds

as the music gathers. We hear
countless lines of repetitive

interlacing melodies. Piccolos
jump in, as to dismiss notions..."

Most of the poems in this chapbook, read with an expectation
and a loss, but the couplets hold each line in the way only a
good writer can hold the theme, line by line. Tricaro
writes with confidence in what is being put before us, the reader.

"The iris of my mind
becomes a cobalt stillness..."


Irene Koronas
Reviewer:
Ibbetson Street Press

Looking Up by Linda Pressman

( Linda Pressman)
















Looking Up
Linda Pressman
Available at Amazon.com
$12.67

Review by Rene Schwiesow

Linda Pressman is the adult child of two holocaust survivors. The horrific ordeal that her parents, family, and their friends endured was a constant underlying trauma throughout her childhood.

The number 7 is a sacred number. In Hebrew the number signifies completion. Linda was the sixth female child out of seven girls. “Looking Up” is the memoir of growing up in the fullness of a Jewish, but not too Jewish, household. The war drove God out of her parent’s immediate vision; survival was all. Near the end of the book, Linda describes her family as being a member of “Holocaust Judasim.” This, she says, “consists of the joyous celebration of the food that’s been handed down to us by generations of Jews who believe in the God my parents no longer believe in. There are other tenets, like both a fear of being Jewish and a longing for the lost Judaism of their childhoods, when my parents had been sure that God was out there somewhere, up there somewhere, that if they looked up they’d find Him, but most of it centered around food, especially since they’d had none during the war.”

Pressman’s parents met post-war at a Displaced Person’s Camp. Her father spent the war in Siberia, a fact that explains his belief that Chicago weather was balmy even during the dead of winter. Her mother’s war time childhood was spent hiding in the forests, scavenging for food and knowing that trees were not safe to hide behind after a relative was found behind a tree and shot. Pressman says this about her mother and the traumatic effect of the war: “Mom doesn’t just come out of the war with missing family, with a missing tooth; she was missing other essential things, like a sense of well-being and of being right with the world that the other women had.”

After immigrating to the United States, her father became a self-made man, building a lucrative laundry business, supplying the large family with sufficient means toward a lifestyle that allowed Pressman’s mother to remain at home to raise the children. As a father, however, he was rarely present, though there were exceptions. Her mother is most often described as being tangled perpetually in a phone cord that reached from the base to her downstairs laundry/sewing area where she spent most of her time at the machine and talking to friends and relatives. We are left with the idea that the 7 girls had plenty of time to fend for themselves. As a reader, I had to wonder at the metaphorical reasoning for Pressman’s mother spending so much time on the phone. Of course there is a stereotypical idea that homemakers were cooking, sewing, or spending their lives gossiping via telephone; however, from the metaphorical standpoint one can see the phone cord as umbilical, a cord that kept Pressman’s mother fed by her family – her remaining family.

Pressman weaves the war time story of her parents in and out of her childhood and the world she experienced on Drake Avenue in Skokie, IL, outside of Chicago. On occasion this may leave the reader somewhat disoriented as to time frames.

“Looking Up” is not your typical Holocaust memoir. While Pressman does offer some grisly views of life on the run during the Nazi Regime, she offers it through her own eyes. This point of view distances the story by a generation. What Pressman shows us is a glimpse at the lifelong after effects of having spent one’s life evading death at the hand of a Nazi and a look at the effect that life had on the successive generation – a generation who grew up in a “typical” suburban neighborhood living the “American dream,” but haunted by a war, a bigotry, an atrocity, that will never go away despite the 7 daughters, despite the number 7 representing the seal of God.

*****Rene Schwiesow is co-host of the wildly popular South Shore venue The Art of Words and serves on the committee for the newly inaugurated yearly Visual Inverse event at The Plymouth Center for the Arts – pairing art with poetry.

Track Wreckard 1-14 By Denis Sheehan

A BagelBards Book Review

“Track Wreckard 1-14”
By Denis Sheehan
Bone Print Press, No price listed

Reviewed 2/13/12 by Paul Steven Stone

“Track Wreckard 1-14” is the linearly told tale of two weeks in the life of the author, who set himself the literary task of recording 14 consecutive nights down at a local Pub in Rockland, Mass, which is on the South Shore of Boston, for all you snootie urban intellectuals who would swear Cape Cod lies just beyond the southernmost border of Boston.

But not to get distracted, as the author of Train Wreckard often does, since he is religiously recording the minutiae of his life as a barfly in a blue collar town where flies come in larger herds than writers and distractions are as frequent as attractive (or eligible) women moving across the landscape of the author’s blurry vision.

Aside from developing a drinking problem, or feeling like I did, reading the book did an excellent job of replicating the boredom and pointlessness of a life spent without challenges or significant interests. Often the most intriguing question of a chapter (evening?) would be which stranger Fate might send to occupy the next bar stool, or two stools down, with the constant gambler’s prayer that it be some gorgeous, unattached nymphomaniac who could give this book some spontaneous sexual gravitas.

To give you a feel for Sheehan’s approach and a flavor of his writing, here from the beginning of Vol. (chapter?) X is Sheehan reminding us of the rules of the game:

“Tonight’s Scenes from the Local.
Here we are again, at the end of a long drunken night out at the local fav. Another Track Wreckard, number 10 (ten). Unedited and unproofed for your uneasy reading and deciphering. The night is over except for this writing…”

Yes, it’s only a small part of the writer’s conceit, but he has chosen to shoot from the hip in telling his tales, never bothering to go back and proofread or edit his output, and rarely editing the flow of detritus that occupies his mind as a proud Rockland townie and barfly wannabe.

Would I recommend “Track Wreckard 1-14” to a friend? Not unless he was at the beginning stages of alcoholism and needed to see how things look halfway down the slide. I would however recommend reading half a dozen or so of the book’s volumes (chapters?) to anyone who might enjoy wiping the cigarette smoke and boozy film off this window on a world not often portrayed in all its fatigue and (did I already say?) pointlessness.

Of course, every once in a while Sheehan offers both a slice of life and corresponding insights, such as at the end of Vol. (chapter?) XIII…
“At some point, I failed to notice when, a couple came in and sat next to me, though separated by a pole. The man is your average looking dude, but the woman has something about her. She’s a bit older but has that “ouch” thing going for her. The woman is trying to be all over the guy, but he’s way too interested in his cell phone, Keno, and the Celtics game. As time passes, she goes from paying attention to him to paying attention to her hair. Men are fools. I know I certainly am…”

“Train Wreckard 1-14” makes no pretense about reaching beyond its grasp to present literature or a compelling narrative. Just 14 nights at the local Tap with all the usual suspects. If you want to read a book that’s proudly different and highly unpretentious, pull up a stool and grab a pint. You’ve got a drinking companion already waiting for you.

Ariel Freiberg: A Somerville Artist who wants you to inhabit her paintings

Ariel Freiberg: A Somerville Artist who wants you to inhabit her paintings

By Doug Holder

Ariel Freiberg is a 30 something artist who recently moved from across the river (I mean the Charles not our beloved Mystic)in Brookline, Mass. to the Paris of New England, Somerville, Mass. Freiberg said wanted to be closer to her space at the Vernon St. Studios. She reports that she really likes the vibe in our happening burg, and believes it is a good fit . The young artist told me amidst the din of a Saturday morning Bagel Bard meeting at the Au Bon Pain Cafe in Davis Square: " I feel part of the larger connective tissue of art-making disciplines that abound in the city." Freiberg finds that artists and art of all stripes inform her artwork, and I was pleased to hear literature is a component of it as well.

On her website Freiberg writes that her painting "...explores nature and literary based female-centric mythologies...Part of the process of my art is to invite the viewer into a visual and conceptual dialogue with the narrative of my personal experiences and observations."

She told me a recent piece dealt with the death of her grandmother who lived in Israel. The artist also explores themes like the seductions of beauty, the frenzy of consumption and copulation, and sexual fulfillment.

