THE BOSTON NATIONAL POETRY MONTH FESTIVAL--April 28 to 29, 2012

                 ( Left--Harris Gardner-- Founder of Festival)
                  Right-Sam Cornish-Boston Poet Laureate)

                                                            

                                                         2012 

         THE  BOSTON NATIONAL POETRY MONTH  FESTIVAL

                      Now In Its Successful TWELFTH!!! Year

CO-SPONSORS:  Tapestry of Voices & Kaji Aso Studio in partnership with the Boston Public Library, SAVE the DATES: Saturday, April 28th 10:00 A.M.- 4:40 P.M. OPEN MIKE: 1:30 to 3:00P.M.; & Sunday, April 29th^th, 1:10 to 4:30P.M. The Festival will be held at the library’s main branch in Copley Square. FREE ADMISSION

56 Major  and Emerging poets will each do a ten minute reading; ALSO

Featuring 6 extraordinarily talented prize winning high school students: from Boston Latin High School; Boston Arts Academy. These student stars will open  the Festival at 10:00 A.M.  SAM CORNISH, Boston’s current and first Poet Laureate will open the formal part  of the Festival at 11:00 A.M. 55 additional major  and emerging poets will follow with a

                                              POETRY MARATHON

Some of the many  luminaries include SAM CORNISH, Richard Wollman ,Christine Casson, Dan Tobin, Alfred Nicol, Rhina Espaillat , Jennifer Barber, , Kathleen Spivack , Doug Holder, Elizabeth Doran, Charles Coe,  Kim Triedman,  Ryk McIntyre, January O’Neil ,  Regie O’Gibson, Kate Finnegan (Kaji Aso Studio), Victor Howes, Susan Donnelly, Jack Scully, Rene Schwiesow, Chad Parenteau,  Tomas O’Leary, CD Collins, Marc Goldfinger, Gloria Mindock, Tim Gager, Diana Saenz, Stuart Peterfreund, Valerie Lawson, Michael Brown, Mignon Ariel King, Tom Daley, Molly Lynn Watt, Ifeanyi Menkiti, Lainie Senechal, Harris Gardner, Joanna Nealon, Walter Howard,   Susan Donnelly, Zvi Sesling,  Irene Koronas, Fred Marchant, Danielle Legros Georges, Robert K. Johnson, Suzanne E. Berger, and a Plethora of other prize winning poets.

This Festival has it all: Professional published  poets, celebrities, numerous prize winners, student  participation, OPEN MIKE.

Even more, it is about community, neighborhoods, diversity, Boston, and Massachusetts. This popular tradition is one of the largest events in Boston’s Contribution to National Poetry Month.  FREE ADMISSION !!!

FOR INFORMATION: Tapestry of Voices: 617-306-9484

Library: 617-536-5400

Wheelchair accessible. Assistive listening devices available. To request a sign language interpreter, or for other special needs, call 617-536-7855(TTY) at least two weeks before the program date.                                              

A Perpetual Symphony: Review of Elegy for Everyone by Alfred Nicol

A Perpetual Symphony: Review of Elegy for Everyone

Review By Prema Bangera

Elegy for Everyone

Poems by Alfred Nicol

Prospero’s World Press, Inc.

Flushing, New York

ISBN 978-0-9822028-1-4

Seldom do we find a contemporary collection of poetry which makes us hold our hearts, oozing out raw and pure emotions. However, Alfred Nicol’s Elegy for Everyone does just that, with each poem exposing our everyday honest human expression. The complexity of each poem shadows and mirrors our soul, whether it’s about heartache, nostalgia, whimsical humor, etc. We are transcended into our own minds, facing the words which reflect our own demons, our forgotten smile, and our need for imagination. 

The book opens to a poem reflecting an ancient Greek myth of Artemis and Actaeon, properly titled "Actaeon, After." While reading this poem, we are suddenly captured within Actaeon's body, undergoing his transformation:

No harm has come to me; I am another, not myself.

I might have leapt and fled among the trees. I did as well 

by keeping still. The fleetest deer cannot outrun its senses.

Or how should I unsee what I had seen, or gather in 

what seeing had drawn out from me? My self went out from me.

