MAY 20, 2012: Have a laugh at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop’s Expense!

MAY 20, 2012: Have a laugh at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop’s Expense!


By Doug Holder

Who said poetry has to be staid and stuffy? Not The Grolier Poetry Bookshop, which is sponsoring a one-time event filled with poetry, levity and laughter. Laughter at the Grolier cranks up the merriment May 20, 2012, 3:30PM at the brand new Grolier Poetry Room--upstairs at the Bloc 11 Cafe--11 Bow St.--Union Square-Somerville.

You’ll experience a wild concoction of poetry, mixed media, and mirthful merriment featuring hilarious poetic luminaries. You’ll also be helping the famed Grolier Bookshop--a literary landmark--in the heart of Harvard Square to thrive and stay alive!

This will be the second event at Grolier’s Poetry Room above Bloc 11 in Union Square. The first event Madness at the Grolier was a resounding success, and the sponsors promise to please with this one too!

Featured readers will be hilarious local poets X. J. Kennedy, Tomas O'Leary and Dan Sklar. In addition, the event’s curiously titled “Readers of the Lost Arc” will be Lo Galluccio, Doug Holder Paul Steven Stone, Alice Weiss, and the owner of the Grolier himself: Ifeanyi Menkiti.

In addition to the Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Laughter at the Grolier is sponsored by Ibbetson Street Press and Blind Elephant Press. The suggested donation is a paltry $10. So come and support this unique poetry bookstore, and have a laugh, guffaw, or yes, even a yuck—at their expense!

Program: Visual Inverse : Board of the Plymouth Guild

Program: Visual Inverse




Pairing of poetry and Art



Board of the Plymouth Guild



15 Poets interpret



15 pieces of visual art



38 Pages



Program Design: Terry Kole



And Jack Scully



Plymouth Center for the Arts www.plymouthguild.org





Review by Dennis Daly





Homer, the poet, conjured up with his verbal art an impossible description of Achilles’ Shield, as created by Vulcan, the visual artist, in Book 18 of The Iliad. Here is a description of characters on a panel of the shield from the translation of Alexander Pope,





Along the Street the new-made Brides are led,



With Torches flaming, to the nuptial Bed;



The Youthful Dancers in a Circle bound



To the soft Flute, and Cittern’s silver Sound:



Thro the fair Streets, the Matrons in a Row,



Stand in their Porches, and enjoy the Show.





This unbroken tradition of ekphrasis continues to this day yielding astonishing insights of one art form by the creation of another. Recently a show entitled Visual Inverse, a Pairing of Poetry and Art was held at the Plymouth Center for the Arts in Plymouth Massachusetts. A large number of lucky attendees



viewed the live performances. I and others (not so lucky, or in my case, not so smart) had to wait for this magnificent program to circulate.



Mike Amado, who died in 2008 and is the inspiration for the successful poetry venue, Poetry: The Art of Words, begins the collection with his poem, Spring Beyond the Door, which matches up with the colored photograph, “The Other Side of Winter” by Barbara Barker. His poem is traditionally descriptive, subtle and true to the photograph. Here are my favorite lines,





…viscous ice



inches its way down the house,



roof tiles to the shingles.





icicles cage in the porch





It brings to my mind Boris Pasternak’s ice house, the lovers’ hideout, in Doctor Zhivago by way of David Lean’s movie interpretation.



Louisa Clerici’s poetic study of Jill Voelker’s drawing, “Pow Wow—One Who Sees Vision,” is a model of aesthetic empathy. Clerici’s piece almost mirrors the dense texture of Voelker’s work. The poem moves from finger painting gods to druid magic, elves, and wizards. Clerici navigates through this wondrous world with unusual adeptness, leaving us with the delightful image of the poet’s words pouring onto her page.



Violent confrontation is the technique of choice used by an unblinking Reggie Gibson in his aggressive take on the oil painting, “Southeast Ridge” by Gretchen Moran. Gibson sees teeth and vermin and razor wire and a heat swollen sky in this expressionistic painting. But Gibson also sees healing here and a hum as soft and spiritual as a prayer, and I do too.