Freiberg, who says her influences are Italian artist Giovanni Tiepolo and Watteau, likes how their work( like her own), invites the viewer into the intimate space of the artwork through use of color and other techniques. She wants the viewer to inhabit the picture. She told me: " I want the person to be actually in the picture." I thought to myself that this reminds me of an old Twilight Zone episode I saw where the person actually entered the picture in order to get away from the insistent press of the flesh of the everyday, and just fade away between the frames. A visceral experience!

And indeed Freiberg's work is visceral. Her mythical woman are all at once innocent and carnal, child-like, and womanly--all the contradictions that make them real.

Freiberg holds a number of gigs to pay the rent and keep her stomach full. She teaches at Bunker Hill Community College (as does yours truly), as well as other venues of higher education in the area. Freiberg has a show coming up at the Laconia Gallery in the South End of Boston, and she will be part of a show at the Arts Armory in Somerville March 2. For information go to her website http://arielfreiberg.com

From The Viewing Stand Poems by Madeline Tiger

From The Viewing Stand
Poems by Madeline Tiger
2011 Dos Madres Press Inc.
Loveland OH
Softbound, 24 pages, No Price
ISBN 978-1-933675-67-1


Review by Zvi A. Sesling


When I open a book of poetry and find favorable comments on the poets previous work by poets such as Alicia Ostriker, Toi Derricotte and Gerald Stern, I naturally expect to find enjoyable, even deep work by the author.

Ms. Tiger lives up to my expectations. Yes, she is an adult, but the poetry is yesterday, written as if she were still a young girl. She brings the past to the present, her childhood brought forth for the reader to understand as an adult. She told of her young girl’s life from the vantage point of adulthood. She brings the past into the reality of the present. You may find that was acceptable no longer is. Fantasies that one discovers in adult years were reality. The Holocaust, for example. A game seen later as potential child abuse or pedophilia? Dark family secrets…are they real or in the child/adult mind?

In Sunday Visit we learn:

Jovial Uncle Eph, that old man
gnarling toward the end of the garden,
gnashing. “Jovial” the grown-ups call him.
They’re having tea on the porch. Do they
see? Is this the game. Is he a gnome?


From The Viewing Stand, the title poem, presents another of familial memory:

I am four. Nobody told me
how to climb this marquee.
Scary heights, all those
empty benches. Sky far
out there and the trees,
I’m almost as high as
those leafy branches
Mommy and Daddy are far
down, they warned me
I must stay up here.
I don’t want to stay
or go. I only know
how far it is between us
and how hard he swings.
Sometimes he misses but
he keeps on
swinging…

What makes this book work so well is the strong, convincing voice that is both disturbing and compelling, that delivers to the reader a collection of poems of her private fears and, in the end, some modicum of hope.

Wild as in Familiar By Ellaraine Lockie

Wild as in Familiar

By Ellaraine Lockie

Finishing Line Press

Georgetown, Kentucky

www.finishinglinepress.com

26 Pages

$12.00



Reviewed by Dennis Daly

Wild as in Familiar treats nature’s assaults on man and man’s interventions into nature’s processes with a critical eye and an aggressive imagination. To fully appreciate these poems go immediately to page twenty-two and read Ellaraine Lockie’s tone -setting poem, Rebellion. The debilitating rupture of a disc causes the poet’s doctor to order,



Stay away from amusement park rides

Country roads and horses …



The cowgirl-poet spurns this sensible advice and mounts up, riding a middle-aged horse, which had been headed to a dog food factory. She identifies closely with this horse because of their mutual age and vulnerability. She offers that “we were related long before I adopted her.” She describes them in tandem moving



Toward the flames of sunset in front of us

Like sisters following the same trail

Our manes flying free in the prairie breeze.



In Earthworms in My Hand, the poet’s persona again intervenes in nature, rescuing earthworms from a Katrina-like deluge. She

Rescues in the scoop of one hand

The hollow of the other

Back aching and deadline waiting

These missions claim the entire morning.



She, however, is motivated to accomplish her good deeds by sad memories and intense longings:



They don’t see my father’s faraway gaze into grief



Or my want of a man like these elfin lovers

Who slither on their natural lubricants

Over palms and between fingers.



Another earthworm poem entitled, Walk with Earthworms, makes the case that nature is quite unsympathetic to suffering. In fact it is often malicious,



I’m as fragile this morning

As their flushed-vein colored flesh

Rain bruised without buffer

Of umbrella or outerwear

My body italicized

Bending into stings of sorrow



Zeus is having none of it

And claps his thunderous hands…



SAD is actually a pretty funny poem or rather the idea of it is pretty funny. It details a counterattack against the now recognized disease of seasonal affective disorder. An orange robe, a rhinestone brooch, hundreds of burning candles, a snow- white wall, Christmas lights, a blazing fire, and lemons sucked through a peppermint stick all do their part in combatting the dark mask of melancholy. The poet uses martial imagery and strikes a defiant pose,



You attack after two torrential weeks

This time you won’t find me

Wallowing in any river of resignation



This time my skin is steel.



In the poem, Evolution, the poet confronts the coldness of nature and accepts the callous actions of God’s creatures,



The need of a hawk to systematically pull feathers

From a sparrow before eating it alive

Or a kea to attach itself to the back

Of a sheep and hammer beak to kidneys



A deviant rabbit that eats her own young

The pyromaniac and pedophile…



Then,



I surrender to dichotomy

To the world and the obscure wisdom of its creator…



Two poems, which seem to be at odds with one another, are Drawing Breath and Fallout. In Drawing Breath medical science intervenes against nature by providing a contraption to fight sleep apnea. The poet points out the unnaturalness of this by having her persona read a Stephan King novel and by contemplating the three day life cycle of a crane fly. Fallout deals with a much more serious topic: abortion and the multi-generational scars it leaves. The metaphor the poet uses is the bud on a rose bush that confronts her. Unquestionably, anger rises here,



..nor the bite of thorns

Can protect that bud

From prenatal picking..



And,



A small sacrifice to the tiny worm

Still chewing on a leaf

And to a grandchild stolen

By pro-choice



Not for everyone, but intense, honest, and well written.

Staying with this difficult theme, the poem Wings Clipped asks the question, when is it proper to play God? The poet’s persona discusses the fate of a damaged Monarch butterfly with her grandson (yes she does have a grandchild),



Do we hammer him between the newspapers

I mercy killed a mouse last month



Now it gets tricky

Playing God…



The last two poems in the book deal with death, salvation, and homespun religion. They are lovely and uplifting. A Wretch like Me takes you to



An open casket with thick rope handles, pine

The dust to dust kind

With no metal, plastic or satin lining

Displayed under a Madonna tree that has lived

Longer than the woman in the coffin..



The Amazing Grace hymn played by a bagpipe is the backdrop. Lilac balm becomes the aroma of saving grace.

Saying Good-bye, the last poem in the book, identifies a light, which emblazons a madrona tree as the light of salvation. The poet notes that this light is from the natural world, not the interior of a church,



Not in sixty years of Sundays



A searchlight for lost souls

For the downtrodden, the sick, the guilty, the sad…



It is this light, which gives the coldness of the natural world a warm context. Lockie’s poems do likewise. She takes the terrible beauty of nature and touches it up, line by hurtful line, with human love. Amen.

69” S. (The Shackleton Project)/ Phantom Limb/ ArtsEmerson /February 07-12

69” S. (The Shackleton Project)
Phantom Limb
World Première
February 07-12 ONLY
ArtsEmerson
Paramount Center Mainstage
559 Washington Street in Boston’s Theatre District
Tickets online at www.artsemerson.org or by phone at 617-824-8400
Limited Engagement!

Review
By Amy Tighe
artighe@aol.com

I love the Paramount. It feels splendid and yet inviting, comfortably kitschy in places and slightly intimidating in others. The tall splashy paintings of lovers in by-gone eras, the dramatic and grand stairwell and entrance, the spectrum of innovative cultural offerings always allows me to feel like I am completely held in the transformative arms of good art.
So even if I don’t like the performance I am seeing, it doesn’t matter. I am already engaged just by going.


69”S. ( The Shackleton Project) was described to me as watching poetry, or hearing a symphony, but I simply could not find myself in the piece. There is no dialogue, lots of edgey music and stunning visuals projected on the stage. And some technically intriguing performance work. It’s a multimedia and abstract exploration of the thrilling, dangerous and heroic journey of the Antarctic of 1914. Program notes and lots of back story is helpful, but for me, this performance was more enjoyable viewing it on its own devices.