Now I am the blurred thrum of startled wings, and now

the tremor of a single leaf, the seam of parted air.

At once bereft and blessed with more than everything I had—

to see as in a dream the one I dared not dream to see—

if I were but the shadow of a reed I would be glad.

The beauty in the narrator’s vision is so clear and vivid—we are drawn into the Actaeon’s transcendence.

Similarly, we are lost in quiet and exquisite sorrow of the change which occurs through an altering life in “The Mistress to Herself.” The narrator wonders about this waiting game she has been playing with her lover:

While I am held more tenderly

than I’ve been held by other men,

he does not say a word to me

that he might not take back again.

He’ll keep me on a pedestal

until he puts me on the shelf.

So I can either wait to fall

or I can come down by myself.

I don’t know whether to be sad

by holding on or letting go.

A little love is what I had.

It did not seem a little, though.

We are overcome with the complex hollowness the narrator feels while struggling with the love she carries and that which might be tossed. This poetic monologue transpires into a speech every soul holds, this longing to love and to be loved—this waiting of the inevitable ending of a complicated relationship.

In wandering for this passion, we are awakened to the fear of love—the struggle of its aftermath in “I Go Near Love.” The sheer touch of this passion is longed for, but also dreaded:

I go near love advisedly.

Someone is there, expecting me.

She may not be as mindful, though,

Of consequence we cannot know—

With loss the only certainty.

She pictures love a tranquil sea.

I know how cold its depths may be.

Love is a place I would not go:

I go near love,

Where, looking in her eyes, I see

The soft flame burning quietly,

And my brief wings beat to and fro

About that mesmerizing glow.

Though I may fly I am not free:

I go near love.

Here, it’s evident how haunting the past can be—how anxious we feel in finding and losing any sort of love. The grief of a loss consumes our being.

The mourning of any being in also found in “Elegy for Everyone.” This poem reaps the embodiment of our everyday lives, our everyday song:

It’s best to read the obituaries first.

Wonderful people die most every day,

people you may only in passing

but that was always true of everyone…

It’s best to read the obituaries first,

Before the news and sports. They’re better written.

It comes of knowing rules of composition,

especially Beginning Middle End.

Sister Joan was ninety-nine years old.

Her story’s got a lot of middle to it…

Only human doesn’t get things done,

not the things that matter. Only human

sends a check and gets a calendar.

Only human gets enthusiastic

now and then. It never lasts. So what.

The things that matter always take forever.

Only human hasn’t time for that.

We are in awe of how strangers’ death goes unnoticed and their story is always overlooked. However, this narrator chooses to examine the seldom unexamined mode of nature, knowing that every story has a lot of middle to be told.

In the book, Elegy for Everyone, Alfred Nicol’s poems touch upon every human emotion. When reading any single poem, we are overcome with empathy for the narrator while finding a sense of self within each line. Each poem reveals the truth of the human condition, how every exposed heart carries joyfulness, grief, affection, and failures.

    *****Prema Bangera, a native of India, moved to Massachusetts in 1994. As an avid explorer, she has lived in Bombay, Prague, Boston, Erie, Seattle and visited many other cities. She was named poet of the month by Boston Girl Guide. Her work has been published in Quick Fiction and forthcoming in Ibbetson Street and Bagel Bards Anthtology. She is also pursuing the realms of theater and visual arts.

Ibbetson Street Press Book Release: The Music Man of Terezin: The story of Rafael Schaechter

Release date: April 19, 2012 (Yom HaShoah)

LOOK FOR BOSTON-AREA BOOK RELEASE EVENT ON SUNDAY, APRIL 22

Available for Yom HaShoah events and book readings (no charge to synagogues):

SusieDavidsonJournalist@gmail.com

The Music Man of Terezin:

the story of Rafael Schaechter

 

As remembered by Edgar Krasa

By Susie Davidson

Illustrated by Fay Grajower

Rafael Schaechter was a composer, conductor and pianist who staged musical and theatrical productions with the inmates at Terezin, a unique concentration camp where the Nazis imprisoned many of Eastern Europe’s most talented artists and musicians. Under starvation conditions, they continued to create works, and the camp became a façade, a cultural showcase promoted by the Nazis to convey a false reality of how well they treated the Jews.