Poet Elizabeth Hanson discovers the essence of a perfect leaf in Bill Brissette’s color photograph, “Fallen Leaf.” Hansen’s touching poem inhabits her dream-life and the leaf fallen is a gift like no other, coming directly from the gods.



Charles Harper also taps into his dream life in order to make verbal sense of Ben Pohl’s acrylic painting, “You Live Inside Their Ideas.” Like the patriarch Jacob, Harper wrestles with the incomprehensible and reaches out toward the texture of a cave wall.



In an interesting approach Lawrence Kessenich’s poem, Brief Vacation, translates Greg Kullberg’s” Block Island Wave” by way of other senses: odor and touch. Kessenich smells the memory inducing brine as



his hands submerge in dishwater. In his mind’s eye children breast the cold surf, whales spout, and sandpipers motor up the sand. All this from a inland distance, and a gifted poet.



“Arianna,” a striking oil painting by Edwina Caci, offers a formidable challenge because of its singular level of excellence. Irene Koronas, with her poem Girl, Wearing A Hat, is up to it. Koronas intersperses her spot on descriptive passages with an impressionistic study, giving the child movement and filling her out with the poet’s own hopes and desires,





…she bends to pick pebbles growing under her…





and,





…on golden horizon her simple reply, mute, oval face



without the lace beside a tea cup…





Lovely!



Thomas Libby’s poem Ovaphobia takes inspiration from Kathleen Mullins Mogayzel’s drawing, “Robin Quartet” and runs with it. He writes a poem on the need for human gentleness using the provided egg metaphor. He deems gentleness essential not just for our persons, but for our posterity.



The black and white photograph, Vuitton, by Richard Mulcahy portrays a large fashion poster on a narrow brick street. Gloria Mindock, in her poem Entrapment, imagines the photograph coming alive and details some profound humor-filled aspects. Mindock speculates that the woman has no teeth and that the young woman’s comely legs might be weaponized and used to trip passersbys. A question then arises. Is the beautiful woman portrayed on the poster from a Fellini movie or a Woody Allen one?



Like an alchemist Tomas O’Leary’s poem Red Rose Tea transmutes the precious reflections in Kathy Ferrara’s watercolor of the same name into verbal gold. O’Leary’s poem becomes the internal conversation of a very astute art critic. His lines in turn crackle with wit and sparkle like crystal. I like these especially,





The ghostly ewer they’d coveted and bought



When Lady Grey’s estate went on the block.



See how the great-eared ewer’s belly holds



Spectral reduction of the teascape,



Doily to vase to solitary tea cup.





Miriam O’Neal’s relates the rules of dream-life in her poem, In case you are wondering, which interprets Terry Kole’s acrylic, pen and ink piece entitled “A Whole New World.” The drawing captures you in a fable and the poem delivers surprising insight. Consider this,





Dreams talk to one another all day





and,





A good dream will never interrupt a nightmare.





Rene Schwiesow’s poem, Shades, fleshes out Ivy Francis’ color photograph “Missing You” with gut wrenching sadness. Schwiesow writes a love poem/ meditation on death set in winter on the ocean shore as affecting as any I’ve read in years. The starkness and the cold permeate through you as you breathe in this piece. She infuses her poem with classical images of shades and coins and, of course, the ferryman. This is really well done.



The fact that Linda Vopat’s oil painting of intersecting colored fields offers no clue as to its source and is titled “untitled” doesn’t stop poet Bert Stern for a second. His poem, Plymouth Art Show, begins wonderfully,





To each her own harbor, his meadow or hill,



this ancient oak, these fish, butterflies, sun-



rise or sunset- each scene born out of



nothing…





Stern seems to be riding these colors, testing borders, and playing in the texture. His internalized aesthetics hint at the deeply spiritual while continuing to frolic. This poet loves what he does.



Susan Cook Thanas meditates on Amelia Earharts biography in her poem Amelia. She seems to use Edwina Caci’s oil painting called “Amelia Earhart” to charge up. Awe and admiration then carry her through this delightful mini-portrait.