There are nine Tableaux with no clear breaks between them. The Tableaux are written down, but you can’t read your program to see because the theatre is dark, so….


The first was Elemental Dreams: “After an ice age, man returns to earth.” Several dancers in bright red leotards perform against a white stage. It looked like they were having fun, and as usual, the littlest one gets thrown way up in the air a lot. (In my next life I want to come back as the smallest member of a very cool dance troupe.)


In the next several Tableaux, gigantic puppeteers maneuver marionettes, representing the explorers, through abstract and well thought out scenes. I just didn’t understand the thinking behind it. I spent the first 20 minutes of the performance (one third of the evening) wondering if the marionettes were real people or puppets. They seemed to be muttering a lot and they, the marionettes, moved beautifully. The puppeteers wore long white robes and winged head gear, and they looked like angels or lesser gods. The relationship between the marionettes and their masters was tender, careful. I loved watching that. Phantom Limb, a New York -City-based husband and wife team, created the puppets and use many other traditional theatre forms to investigate current perspectives on contemporary issues.


A black skeleton arrived and I have to say, it was a great idea, but just not executed at the same level as the puppets. The skeleton puppet was the same size as the human puppeteer, and you could not make out the skull well. It’s only that the faces of the other puppets, the Shackleton explorers, were so exacting and so mysterious that the black skull was more of a distraction. And the seal puppet seemed like bad comic relief.
The stage was an everchanging canvas upon which arctic weather was projected. Abstract images at times, and then real ghost ships and glaciers, and at one point a lovely beach which flooded the theatre. Deftly, a terrifying crack in the ice floe was projected on to the stage. This “ installation in motion” was fascinating to watch. There was a geological image that was projected several times, in several geological phases, but it was not clear to me. I guess it was a glacier melting, and I guess I am supposed to recognize the shape, but somehow the message got lost in the abstractive art. The video design by Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty was engaging and worked seamlessly with Jessica Grindstaff’s set design.


I guess the skeleton and the lesser gods and the long sheets of ice and shapes changing are meant to have a message. I sat next to a professor of theatre at a pretty good university and asked what she thought- she said “maybe the leotards are red because they didn’t want to do “Blue Man Group”?


The next day in my writing class we discussed the power of dialogue and I realize that the visuals were meant to speak, the silence was meant to be the voice and the little red dancers were the grammar. Then again, maybe not. It’s abstract and we are meant to piece it together.


The music was performed in four locations throughout the theatre, and was also recorded. Skeleton Key creates ice cracking as part of their score, eerie winds and glorious instrumentals, give voice to the elements, dialogue with the shifting images on the stage.


After the show, in the foyer, there were two women excitedly discussing the performance. I asked if I could join them and they invited me to sit. Retired librarians and teachers, they told me the piece was like walking into a poem, or into a symphony. They loved the piece. I loved talking to them—the foyer feels like a living room where good friends can meet.
I walked down the elegant stairwell and felt like I was leaving a beloved shore. Sure, I read all the notes and know there is a statement here about nature and brave humans and larger gods and masters. But mostly what I loved was the dedicated thoughtfulness, created by ArtsEmerson, which brings us together, lets us chat to strangers about topics as large as the very gods, all while being held fully in the poem of the Paramount Theatre.

826 Boston's free youth writing programs sponsors a Moustache-A-Thon!

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your moustache!

A Moustache-a-Thon works much in the same way as any ordinary walkathon, marathon or telethon fundraiser. Instead of walking, running or answering phones on television, however, Moustache-a-Thon participants, men and women alike, shoulder the mighty job of growing or crafting their own unique moustaches in support of 826 Boston's free youth writing programs, which will reach over 2,000 Boston Public School students this year. Remember- a moustache is more than a crumb catcher. It's a beacon of your love for 826 Boston.



Join us at an upcoming weigh-in! Size up the competition and get some rivalries bristling.

Bald-Lip Barbershop

February 16th @ 7 PM at 826 Boston headquarters, 3035 Washington St., Roxbury 02119

Weekly Weigh-Ins

Wednesday, February 29th @ 7 PM at The Lower Depths, 476 Commonwealth Ave., Boston 02215
Wednesday, March 7th @ 7 PM at The Somerville Theater, 55 Davis Square, Somerville 02144
Wednesday, March 21st @ 7 PM at The Lir, 903 Boylston Street, Boston 02115

The Dead Authors Ball

Thursday, March 29th @ 7 PM at The Burren, 247 Elm Street, Somerville 02144

Kathleen Bitetti: An artist with one eye on public policy and another on her art.

(For You..., Dec 18th 2011: Airport site, performative action done on Dec 18th to commemorate International Migrants Day by Kathleen Bitetti)



Kathleen Bitetti: An artist with one eye on public policy and another on her art.

By Doug Holder

Like T.S. Eliot who wrote in his famed poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"--I have indeed "measured my life in coffee spoons"...and interviews I might add. So over coffee at the Au Bon Pain cafe in Harvard Square I interviewed artist, curator, Public Policy Advocate, Kathleen Bitetti. Bitetti originally from Quincy, Mass. is a slim, energetic woman who for over twenty years has been advocating and advising on the local, national and state level for the rights of artists. She also happens to be an accomplished visual artist in her own right.

She describes her work as "Conceptually based sociopolitical objects, installations and community based projects.” According to her website "Her work deconstructs the American Dream, fairy tales, nursery rhymes...her work also addresses race/gender assignments, the fragility of family dynamics, domestic violence..." Her art has been displayed in such venues as the permanent collection at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Mass. and the New Bedford Art Museum.

If that is not enough Bitetti is currently an artist in residence for the city of Quincy, Mass. through the Quincy Historical Society and was in residence at the Gozo Contemporary Art Museum in Malta.

Bitetti, who headed the Artist Foundation in Boston for many years, was a project leader for a fall 2009 report titled: "Stand Up and be counted--A Survey on Massachusetts Artists’' Work Lives, Socioeconomic Status, Access to Healthcare and Medical and Non-Medical Debt."

She described and brought attention to the many way artists were falling through the cracks. Even after landmark healthcare legislation was passed in the state, and later nationally, she found that artists did not have access to healthcare, as they are often freelancers and contract workers, with limited incomes and benefits. Bitetti told me: "We found that artists were often paid inadequately. And it seems that people expected that artists would produce work for free." (God knows I know how that works in the poetry world!) Through her strident activism she was appointed to the State House's "Creative Economy Council" in Jan. 2012 that will work to solve inequities in the Independent Contractor Law passed in Massachusetts in 2004.

Bitetti is also involved with the “Medicine Wheel" project in South Boston started by her friend, the visual artist Mike Dowling. Bitetti works as a curator for their art gallery. The program helps connect low income inner city kids with the arts, and artists through poetry, and other creative media to broaden their horizons and enrich their lives.

Bitetti is a rare bird--a talented artist with acumen for public policy. Usually, at least in my experience-the two don't often mix. As we were leaving the cafe Bitetti told me she would soon be leaving for Malta to continue her artistic work linking that country to Massachusetts.


Out on the street
I felt a blast of cold air,
I turned
-- and she was no longer there—
I saw her rushing figure blur and merge,
into the hustlers and bustlers-- of Harvard Square.


go to http://kathleenBitetti.com for more information.

UNEXPECTED SHINY THINGS By Bruce Dethlefsen

UNEXPECTED SHINY THINGS
By Bruce Dethlefsen
101 pages / 81 poems / $16
ISBN: 978-0-9846568-0-6
Cowfeather Press
PO Box 620216
Middleton, WI 53561
www.cowfeatherpress.com

Review by – Charles P. Ries
Word Count = 514

I was thinking as I read Bruce Dethlefsen’s Unexpected Shiny Things, what makes a poet great? Certainly they have to find the poetic form effortless and created their own distinct voice. They must be able to reveal mysteries, or prompt the creation of more mysteries. And most capable poets can certainly do all or some of that. But as I read Dethlefsen’s latest book of poetry I found myself smiling in bemusement, or nodding in agreement, or amazed at his wisdom, or saddened at his heartbreak. I wondered how does he do that? Not many poets have this effect on me. So how is it that he does? I believe it is a coupling of awareness and deep love of mankind. Awareness without love is tyranny, so too is love without awareness. The great yearning depth I feel in Dethlefsen’s work is his long-lived, hard-earned, deep-hearted wisdom. Not all good poets have this, but all the great ones do.