This new book by Susie Davidson is based on the recollections of Holocaust survivor Edgar Krasa of Newton, Mass., who was a member of Schaechter's choruses. Schaechter, whom Krasa refers to as “a psychologist without a degree,” was able to uplift the spirits of the doomed Terezin prisoners by teaching and involving them in various musical productions. He is best known for staging 15 performances of Verdi's Requiem at Terezin, with shrinking casts each time due to deportations. It was secretly a defiant act, produced under great risk. By singing the Requiem’s verses about the final judgment day to the Nazis, the prisoners were able to denounce their captors. When Schaechter was asked to stage a performance for the Nazis, their invited Nazi guests, and a contingent from the Red Cross, the head of the Council of Elders advised against it, because if the Nazis learned the secret about the lyrics, he could be hung, and the prisoners could all be deported. He persisted, however, and after telling the singers about this risk, they unanimously agreed to continue with the production. It was their final, successful act of defiance. Shortly thereafter, Rafael Schaechter was deported to Auschwitz, where he perished.

For more information or to arrange book readings and events,

please search for The Music Man of Terezin page on Facebook

( https://www.facebook.com/TheMusicManOfTerezinTheStoryOfRafaelSchaechter), or visit www.SusieD.com

ISBN 9780984661404

2012, Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville, Mass.

Edgar Krasa is a survivor of Terezin and other concentration camps. He is on the board of the Terezin Music Foundation, which has established a Krasa-Schaechter Commission Fund for young composers. He often speaks at schools and community venues. “When I speak at inner city schools, I emphasize racial hatred and highlight tolerance. To music-oriented audiences,  I speak about music as an instrument of resistance and defiance. For religious groups, I highlight the impact of the Holocaust on my faith at various stages of my life.”

Susie Davidson is a poet, journalist, author, and filmmaker who writes regularly for the Jewish Advocate, the Jewish Journal, the Jewish Daily Forward, JointMedia News Service and other media, and has contributed to the Jerusalem Post, the Boston Sunday Globe, and the Boston Herald. She is the Coordinator of the Boston chapter of The Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life and the Brookline (Mass.) Library Authors’ Collaborative.

Other books by Susie Davidson:

“I Refused to Die: Stories of Boston-Area Holocaust Survivors and Soldiers who Liberated the Concentration Camps of World War II” (2005)

“Jewish Life in Postwar Germany” (2006)

“Selected Poetry of Susie D”

“In Gratitude and Hope” (collection of remarks made by former German Consul to New England Wolfgang K. Vorwerk at area Holocaust community events, ed.) (2008)

 (All Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville).

Fay Grajower, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, studied at The School of Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and holds an M.A. in Studio Art from New York University. Her works have been featured in galleries and museums in cities throughout the U.S. and abroad including in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Wash, DC, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland and Florida, and in Germany, Poland and Israel. Her work has been exhibited at the Auschwitz Jewish Museum in Oswiecim, and in Poland at the Biblioteka Slaska in Katowice and the Czestochowa Museum. She was an artist-in-residence in Boca Raton, Florida; in Mitzpe Ramon, Israel; and in Erfurt, Germany. Her commissioned works include a painted sculpted glass dedicatory wall at the JCC of Wilmington, Delaware, a Holocaust Memorial Sculpture Installation at the B'nai Torah Congregation in Boca Raton, a Holocaust Memorial at the Young Israel of New Rochelle, New York, and an installation for The International Women's Research Center at Brandeis University.

Conversation Pieces: Selected Interviews: Eric Greinke

 

Conversation Pieces

Selected Interviews

Eric Greinke

Presa :S: Press

ISBN 97831251-6-7

2012   $15.95

“I think there may be magic hiding beneath what

we normally consider the mundane. I think poetry

has a unique power to penetrate, to open doors of

perception into a deeper, more wholistic vision.”