Unexpected Shiny Things is broken into five sections that broadly define the thematic mood of Dethlefsen’s mind: Stars on Strings, Golden Coffee Sunlight, Sifting Starlight, Unexpected Shiny Things, and Chasing the Moon.

Again and again, he takes us from the common to the sublime, from the ordinary to that transcendent and numinous. There are great and important poems in this collection: Forgotten, Lily Pads, Mountain Dreams, Hummingbirds, Crows Mate for Death, How I Hang On and 1950 to call out just a few. Some of these mind blowing masterpieces. Here is “1950”: “at night / my mother bathed me in a white tub / scrubbed me with white soap / rubbed me in a white towel / hugged and plugged me / into pajamas and the white sheets // an act to kind / so common / it barely even happened”.

His poem “Hummingbirds”: “ flagella move so fast / they think that hummingbirds are dead / hummingbirds know that we are dead / we mostly think that trees are dead / the trees think the water’s dead / the water things the rocks are dead / the rocks thing the mountains and the world are dead / the world thinks the universe is dead / the universe thinks that god is dead / and god who knows what god thinks // you know sometimes though / I think / I make the world go ‘round / simply by walking on it / and pushing backwards just a little / with each deliberate step”.


In Unexpected Shiny Things, Dethlefsen flows from the concrete to ethereal. He orbits around the collective unconscious like a Jungian astronaut - his interior radar big enough to find meaning in both the great moments and the small nuances of life. This is the blessing of the mature poet – one who has lived hundreds of lives and can bring this diversity of experience to us as a cascading pool of images for us to soak in. Dethlefsen is an exceptional poet. His writer’s voice is so common and plain spoken that it lulls the reader down his rabbit hole and out again with a winter fresh mind.
_____________________________________________
Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over two hundred print and electronic publications. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing. He a founding member of the Lake Shore Surf Club, the oldest fresh water surfing club on the Great Lakes (http://www.visitsheboygan.com/dairyland/). You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literati.net/Ries/

The Joy of the Nearly Old by Rosalind Brackenbury

The Joy of the Nearly Old
By Rosalind Brackenbury
Hanging Loose Press
231 Wyckoff Street
Brooklyn, New York 11217
http://hangingloosepress.com
98 Pages
$18.00

Reviewed by Dennis Daly

Rosalind Brackenbury delivers a movable feast of poems in her new book, The Joy of the Nearly Old. These are poems of privilege set in Paris, Nice, Key West, New York, England, Peru, and places in between. A sensuous joy of life drives the poetic movement through themes of aging with its anonymity and uncertainty, emotional pain with its dark moments, and death with its hard questions and seeming finality.
The title poem sets the tone. In it the author mourns a dead poet, who succumbed to a weakened heart. She identifies with him and worries, especially since he was her age,

…a poet
my age exactly, who died this year
on a table in a hospital in Texas
while they were jump-starting
his heart…

Later on in the poem Brackenbury lauds the anonymity that aging bestows,

The world can’t see us.
We are too old to be noticed:
nobody watches us pass.
The nearly old live cloaked in privacy.

Age anonymity, Brackenbury shrewdly observes, can also sharpen the senses,

Alone again in the corner of a café,
invisible, crazy with joy. Oh the taste
of coffee! The sunlight
of this morning, this one day.

The Space Between Years, a poem which deals with the nature of aging, serves up a compelling, echoing image painting an in-between time that

Runs deep like a canyon,
a corridor of dreams;
waking, I wonder
who called me.

Of course, it is in the space between years that life and everything else happens,

In the space between years,
oranges in a white bowl,
black walnuts in a basket,
letters on the table,
flowers, red and white
in a jug.

Mid-life runs at a slower pace. In A Man and a Woman and a Blackbird the young are in a hurry; older people try to conserve time,

It’s so much easier now,
not being young and in a hurry.
Nobody waits, nobody notices,
our time is our own.
It takes a lifetime to get here.

The theme of slowing down time combines nicely with the time in-between in a beautiful poem called The Handkerchief,

we pause to hear the quiet movements
of its shallows.

Small, small the difference
between perfection and what is not,
all the difference there is:

when the world stills,
the center holds…

The poem ends with a comforting and stunning image:

the way his hand,
dragonfly over water,
nearly skims mine.

Very, very nice.
In Vert Galant, another poem delving into the mystery of age, the poet returns to the Paris that she had visied in her younger years and wonders how time changes reality,

I sit on a green bench
and wonder, is it the same
willow fingering the water

and am I the same
girl in love with it all,
who said, one day she’d buy lunch
for herself in a Paris restaurant
not counting the cost
and has just done so?

The poet in her poem Goodbye paints a picture of her father at an advanced age handling his years with almost an athletic grace,

He quit at eighty-six
angry with age, annoyed at each small ache;
stumbled a little on the tennis court but dealt
that half-blind lethal serve, the way

old Chinese painters draw their single curve
of black on white, the brush a thousandth
time trailing its ink exact as grace…

My Parents in the Rose Garden presents a near idyllic remembrance of the poet’s parents. It is the way we all want to remember our mothers and fathers, but only a few actually do. This poet is not only privileged, she is lucky. Her poem works because she shares the joy of this in an honest, unselfish way,

They walk a rectangle, hand in hand,
looking at the roses.

They pause to look, talk, I see
him smile, she straightens
her spine to be up to it, to him,
to their continuing daily
stepping out.

Forever now, or for as long as I
shall live, I see them…

There are also some very memorable love poems in this collection. One of them, Ferry Across the James River, stands out. It creates an interesting metaphor with love happening on a ferry between two banks. The point, of course, is the intense and temporary nature of love. These lines are pitch-perfect,

It wasn’t a dream, but now I see this
again and again, our brief life
together between two banks:
back there the quiet beach
where we searched for scallop shells
and driftwood to carry home,
before us, soon, the landing place
and above us the gulls, their feathers
fiery as angels.’

Three of the poems in this book are essentially anti-war poems and I think that they work less well than most of the others. But I’m quibbling: these kinds of poems are very difficult to write, especially in anger. The poet rages,

the boats rise and fall like breath.
This morning, this Sunday morning,
we heard Falluja was taken.
A thousand dead; they called them all
insurgents.

You can’t, however, argue with her rhetoric and logic.
My favorite poem in this well balanced book is Who Has Seen Our Original Face. It portrays a mother’s first eye contact with her child after birth. Here’s the image:

Startled into air,
your first stare after birth, for me.

That first sharp glance
and afterwards, each time we met,
the recognition.
Is this love, could this stunned meeting
possibly become love?

Poetry lovers, who seek calm reassurance in this troubling life and timeless (if not pain free) joy from the written word will like this book a lot.

The Lamp with Wings: love sonnets by M.A. Vizsolyi

The Lamp with Wings
love sonnets
by M.A. Vizsolyi


Harper Perennial
New York, NY
Copyright © 2011 by M.A. Vizsolyi
ISBN: 978-0-06-206901-6
Softbound, 63 pages, $13.99

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

This book was selected as one of the 2010 National Poetry Series winners, the one selected by poet Ilya Kaminsky and it presents to us the love sonnet in a way that
Galileo or Copernicus presented the solar system to an unprepared world.

When we think of love sonnets we immediately focus on Shakespeare, but Vizsolyi writes love sonnets the way Shakespeare could never have imagined. Perhaps the way J.S. Bach could not have imagined Philip Glass, though connections between the two composers can be hear, the line from one poet to the other can be read.

[hello little one I no longer glue] is one example:

hello little one I no longer glue
the starfish together with direct &
understandable sadness if you want that
go to mcdonald’s where the
romantics supersize everything
everything
if you want the flower which will
walk with you & bear your pain
I recommend angela’s on 3rd she has
such nice flowers there the daffodils
are in & narcissus will barely
raise his head to meet you such
a beautiful girl if I gave you the
heavens you’d tear down the roof such
a beautiful girl if I gave you sea
stars you’d skip them like stones

Love sonnet you say? Absolutely and Vizsolyi notes at the end of the book that the spirit of his wife, Margarita Delcheva’s spirit dances through every poem. So it does. You will find many references to her – without name. For example:

when we find it in the river
without realizing its weight
& you will look at me & I at you
from:[in the heart of pennsylvania there]

Or from [I imagine the knocking of your hooves]

about the cat with a wooden leg who
ran out of the house to save
your life the seventh knock on
the wall was hers the dead are not lonely

What makes Vizsolyi’s love sonnets compelling is a combination of sight and sound. The poems have no punctuation so whether you read them silently, or out loud, you provide the stops and starts. There is also a one & one-half line spacing which also affects your reading and, course no capital letters, only an occasional apostrophe will do for him. Then add the bracketed titles which are always the first line of the sonnet, unexpected language, images, metaphors, and you a poem which shakes you to the core of what you think a sonnet is supposed to be. Forget Petrarch, Shakespeare, or other sonnet writers who you have read in the classical mode. Instead, experience Vizsolyi as you might any writer who has creativity and the willingness to put it out there for readers to absorb.

Kaminsky says, “This book will knock your socks off. This is real poetry.” I agree.

Somerville Bagel Bard Zvi Sesling gets Poet Laureate for Brookline

I am a lover of irony. It seems that a Somerville Bagel Bard Zvi A. Sesling( Who resides in Brookline) lobbied and spurred the city on to have a Brookline Poet Laureate. I told him about the lack of interest in our beloved burg and it inspired him to get one for his town...they finally saw the light. The light in Somerville is still way, way at the end of the tunnel...sadly. Here is an article by Sesling about how he did it...




Somerville Bagel Bard Zvi Sesling gets Poet Laureate for Brookline



Back in June 2008 I brought a proposal to the Brookline Board of Selectmen requesting they create a position of Poet Laureate for the Town of Brookline. I suggested the Brookline Council on the Arts, together with a citizen or two and a Selectman take applications, filter them and select one person for a two year term.

I thought the idea was a “no brainer.” I thought, despite the many difficult issues they had to deal with, they would, among their more trivial issues find a few minutes to approve the concept.

However, I guessed wrong. Perhaps they did not know or understand the wisdom, joy and education poetry imparts to readers. I had already explained to them that the cities of Boston and Cambridge have Poet Laureates as does the State of New Hampshire, where the legislature, in the middle of pressing issues of the economy, gay marriage and taxes still found the time to appoint a Poet Laureate.

Yet, Town of Brookline Board of Selectmen could not find even five minutes in one
year of meetings to take an action and could only benefit the town. I wrote letters to the local paper, asked four of the five Selectmen for help and got no where. One Selectman promised my wife to do something and then would not return phone calls.

Then, last year when I went to the polls to vote in a local election, I was telling Selectman Ken Goldstein about the idea and my frustration with the Board. He was in the second year of his first term and he said he would undertake the project. A few months later he and I appeared before the Brookline Council on the Arts with the proposal. The Council then undertook the project and did months of study, including looking into the Boston Poet Laureate contract. They moved forward, meeting, creating a contract and finally having Town Counsel (Brookline’s in house lawyer) review it. Selectman Goldstein and the Council on the Arts then brought it to the Selectmen who voted unanimously to approve the position for an initial two year period with a stipend of $1,000. Two banks, Bay State Federal Savings and Century Bank each contributed $500 to fund the position.

In his presentation Selectman Goldstein even read a poem from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Julia Ward Howe which included a reference to Brookline.

The lesson I learned from all this is that it takes a committed city/town official, one who appreciates and supports the arts, who makes commitments and keeps them.

I know that Doug Holder has been trying to get the Somerville City Council to approve a Poet Laureate for the city – and there are some many wonderful poets in Somerville, many of whom, known as the Bagel Bards – meet weekly at the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square.

Perhaps there is a City Councilor out there who will take up the issue and see it to fruition the way Ken Goldstein has done in Brookline.

Ghazal-Mazal By Linda Zisquit

Ghazal-Mazal

By Linda Zisquit

Finishing Line Press

Georgetown, Kentucky

ISBN: 978-1-59924-914-8

28 Pages

$12.00



Reviewed by Dennis Daly



Poet Linda Zisquit in her twenty-eight page chapbook, Ghazal-Mazal, stretches the usually strict and demanding poetic form of ghazal into a playful set of variations—etudes really—that highlight this kind of poem’s potential in the English language.

Ghazal is an Arabic word that traditionally describes a type of love poem written in Persian, Arabic, or Urdu. It is also used in Uzbek by the legendary fifteenth century poet, Alisher Navoiy. Most ghazals consist of between ten to thirty lines combined in couplets. The first two lines end in the same word or phrase and there is a penultimate rhyme before that word or phrase. This end refrain is then repeated in the second line of each couplet. The couplets exit almost independently in the purer versions. And finally the last couplet is a signature couplet bringing the poem’s authorship in some fashion to the foreground.

In Ghazal: Routine Zisquit both intellectualizes the concept of routine and orders up some stunning images which brings it home. Like most young lovers she rebels against routine. She says,



…I scoffed routine



and while it was offered each stark morning

as I woke next to a graceful man of deep routine



I saw instead the gray offal of old snow

and the Buffalo dread embedded with routine.



Next the poet comes to an understanding of her own routines, which she has picked up from her mother,



my mother’s skin freckled at the public beach,

the way she shifted weight from leg to leg, a routine



I’ve taken on as I wait for the bathwater

to heat and in that movement mimic her routine.



Then the poem takes a surprising turn as the poet realizes the power for good that a routine possesses:



like a boat or barge on the water

that lifts mysteriously, moving rhythmically, in routine



and I, shot-sighted, dismissed its force

its holding power: the tension inherent in routine.



In Ghazal: Ache, Zisquit discusses the penultimate rhyme scheme that she doesn’t always use, and does it by using that rhyme scheme, albeit a bit flawed. She’s does this very well. Here’s a taste:



But the continuing line the couplet

with its penultimate rhyme, more ache



then comfort, especially when you break

the pattern at the start, core ache.



It doesn’t have to be the same each day

you can stare at the page, or go for ache.



Ghazal: Illicit Love matches form and reality with interesting consequences. The ghazel form itself becomes a metaphor,



The night I found you I found the form

for the poems already written! Illicit love



is meant for couplets disconnected

and a refrain at the end repeated: illicit love.



The poet speaks of form becoming essence,



… But illicit love



continued, or more accurately began

as vagrant habits ended. Illicit love



became the essence of my matter,

the single spark to light the fire …



And finally,



…illicit love’s



a filler that, once finished, reveals an empty vessel.

Now I search for subject without illicit love…



Ghazal: Havoc is an angry but deeply touching poem. It seems to be a love poem with mixed feelings about the sometimes- destructive nature of love. The unease with loss of control is telling,



All it takes is for you to appear and—havoc.

My heart, my house, nothing resumes its place, all havoc.



Why is it that your swagger, your foolish happiness

Is my undoing, and I cannot eat or sleep, havoc.



Another poem, which uses the ghazal form as a metaphor is Ghazal: Your Flaws. The poet argues through her poetic images that life’s flaws can be turned into virtues with a dose of awareness,



..your ghazals lack penultimate

rhymes, not to mention disjunctive couplets. For flaws



you are replete. You enjamb the lines as if the form

propelled you. Or unexacting, you respect your flaws.



The poet is literally playing with rhetoric through images and she is good at it.

Zisquit also includes seven non-ghazals in this collection. My favorite is Song for Robert Creeley because of this lovely image,



Early morning wetness

And this emptiness

Not of objects missing

Or someone gone—



As if a light rain

Cleared away dust

And the solemn desire

To embrace what’s at hand



Came shining…



This collection of Zisquit’s work may seem small, but the artistry herein speaks volumes.

Linda Larson: A Poet Who Writes What She Loves and Loves What She Writes.