Within the five interviews selected for publication, Eric Greinke

gives the reader a glimpse of how the small press works and it's

history as it relates to Greinke's involvement many years ago:

“Pilot Press began as a conscious effort to market

our writings...as we settled into it we centered on

those aspects of the art which we saw as having the

greatest moral value and aesthetic clarity.”

Each interview lends to an overall look-see at the poet

as publisher and writer.  Greinke journeys the reader

from beginning to the present day and his current,

Presa :S: Press success. His devotion and energy to the

poetic community is astounding and deserves praise:

“The small press today continues to be where the pure

poetry is published,...there is no way to become an

instant poet...MFA programs insulate students from

the struggle of real life to a degree, & also tend to

over-analyze & intellectualize what is essentially

a non-rational, creative process.”

Greinke tells us about his writing life as well as the

publishing life of a poet. What Greinke speaks about

applies now and will always apply because he is a

principled poet with a commitment to the community.

“In 'The Broken Lock,' the doors of perception opened...

I think one can approach poetry from either inside-out

or outside-in. The result is fundamentally the same.”

“The creative process is exciting to me and sustains

my interest as a means of transcendentalism. The more

I practice Zen self-discipline, the more naturally it flows.”

Irene Koronas

Poetry Editor:

Wilderness House Literary Review

Reviewer:

Ibbetson Street Press

Bernard Horn: A Poet and Professor Who Brings Us Our ‘Daily Words’

Bernard Horn: A Poet and Professor Who Brings Us Our ‘Daily Words’

Interview with Doug Holder

  Bernard Horn is the author of the award-winning poetry collection “Our Daily Words.” This English professor at Framingham State University in Massachusetts has had his work praised by the likes of Robert Pinsky,  and David Mamet. Irene Koronas, a reviewer for the online journal  “Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene” wrote of his work:

 “ We read each poem in the 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 lies our daily refreshment.”

 Horn'S poems and translations are widely published, in such journals as “The Manhattan Review,” “The New Yorker,” “ The Worcester Review,” and others. Horn has taught at Haifa University in Israel and at the Radcliffe Seminars at Harvard University. I spoke with him on my Somerville Community Access TV Show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder:  "Our Daily Words" is your first poetry collection and you have had a long and distinguished career. What took you so long?

Bernard Horn: I have been writing for a long time--it's a matter of the market. I have been in writing groups with people for years and I have been sending out poems for many years. I am slow at writing poems. It is a longtime between how a poem ends and begins, not to mention all my teaching and family responsibilities that takes away from writing time. However I get material from my family. A lot of my poems are about family. I have written a number of poems in the middle of family chaos.

DH: Your wife is an artist and recently retired from teaching at Endicott College. Does your work compliment or overlap each other?

BH: We just had a joint presentation.  A bunch of my poems were written in 2001 in Israel when I was teaching at Haifa University. At the time my wife ( Linda Klein) was doing these small gouache paintings. My poems dealt with terrorism--with the Second Intifada--as it was known. We didn't think there was a relationship between her paintings and my poems. But after looking closely at them I realized gouache looks like you are looking through a screen or veil at an object on the other side.  Sometimes it looks like you are looking through  barbed wire. I realized that even though I knew Israel fairly well, I was still looking at i through the 'veil' of being an American. Later we put these images in my poetry collection. We had a joint exhibit at the Marblehead Public Library. This was the first time we did this.

  Both my wife and I know as a painter and a poet respectively, that the moods we go through don't necessarily have to do with the ot her person. It is a valuable thing to know in a relationship.

DH: In your new collection you have a poem titled " The Smell of Time." As soon as I smell ethnic food like gefilte fish, I am transported back in time to the early 60's when I was a boy at my grandmother's house in the Bronx.  I wonder, if one doesn't have a sense of smell, could one still be a good poet?

BH: That's a terrific question. Memory is so bound up with smell. And my poems are so dense with memory. It is such a powerful thing--and at times more than anything else it tells you time passes. Place and memory are just as important; so it is a hard question to answer.

DH: You seem to work hard to find that sentence that captures our dreams, our experience,... our essence.

BH:  I am always taken with the power of a sentence rolling forward. It is a memory of a sensation, on top of a thought.

DH: You have translated poems of the famous Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. I read in an interview in The Paris Review with Yehuda that he believes all poetry is political. Poems are human responses to reality and politics is part of reality.

BH: I agree. There is a pressure in politics. When I was in Israel my poems were taking in the issue of terrorism. Then I found it hard to write my own poetry. What happens if you are writing during a time of terrorism people always call on you for solidarity. A place of solidarity--it is not a quiet place-it can be a very hard place to write in.

DH: You started out as a chemical engineering student at MIT, but you ended up as a PhD in Literature. How did you get to point A to point B?

BH: Well I think people who knew me were less surprised than anyone else. You just didn't major in the humanities at MIT. A friend's theory is that anyone who came of age during Sputnik--and were in sort of the middle between the humanities and the sciences chose the sciences.

This was in the early 60's, and I started out as a chemical engineer in West Texas. I tied to imagine myself in this job 10 years in the future. I couldn't. The rest is history.

To My Wife

Some times
when we grab an hour of love
luxuriously in the late afternoon,
the growly baby snoring in the next room,v her sisters at the mall,
I feel as if I'm robbing the gods, who have,
some say, all the time in the world.

--Bernard Horn

How Are Ya' Charlie? By Doug Holder

 


                                          Kevin White

                                            Jerry Williams       



I used to listen to the late Jerry Williams on Talk Radio years ago. I was fairly new to Boston, and Williams gave me his unique take on the city and all its colorful players. On many of his shows he would do this parody of Mayor Kevin White's decidedly strong Boston accent. Williams shouted over the air " How are ya' Charlie!" with a very pronounced emphasis on the "rs"--if you know what I mean. I thought at the time that White couldn't possibly sound like this--Williams was just trying to get his ratings up with this cornball sketch. So one evening while strolling down Charles St. on the foot of Beacon Hill I head a voice behind me sounding very much like the one I heard on the radio: " How are ya' Charlie!" I figured it was Jerry Williams doing his shtick on the damp cobblestone sidewalk. I turned around and it was the Mayor himself , in all his glory, calling to a friend in the distance. I never doubted Williams again--I can tell you that!

Doug Holder/ Somerville, Mass.

Ibbetson Poet Linda Larson Nominated for St. Botolph Emerging Artist Award

 

                                                    ( Linda Larson)

 

For a number of years I have nominated poets and writers for The St. Botolph Emerging Artist Award. This award presented by the St. Botolph Club in the Back Bay of Boston is given to talented, emerging artists, or artists who have not received wide spread acclaim as of yet. This year I have nominated Ibbetson Street Press poet Linda Larson. We have published a fine collection of her poetry, and she has been in the magazine Ibbetson Street a number of times. She has survived many hardships and has become a superb poet...

 

The Emerging Artists Selection Process

Nominations are solicited in January from recognized professionals in the cultural community and St. Botolph Club Members, as well as from former Emerging Artists recipients in the fields of music, literature, and the visual arts. A letter of recommendation by the nominator is submitted on behalf of the candidate, who provides a writing sample, visual images, or performance recordings, along with a letter of intent and need. These materials are reviewed by three juries comprised of Board and Club members. From about 150 candidates, approximately fifteen are selected annually for individual awards of $2,500. These awards are announced in June

 

A Thumbnail Biography of Linda Larson

Linda Larson was born and educated in the Midwest and spent childhood vacations and more than a decade of her adult life in Madison County, Mississippi. While in Mississippi, she worked as a feature writer for The Capitol Reporter and The Jackson Advocate. Larson relocated to the Boston/ Cambridge area where she has lived and worked for the past twenty years.
For five years she served as editor of and contributor to Spare Change News, a homeless newspaper based in Cambridge.
Over the years Larson has struggled with mental illness, homelessness and alcohol addiction.
She has been recognized by both houses of the Massachusetts Legislature for her advocacy work on behalf of people with mental illnesses.
As Larson’s life has become more manageable, she has been able to realize her long-term goal in putting together a collection of poetry, Washing the Stones, published by Ibbetson Press, August, 2007. These poems go a long way towards recapturing her promise as a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars in the Seventies and as a teaching fellow in the creative writing doctoral program at the University of Southern Mississippi .