Linda Larson: A Poet Who Writes What She Loves and Loves What She Writes.

Interview with Doug Holder

Linda Larson has been a journalist, poet, writing teacher, and a writing student in the course of her career. One thing she likes about the role of a poet is that she gets to write about what she loves. And it is evident in her body of work that she has a deep love for her subjects and the craft of writing.

Linda Larson was born and educated in the Midwest, and spent many a childhood summer in Mississippi. She graduated with an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at John Hopkins University in 1970. While in Mississippi she worked as a feature writer for the Capitol Reporterr and The Jackson Advocate. She relocated to the Boston area and for five years she served as an editor and contributor to Spare Change News-- a homeless paper based in Cambridge. In 2007, she published her first book of poetry Washing the Stones ( Ibbetson Street Press).

I talked with Larson on my Somerville Community Access TV Show: Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.

Doug Holder: So you were a reporter for a couple of newspapers down South. Did your experience as a journalist prepare you for poetry?

Linda Larson: Like with poetry, when you are a journalist you try to find something to write about that is of interest to you--what matters to you. When you write a story--like a poem--you want to start with a gripping image. Basically my poems are stories. I learned how to tell a good story as a reporter.

One thing about poetry is that you get to write about what you love, not about what you are assigned--and that is how it all begins...

DH: The noted critic Irene Koronas quoted Picasso in a recent review of your book: " All art is a lie." Is your work a lie?

LL: This means to me don't be afraid to tell the truth even if you have to lie. 9 out of 10 people who have read Mississippi Poems believe they are autobiographical to the letter! That all these things happened. These are my stories but stories are one thing and a life is something else. I am baffled that people think you are a homeless woman, a grandmother of a soldier, etc... Sometimes you need to embellish--you need powerful imagery--to make the point in your poem.

DH: You make no bones about it--you have suffered from mental illness. Plath and Sexton did as well--and they sort of brought a romance to it. Do you find anything romantic about it?

LL: Do I find anything romantic about mental illness? Well, sure. When you are psychotic it is really good practice for constructing your own reality. In the midst of psychosis you really can't write coherently--but you can mine your experience after the fact. I don't write as well on medication. I can write better off it. But I can't function without medication.

But overall I don't think there is much romance attached to mental illness. And there is nothing romantic about killing yourself--like Plath and Sexton did.

DH: Can you talk a bit about your editorship of Spare Change News--the Boston area homeless newspaper?

LL: When I started with Spare Change I was writing pieces about homelessness, cocaine, etc... One day I went to the offices in Harvard Square to get some papers to sell when someone in the office said: "You are the new editor." I guess they liked my writing! I cracked up with laughter then, but they were serious. That was in 1997 and I worked there to 2002. I was glad to dedicate myself to something more than myself.

DH: In your collection Mississippi Poems you have an appreciation of the beauty of the state. Most of us think of its ugliness: its poverty, its civil rights history, etc... How do you explain your different take on this?

I was very fortunate that my aunts, uncles and cousins thought children were great creations. They thought they should be loved, cherished, and indeed I was loved there. When I was back North with my family I didn't feel as loved. So this is how I came to love Mississippi. When I was older I found out what was going on there--incredible injustice, violence-I didn't understand this when I was younger. Later I taught school there and wrote for two newspapers down South. I was in the middle of all this when I was a feature writer for the Jackson Reporter- an all black newspaper. I was the only white writer. My once loving family down there hated me for this.



**Linda Larson is currently working on a third collection and resides in Cambridge, Mass with her husband.


Buckethead

I

Buckethead

She moved into the other half of the duplex
I owned on the colored side as it was called then
Of Fortification Street-
Where Grant had broken through the Confederate lines
And turned Jackson, Mississippi,
Into Chimneyville.

With her she brought
All of two trash bags.
Her hair looked like the
Nest of a magpie
Done up in platinum blonde.
But she showed up alone,
And she was
Showing.
I couldn’t bring myself
To turn her away.

She kept to herself.
Got up in the morning,
Went somewhere,
Dressed neatly under that banshee hair-don’t.
Never brought groceries home.
Her car
Parked in the side lot
Was littered with soda cans and
Fast food wrappers.

She carried brown paper bags into the house
Clinking like liquor bottles.
Never brought any out.
One day she came over,
Knocked at my door,
Classifieds in hand.

A German shepherd?
A female spayed?
Would it be okay?

The poor pitiful thing.
What would a good shampooing and brushing do?
A trip to the beauty shop was what she needed,
A spot of lipstick,
Not a dog.

All alone she was,
Not even a pretend ring.
Her legs and arms stick thin,
I said yes…
She would have to keep it outside.

She brought the dog home
In early June
The sorriest looking dog I had ever seen.

She’s been on a chain her whole life
She apologized for the dog, now
Skulking low to the ground,
Head turned sideways,
Anticipating a blow…
She dragged it up the steps
She’ll be all right
I am going to call her Tess.

What was her name before?
She didn’t have one.
She was just chained up outside in their back yard.
They just wanted her gone.
I’ll tie her up in the yard.
She said obligingly.

It appears to me she’s done enough
Time at the end of a chain.
My tenant gave me a grateful smile before
Hauling the dog into her half of the duplex.

Moments later they reappeared,
Tess bravely adorned in red leash and collar,
Her mistress in a white sunhat pulled over
That hair’s nest, a great improvement.
But Tess didn’t know how to walk on a leash.
To walk her was hard, sweaty work for the girl.

On one of those walks, up towards
The white side of busy Fortification,
Stopping to buy a soda,
Or sitting on someone’s steps to cool off,
He must have spotted her
Taking a breather along West Fortification Street.

It was hot as Hades,
Almost the fourth of July,
Close enough so fireworks could be heard
Off and on in the neighborhood.
My main concern was keeping cool.
I turned the AC on in the bedroom
And put on my housecoat.
It was time for The Price Is Right.

And then I heard shots fired
Not cherry bombs,
Gun shots.
The shots were
Coming from my front door,
Then into the living room.
I am no fool.
I keep a loaded handgun in my nightstand,
My brother’s doing.

So I snatched up my gun and started shooting back.
The shooter hadn’t figured that the person,
The woman, who lived there would have a gun and
Be able to shoot back,
Defend herself.
Like the coward he was
He ran.

I got a good look at him.
He was white and wore a Bull Durham cap.
I knew right away he had miscalculated
Which side of the duplex she lived in.
Tess was moaning a low feral moan
Through the screen door.
Her mistress,
Whatever her name was,
Stood silent and completely still.
She knew she had to go.
Like a marionette
She headed to her car empty-handed,
Not even a toothbrush.

I went to my Bible and gave her
Four one hundred dollar bills and four twenties.
“Don’t worry about the damn dog;
I will take care of Tess.”
I cannot tell when white folks are pale or just white.
She looked gray.
Grabbed my hand and kissed it,
Held it to her cheek,
Started her car and took off.

When the rent was due
And she hadn’t contacted me,
I went inside for the first time.
It was neat and clean and empty.
She had been sleeping
On a pile of neatly folded blankets and clothes.

What I had heard clinking were pieces of pottery,
Not like any pottery I’d ever seen.
Glistening and strange,
More varieties than a body could dream up
Or want or wish for,
Some I could figure out a use for,
Some I couldn’t.

I started out with good intentions.
I would pick up some corn-husk tamales
On Farish Street and walk the dog at the same time.
There I was dragging Tess by her leash and of a sudden
I jerked her up to where I was standing.

I took the leash off.
Go on now, Tess.
Time to find another friend.
Tess wouldn’t budge,
Wouldn’t even look at me.
So I gave her a shove.
She still cowered beside me.
I kicked in her direction,
Raised my voice.
Still wouldn’t move.
I hollered at her and
Tried to hit her with my open hand.
Then with the leash.
Kicked at her again
And missed again.
Raised my hand to her
Off she ran.

II

Again it’s early summer time,
This time a scorcher.
I have plugged my fan in,
Set it outside to blow on me
As I sit on the porch.
Even so my scalp is wet with sweat.
I am still working nights,
Going to the same job.
Still not part of a couple,
Sitting and reading the Clarion Ledger,
Locally known as the Carrion Dredger.