Phantom Drift, A Journal of New Fabulism

 

Phantom Drift, A Journal of New Fabulism

Managing Editor:  David Memmott

Phantom Drift Limited

La Grande, Oregon

www.WordcraftofOregon.com/pd.html

ISSN:2162-8211

ISBN:978-1-877655-73-9

$15.00

Reviewed by Dennis Daly

I admit that the first few pieces that I read in this curious journal I did not like very much. The introduction editorial intimated that many of the pieces therein “may well be indescribable,’ and given what I had just read that seemed about right. Then I read Stephen McNally’s poem, Rabbit. The poet relates in glorious detail how he befriended a long-eared fettuccini eating rabbit, who knew secrets about stone lions and spirits, who have lost their way. In fact it turns out that the very existence of the poet is dependent on the rabbit,

So he imagined a train, and a train pulled up before him.

Once inside, he imagined a railroad that shot into the fish eye of time, and

there was a railroad.

He imagined a journey so impossible it would lead him to a land of hard

bricks and gravity, and he found my world.

Then he imagined a man with blue rings of fire in his brain and he

found me.

Predictably enough, the rabbit caused the poet to drink heavily and indulge in sympathetic drugs in an effort to erase the rabbit’s hold on his fragile world.  It didn’t work but something else happened,

Sober, I was about to take up religion

when, one evening, his words (for reasons you wouldn’t understand)

seemed reasonable and clear.

Like a waterfall, it all crashed down on me, but lovingly.

He was my friend…

Okay I get it now. But how could I possibly review this journal, where, in the rabbit’s philosophy,

Art is a game of killers

and life is nothing but swamp gas, a flash in the summer sky.

In desperation and despair I went out for an evening walk.  I turned the corner at Nursery Street and there he stood, looking at me with not a little interest, somewhat larger than a normal rabbit and, yes!, he had long ears. We had a great conversation. I told him how I had stopped writing poetry thirty plus years ago—writers block big time, and how lately things seem to have turned around. He explained McNally’s next poem called Moon to me. The poem begins with a memorable image of a murderer at the door in a snow storm,

The murderer appeared at my doorstep in the night and he was dazzling,

his eyes two vaults guarded by ageless, chanting priests.

As I stared at him the snow hurried closer to touch his coat

and the moon covered us with his red hands.

Soon lighting struck from some past age and the earth glowed because the dead were building fires. It all made absolute sense since

…the snow hanging on his black coat

Formed the star chart for a galaxy beyond our reach.

As everyone should know, multiple universes can do that. Next I read a review of McNally’s Child of Amber, which won a well-deserved prize in 1992, by Matt Schumacher. It turns out that this was McNally’s only collection of poetry and Schumacher was stunned by its quality. The poet had a gentleness with animals that was endearing. His poems are in fact a refuge for animals. Schumacher notes that McNally passed away in 1998. But he lies. McNally still lives. I’ve seen him and talked with him.

About this time I closed the journal for a moment to look again at the cover. The painting by Jessica Plattner is entitled St. Christopher Carrying His Child-Self Across the River. It shows a monkish St. Christopher carrying his miniature across a waist-deep river. Nature appears well kept and stylized. The miniature Christopher has a cloud halo. The Roman Catholic Church now denies that St. Christopher ever existed. They are pulling wool over our eyes. I have his medal in my car and it keeps me safe. Many of the other plates included like number 7, The Encounter, are both creepy and reassuring. I find that strange.

In Joshua McKinney’s short fictional piece, Couch, a man with his beer falls asleep and ends up inside his favorite couch where he suffers indignity after indignity. Two coins fall on his eyes. Is this a good thing? I think so, but death is near as his kids use the couch as a trampoline. Pay no attention to the detective, who shows up to investigate and whispers to the unfortunate man’s wife into the wee hours. I’m sure it must be innocent fun.

Lichfield by Wade German waxes nostalgically about a school bus stop where earthy children get on the bus for a ride down the forever highway. They are described thusly,

They all look like birds in antiquated clothes;

smelled of mold and fresh-turned earth.

They always took the back seats, sat there mute.

We never spoke to them, didn’t like their town…

A bit like The Polar Express, only scarier. Here they are swallowed up by the cloud of our unknowing. And yes they need our prayers, like the fourteenth century mystical poem/prayer that it references.

Anita Sullivan’s poem, When the Solstice Is Late, is a timeless wonderful piece. In the window

An ancient dowager sits up there sipping tea

and peering with rheumy eyes into the mote-less afternoon.

She is waiting for the impossible: a horse sent to fetch the sun. The horse is not up to it and it ends badly.

The character Blau can’t win for nothing in the frustrating short story called The Jar by Brian Evenson. The prisoner does not have any hands and cannot retrieve his hands without his correct number. The guard is a son- of-a-bitch and there lies the problem. The guard at least has the decency to take him to the room where the pairs of hands are kept. This is a sad story so I will end the review.  There is no point in perpetuating unhappiness.

As you may have guessed, the original reviewer, Dennis, is no longer here. I don’t need him anymore. As of now, he never existed.  I am Bernard and I am a rabbit with long ears.

Somerville Singer/Songwriter Lisa Doyle Puts on a ‘Lion Face’ for children.

Somerville Singer/Songwriter Lisa Doyle Puts on a ‘Lion Face’ for children.

By Doug Holder

  One Saturday morning in March Lisa Doyle negotiated the riotous terrain of the Bagel Bards meeting at the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square to meet with me for an interview. Doyle, a longtime Somerville resident, has created along with her sister Lisa and her brother Mark a sophisticated collection of songs for children titled “Lion Face Song.”

  Doyle, lives in the Beacon St., Shaw’s Market section of our city, and counts the Café Rustica as one of her favorite haunts. Like many a Somerville artist she loves the city’s energy, and all it has to offer.

  Doyle told me that her sister Amy Doyle is a writer, former teacher and mother of three, and her brother Mark Doyle is a renowned producer and arranger who has over 65 albums to his credit and has worked with the likes of Hall and Oates, Leo Sayer, Judy Collins, and Meat Loaf, to name a few. Although Mark Doyle lives in Syracuse, New York he is in close contact with the sisters. This brother and sister trio formed the studio group 3D that performed and wrote the songs in this collection.

  According to their website the “…lively multi-cultural music in this collection invites listeners to participate and move to a variety of rhythms, including: reggae, salsa and merengue.” Doyle told me: “These songs are perfect for early childhood music and movement activities.”

   Doyle said that the cd includes lesson plans for kids and uses adaptive yoga techniques to spike the kids’ imagination, and keep them centered. The music and songs teaches kids about ways to release tension. One song “Shake” introduces children to the ancient Chinese Qigong method of relieving tension and stress. The cd also teaches respect for the environment, one’s elders and other cultures.

  And although this might sound corny in these cynical times, Doyle said that the cd teaches kindness, rather than focusing on negative activities like bullying, Well—a little kindness goes a long way as I hope “Lion Face” does!

*** For more information contact Lisa Doyle doylelisa@comcast.net  http:///3dband.net

Broken Borders Poems by John L. Holgerson

Broken Borders Poems


John L. Holgerson

Wasteland Press

$12.00



Review by Rene Schwiesow



“Broken Borders Poems” is internationally inspired. The poems included were written in the United States, London, Athens, and on the Greek Islands of Hydra and Rhodes. Some of them, Holgerson says, were “born in one country, grew up in a second and found maturity in a third.”



In the opening poem Holgerson tells his reader



. . .you will dance.

Across the room, in the streets,

you glide. An escaped kite

rising on crescendo currents,

tugging, slave to string of song.



Poetry does allow us to soar like a kite, on the air flow on the words and images that carry us high above the landscape. We rise on that crescendo with the beauty, dip with the melancholy and find freedom in the expansion of metaphor. We are, however, always tethered to the reality that sometimes poetry is just not so pretty. Holgerson gives fair warning to the unwary pedestrian who may be observed without their knowledge:



Do not go so unarmed

among the smiling hunters

Do not listen

to the clever lures

whispered from behind. . .