On the front page,
A photo of a dog,
A shepherd with a plastic bucket over its head
Held by two
Police officers caught in the act
Of removing the bucket.

The cutline reads:

This dog nicknamed Bucket Head
By the children in this Jackson neighborhood
Has eluded capture for many months
Surviving only by the kindness of families
Who over the winter put out food for her.


---Linda Larson

Morning By Thomas Fitzgerald

Morning

By Thomas Fitzgerald

ISBN: 1-59924-807-7

Finishing Line Press

www.finishinglinepress.com

Georgetown, Kentucky

18 pages

$14.00



Reviewed by Dennis Daly



I remember Sister Therese Immaculata, one of the more enlightened Sisters of Charity at my school, explaining the tortures awaiting many of us in Purgatory. She described this state of being to our fourth grade class as a downscaled version of hell without too much fire, but with a lot of heat, loneliness, and a dreadful emptiness. On the upside, it was only temporary.

Poet Thomas Fitzgerald in his chapbook, Morning, recounts much the same sufferings as those detailed by that almost mythical nun of my long ago childhood. In Please Do Not Seize, Fitzgerald’s persona, like a moth caught in prison of glass and screen, becomes desperate in his need to escape his inner torments. He must keep his head about him if he is to survive. Even as he confronts the ghosts of his past, he admonishes himself to “wait” and “give it time.” This first poem sets the tone for his subsequent pieces.

In Child Bug, old flaws and new ghosts populate the poem that predicates addiction,



I feel like getting drunk tonight.

Looking at the crack on the top step,

the one that speaks every time I press it,

at the hole in the ceiling

from the time I raised my hands too high,



And,



Or that I saw an old friend perfectly dead

and breathing—

eyes moving across the world.



Waking, a poem, which follows the downward spiral of a lost human with what appears to be complete honesty, confronts abject despair,



that I would be drunk



again—but alive enough

to see a woman wipe tears



from her freckled chin. I should

have known she’d say, I think



its time that you be leaving…



At the heart of this chapbook is an impressive set of pieces entitled, The Institution Poems. Here pain is mulled, dignity put aside, and death considered. Still, in the end, there is a green ribbon of life affirmation threading through them all. In the first poem the institutionalized narrator avers,



I have the thought:

It is good

my heart is beating.



Life and reality is worth holding on to,



I grip the peach in my hand

feel the juices run over my fingers.



Getting through this ordeal is much like Odysseus, bound to the mast, struggling against the pull of the sirens. Only here the poet’s persona deals with the draw of death as a child would,



I remember autumn

on the school bus

with the other children.



I remember how we held

our breath while passing

by the graveyards so the dead

would not haunt us.



He withdraws from addiction and seeks the surface of a different experience, almost a new birth,



My own sweat sticks

To me, heart overthrown, deep breaths, recalibrate.



I attempt to rise

Fingers run through my wet hair.



The fields are wet

starched cotton.



There is a pretty funny, yet telling, metaphor in That Alcohol Thing. The third paragraph of this prose poem relates,



My great-grandfather had a friend who said if he died first he

would come back and tickle my great- grandfather’s feet at

night. My grandmother said after his friend died he wore

boots to bed for the rest of his life.



The poem, The Dark Water, Empty Again, ends with a very stark and well crafted image which touches on loneliness, addiction, and hope,



He walks past me without

hello and now I am truly alone.



The wind over my empty beer bottle

makes the sound of a ship headed home.



The Waiting Room is existential and quite sad. In this room doctors are mechanistic strangers, bureaucrats really,



Hour pass. Does anyone remember I’m here? Patients peer

through the locked windows to gawk at the new lunatic.

Doctors open the steel doors and pretend I do not exist.



Before redemption there must be penance and there is here,

… my mother crying. I remember that I

deserve this.



And also here in the poem, I Have To Sit On My Knees,



To no one, to everyone, to

the stranger on the street,

to the hawks, to the crows,

beer in hand I try

to say it out loud:

please forgive me.



Because There Is Light is the last poem in this collection and the most interesting. The images allude to religion and the saint who seems to be invoked is Saint Thomas—doubting Thomas. The poet desires to understand his vulnerability by reaching out to other good but flawed fellow travelers. He is wandering through the supermarket of life after the deli has closed. I’m thinking of Edward Hopper’s Nightlife perhaps, or even Van Gogh’s Night Café, for their after hour atmosphere. The poem ends this way,



And I wander still, aimless

from Frozen Dinners to First Aid,

desperate to reach out

to the next person who passes by.

To touch the wound of his life.

To stand quietly together

in the checkout line.



Well done!

There’s Jews in Texas? Poems by Debra L. Winegarten

There’s Jews in Texas?
Poems by Debra L. Winegarten
Poetica Publishing Co.
Copyright © 2011 by Debra L. Winegarten
ISBN: 978-0-9836410-6-3
Softbound, 22 pages, $10

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Debra Winegarten’s small, but packed book of poems was winner of the Poetica Magazine, Contemporary Jewish Writing 2011 Chapbook Contest, and with good reason. First, as the title would indicate, there is some humor in Ms. Winegarten’s poetry. And coming out of Texas one would expect to find some anti-Semitism as well and the author does not let the reader down, often combining humor and anti-Semitism appropriately in a manner that Jews and non-Jews can both appreciate.

For example, in “Second Grade, Part Two she tells it as it is – or was – or maybe still is:

A grown man stops me on the sidewalk
Eyeing my Star of David necklace and asking if I’m Jewish.

When I nod yes, (I’m not supposed to talk to strangers),
He tells me that’s really too bad for me,
Because didn’t I know that
Jews burn in Hell when they die?

Tears falling so hard I could barely see,
I dropped my weekly treasure and ran home
To Mom so fast I thought
I might keel over before I got to her
And be snatched right down to Hell.

When I told Mom what happened,
She put both hands on my shoulders,
Knelt to my height where she could look square in my eyes,
And in that Dallas drawl of hers, said,

“That’s okay, honey, don’t worry.
We’re Jewish.
We don’t believe in hell.”

It is my personal belief that this has happened to too many Jewish children. It happened to me when I was six or eight years old, but even more recently, in the 1990s I had some
evangelical something or other sitting next to me on flight to Dallas and when he saw I was reading a translation of Chaim Nachman Bialick he asked if I was Jewish. I ignored
him, but when he started preaching to me, I gave him one of looks and told him what I really thought and flew in blessed silence the last two and one-half hours.

Many of Ms. Winegarten’s poems stir perhaps forgotten memories of anti-Semitism, but
others reflect the fine sense of humor she has as in “Passing:”

Like the time at Emma Long Park
When a teenager was dragging
his distressed puppy into the water.

I marched right over and said,
“I’m a vet. Stop that right now.
You are doing serious damage to your dog.”

Wearing a bathing suit,
I couldn’t be expected to have my license
With me, so I passed.

Near the end of this poem the author is with a friend and two teenage boys are tormenting a kitten and the girl friend orders the them put the cat down.

“Who are you?” one acne-faced boy sneered.
Pulling out her gun, she pointed and said,
“I’m the fucking Cat Police. Put the cat down.”

They dropped the kitten and ran.


This book, short as it might be, is filled with sad and funny vignettes. But it also gives
insight into her upbringing, her childhood and, of course, views of Texan anti-Semitism which is not unique to Texas but which one could (and can) find in here in Boston and other cities in the U.S.

One may smile at some of the poems but they cut deep into the psyche. Ms. Winegarten
is a third generation Texas Jew whose growing up Jewish in Texas has brought forth some poetry worth the reading.

The Awful Rowing Toward Anne Sexton by Lawrence Kessenich

Lawrence Kessenich is one of the managing editors of the literary magazine Ibbetson Street. He is also a former editor at Houghton Mifflin and worked with Diana Hume George and Diane Wood Middlebrook on the Selected Poems of Anne Sexton as well as a subsequent biography. He was generous enough to send this essay about his experiences to the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.







The Awful Rowing Toward Anne Sexton
by Lawrence Kessenich





From the first time I read one of her poems, I was in love with Anne Sexton. She was the poet I wanted to be. Her work was original, profound, self-deprecating, spiritual—and had a sense of humor to boot:



God loafs around heaven
without a shape
but He would like to smoke his cigar
or bite his fingernails…

…

He does not envy the soul much.
He is all soul
but he would like to house it in a body
and come down
and give it a bath
now and then.



. She played with words:



even its murders lined up like broken chairs

*

the skull with its brain like eels

*

they suck the childhood out of the berries

I was entranced by Sexton’s skill, her brutal honesty, her humor. And when it came time to consider graduate schools in creative writing, I dreamed of forsaking Milwaukee for cosmopolitan Boston, of sitting at her feet in a Boston University lounge to learn how she worked her magic.

I was on the verge of applying to graduate schools—including BU—one fall day when I went shopping at the local market. There I ran into a fellow student from one of my poetry classes, a few semesters before. She asked how I was going about choosing the creative writing programs I would apply to. I told her that I’d been advised to seek out programs where poets I respected were teaching. She asked who those poets were, and I told her. When I mentioned Anne Sexton, she interrupted, saying, “Oh, it’s too bad about her…”



At that point in my life, I wasn’t paying much attention to the news, so I had no idea what she was talking about. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Didn’t you hear?” she said. “Sexton committed suicide a couple weeks ago.”



I was stunned. The thought of that vital life having snuffed itself out was profoundly disturbing. Yes, there was darkness in her poetry, but the humor that often accompanied it had led me to believe that she had a firm grip on life, despite its contradictions. I was deeply saddened by the fact that not only would I never study with her, but I would never even see her read her poetry in person. The kicker was that I later learned Sexton had committed suicide on my birthday, October 4th.



Flash forward almost two decades. I am an editor at Houghton Mifflin—Anne Sexton’s publisher, as I am always proud to tell people. For years, I’ve read for Houghton Mifflin’s annual New Poetry Series—including Carolyn Forche’s first book—and my interest in poetry is known around the office. The editor-in-chief, Austin Olney, approaches me and asks if I’d like to work with two scholars, Diana Hume George and Diane Wood Middlebrook, who are putting together Selected Poems of Anne Sexton. Austin is a pretty reserved old Yankee, but I’m tempted to throw my arms around him and give him a hug.



I did not get to help select the Sexton poems that would go into the book—and, of course, having my own strong feelings about her poetry, I thought there were poems that should have been included and poems that could have been left out. But it was one of the great honors of my life to be the editor who guided the book through the publishing process at Houghton Mifflin—a book that is still in print, 24 years later.



Houghton Mifflin had also contracted with Middlebrook to write a biography of Sexton, and when the editor originally assigned to that book left, I was asked to take it over. For several years, I was Middlebrook’s sounding board at Houghton Mifflin, and I will never forget one call from her. After we exchanged pleasantries, she got to the reason for her call. “You’ll never guess what I have in a box under my desk,” she said. I told her I couldn’t imagine. “Tapes of Anne Sexton’s sessions with her therapist.” My reply was, “Well, you just guaranteed that the book will be controversial!” And indeed it was, though by the time it was published, I was no longer in the business.



I also met Sexton’s daughter Linda during my involvement with these two books, and got comfortable enough with her to tell her the story of my wanting to study with her mother—and of the coincidence of Sexton’s suicide occurring on my birthday. “Well, I’ve got an even more dramatic coincidence,” she replied. “My son was born on the anniversary of the day she died.”



So, despite my sadness over never getting to meet or study with Anne Sexton, I feel privileged to have played a small part in keeping her legacy alive. I believe she is one of our finest poets. Her work speaks to me as powerfully and eloquently today as it did more than three decades ago.

Poesy XXXIX

Poesy

Publisher/Editor: Brian Morrisey

Boston Editor: Doug Holder

Contributing Editor: Joe Pachinko

ISSN: 1541-8162

Review by Dennis Daly



Some covers tease. Some lure. Some enhance. The cover of Poesy XXXIX tests. A photograph of a grime-encrusted broken foam- cushioned chair with rolling arms, going to seed, the type often found in the darkened corners of factories, or homeless camps, offers the reader a choice. Either rest here, exchange funky molecules with the garish fabric, and be conveyed to places avant-garde, or pass it by to seek more sanitized, de-odorized, and perhaps academic, comfort.

If you decide to sit, you’ve passed the test and will match up fine with the artistic innards of this periodical. Now go to the back cover. Here you will find an extraordinary eulogy by A.D. Winans, entitled For Scott Wannberg. This jazzy piece offers a central metaphor with an attached simile like no other. Winans speaks of the dead poet as a butterfly in the way in which he lifted the spirits of those around him. So far, not that unusual.

Winans next explains that the way the butterfly lifts one’s spirits is “like a forklift.” That stopped me: a butterfly and a forklift? But, you know, it does work. I have not a little familiarity with forklifts and know the feel of the steady power lifting enormous weights skyward. That, together with the winged flitter of inspiration and delicateness suggested by a butterfly—well, damn if it doesn’t work. This same poem ends with a beautiful touch of wisdom,



Judge not a person by their supposed achievements

Judge that person like you would judge a song

Not by its words and melody

But by the way it lifts the spirit and the soul.



Inside the issue, the poem, Beyond the Bend by G. A. Scheinoha, takes your breath away. A poem’s creation is conjured up,



Swallowed up

first by the languid

stream of syllables,

broken only by

rock hard consonants

jutting up from

the white water churn

of thoughts…



The language is precise and wondrous

Another poem, One Thousand Abbie Hoffmans, recalls an earlier time of innocent hilarity and freedom. Whatever became of my copies of Revolution for the Hell of It and Steal This Book anyway? John Dorsey, the author, gets it right in his last four lines,



You knew mambo when you saw it



Knew dreams by the way

they kissed your skin

for a taste of freedom.



Tiny Photographs, a poem by Bruce McRae, oozes resistance and contrariness with these imagistic lines,



A monk burning

on a busy motorway



Or these,



A stop sign

with a bullethole in it



Or these,



A woman’s mouth

colored with smudged

black lipstick.



A Conversation with Sam Cornish by Doug Holder is not so much a conversation as a reflection on a meeting and conversation with Boston Poet Laureate Cornish. Holder, besides being an accomplished poet himself, is a terrific interviewer. He virtually erases himself from the piece, putting Cornish front and center. Holder uses a gritty Cornish poem, Dog Town Slim, dually for atmospherics and to prove a point—that Cornish is one tough street poet.

Two words not usually associated (at least in my mind) with a poet laureate are community and outreach. Holder tacks these words onto Cornish reinforcing his argument that Cornish, despite his formal title, is not one of the mandarins, the careerists of the poetic world. In fact Cornish marshals the advantages of his title in support of those “holy fools,” who write for the love of it. Holder’s admiration of Cornish couldn’t be more palpable.

Solid artwork in the form of photographs add to and punctuate this issue. My favorites are two window scenes by T. Kilgore Splake. One juxtaposes Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa’s subtle smile with a broad sculptured laughing face sitting on a window sill. The other portrays an older man, in silhouette, catching his breath, perhaps, in front of a lighted, seasonally decorated window.

I also liked very much the reprint of Scott Wannberg’s, The Rain Came Down Collect. Wannberg, before his death, was apparently a beloved supporter and friend of Poesy. A number of this issue’s poets dedicated their pieces to him.

In the poem itself Wannberg expresses his compassion for the hurt and broken people, who seek healing,



The doctor sits high up on a tree limb,

Searching through binoculars,

The healing will arrive soon, I hear

Don’t quite know which train will bring it.



What is also apparent is Wannberg’s belief in the curative powers of legitimate art,



Bring your wounded luggage,

Bring your passion and your hope.

Some things still mean,

Despite rhetoric, lies, and misdealt cards.



Of the many other interesting poems in this issue, one prose poem really struck me—Edgar Allen Poe by Ralph Malachowski. The interplay between Poe’s spun black magic and the reader/admirer is stunning. These two lines describe one heart’s connection with Poe’s vision,



Edgar Allen became a bas relief of grief appearing briefly before our besotted eyes.

Our occult groom will bloom in our heart’s greenhouse, watered by blasphemy, fed by doom.



Great issue!