Do not trust us

to repair your heart

We will shackle it

with chains of verse



Holgerson writes about relationship, with women, with his children, and with a young man on death row in “To a Dying Man on his Birthday,” where he questions the death penalty.



A hell of a system, isn’t it?

You kill. We kill.

And the only one

who really benefits

is the undertaker.



Talk about grounding us in reality. Holgerson swings from the electric chair to the glories of war. Yes you should be reading glories as sarcasm. How glorious is war?



Eyes

vacant

blood-smeared windows

that have looked out upon

every kind of cruelty and death



Bodies

mud-caked

bug-ridden

bone-tired

hunched over



bodies of

American men and boys



Poetry will bring you to contemplation; John Holgerson’s words certainly offer us much to consider, often through shudders. He ends the book with the title poem, “Broken Borders,” which is a villanelle. It is not often that we are treated to form poetry in a chapbook. I will leave you with the final couplet:



I’ve broken all the borders hindering my advance

Listening to the music, relearning how to dance.



Nice!



Rene Schwiesow is co-host of the wildly popular South Shore Venue, Poetry: The Art of Words. She writes a monthly arts column for The Old Colony Memorial in Plymouth, MA and earns her living working with autistic children and running a private hypnosis/wellness practice

WHITE PAPERS by Martha Collins

WHITE PAPERS

Martha Collins

University of Pittsburgh Press

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6184-0

2012 $15.95

Martha Collin's poetry mixes metaphor with concrete

images. Sometimes the breakdown and repetitiveness

of phrases and words, helps the reader to ascertain

their own reality, identity, their own rag tag submission

to our own skin, thin enough to see through:

“black keys letters learn

to play read write dress

shoes purse suit grown

up clothes hat tie night

out morning coffee not

yet sin will find you out

dirt sheep eye and blue

mark so it seemed wrong

that in the meant good

book word confused with

Middle English blac pale

(see bleach) oh no never”

When the reader reads the poems aloud, one can hear

the word clicking rhythm that could be, if we

continue to recite with an accent on what is being written,

an accent that is familiar and then clicks into another

pentameter, like jazz bends a note:

“...a dark sky the coming

in of the kept out

in the wind waves

of whites only within

city limits after dark

whites only under

the stones no skin

covering”

And there is history, and color clarification, and experi-

mental writing. And there is the History in the text books

or not, ethics or not, this is a principled reality and not

the History taught. Collin's music is in the revolutionary

in the same way hip hop and rap lyric the 'revolution.'

Each verse, each awareness addresses the reader. The

song so long ignored by some, we are naked in front

of this verse:::

“could get a credit card loan car

come and go without a never had

to think about a school work job

to open doors to buy a rent a nice

place yard park beside a walk

in any store without a never had

to dress to buy a dress shoes under-

wear to understate or -play myself

to make myself heard to get across...”

 Collins plunges into herself, her image and all the foibles

we all believe, but are afraid to reveal and research, and with

book in hand, fingers ink stained, “playing in the dark.” we

are participants:

“although my father although

my mother although we rarely

although we whispered

although the silence although

the absence although even now

some TV books not to mention

radio websites new militias hate

groups raging against our socialist-

communist-fascist although but still...”

This book brings me to the great poet Susan Howe and her intense

study of her subjects in the same way Martha Collins has studied

her subject, even on the personal level. I also think of Cornell West,

his book, “Race Matters” in the same way Collins denotes colors.

Color matters in this book of white papers with black ink. I counted

color words because color matters and because I enjoy what color

represents and their many representations. There are variations on

color so my count is approximate. These are the colors in this book:

white 101, black 43, green 3, pink 5, browns 13, red 8, blue 1, gold 3,

yellow 7, gray 1:

“...and although I've gone back

and filled in some blanks

I'm still learning this un-

learning untying

the knot of Yes but re-

writing this  Yes  Yes”

The poems are masterfully rendered, using space and time

in newer forms and classical form. This is another must read,

another thoughtful book by Martha Collins

Irene Koronas

Poetry Editor: Wilderness House Literary Review

Reviewer: Ibettson Street Press