The poem, Boat in Sea Grass After Fishing, by Sheila Twyman attaches a way of life to the color photograph “Skiff on Seagrass” offered by D. Peter Collins. The fisherman in the poem admires the cagyness of the bluefish he is unable to catch. His line is drifting with the tide, but that is not important. He is listening to a symphony of color. And, more importantly, his home awaits his return with his wife, Elsie, whom he loves.



In alated ’12 the poet Miriam Walsh transforms herself into her subject. The watercolor, “Dragon Fly Lady,” by Pat Bianco weaves this magic,





I swim, I sleep, I dream.



nourishing myself upon the black



until upon a lotus root I alight,



rising from it own dark seed.





Walsh then dreams of procreation and a “womb surfaces into the sky” and offers the art of a new creation. A fragile piece, but astounding.



I’m told that the Plymouth Center for the Arts intends to host a redo of this event sometime in the future. If you have any creative spark in your soul, go. You’ll not regret it.

Review of The Collected Poems of Jared Smith

Review of The Collected Poems of Jared Smith

• ISBN-13: 9781935520702
• Publisher: The New York Quarterly Foundation

Review by   Ralph Pennel

The Collected Poems of Jared Smith settles deep in the heart of the reader and settles the reader deep in the heart of the heartland. The work in this collection is both intensely personal and of a common language that, at times, expands as wide as any sweeping plain or open field in tenor and voice, and, at other times is equally as singular in breadth. The Collected Poems spans nine books and forty years of Smith’s career as a writer and encapsulates the vastness of his ethic and vision. The works housed in this collection capture not only the visage of Smith’s view of the world around him through careful and thoughtful observations of the land and the people of the land, but they capture the visage of Smith himself, as well.

From the first book (Song of the Blood: An Epic) to the last (Grassroots), and including the “uncovered poems,” Jared Smith’s voice is resonant. Timeless. Unwavering. Each poem is a clear pronouncement, an ideation, and resolute. From word one to the very last intimation, Smith’s poetry is definitive. Each of his books, though singular in content, collectively gives rise to a singular voice.  That is because Smith’s primary concerns are of our humanity and of how we might live better, more meaningful lives, and, in doing so, how we might leave meaningful legacies of our lives as well, and he does so with uncommon restraint and patience.

These concerns rise up throughout Smith’s life’s work. The poem “Evening in the Heartland,” from, Keeping the Outlaw Alive, his first full-length book of poems and a paradoxical look at that which makes us honest and better for honoring that honesty, blemished or not, captures the aforementioned concern as well as any poem in the entire collection and with the same restraint and patience of his later works:

Our chances seem so remarkably small by now of finding anything. Yet, we

carry on. What a remarkable genius man is in his survival, in his ability to

look with amazement at even the darker rocks that will crush him when he

falls, and to find mystery and hope in them. (p. 209)

We are each of us always surviving regardless of our positions in life, of where we reside, or of the luxuries we may or may not have at our disposal. It is in the survival that we are forged by circumstance, rendered accessible, common, humane. And, it is exactly this, this constant demarcation, this remodeling of ourselves toward accessibility, that “makes us [simultaneously]/ An opening into the stars / And as distant as a stranger’s hands” (p. 205).

This exploration, this call to truthfully examine our lives despite the consequences, is further evidenced in the book, Walking the Perimeters of the Plate Glass Window Factory. But in this book there is also a sense of resignation, the poems here as rooted to place and identity as the soil itself. In works such as “He Who Says The Name of God Will Perish,” Smith, with the same patience toward recovering ourselves as “Evening in the Heartland,” asks, “What is life / when we cannot reach out and feel our skin against the cold stone of night / and find the warmth we do not find within ourselves” (p. 260)?

           

Even the poems about other things are really about our humanity, about identity, about affirmation through acceptance. This is most evident in Lake Michigan and Other Poems, a seminal book in the collection, and a book firmly rooted to the heartland, the Midwest, where Smith lived for much of his adult life. It is a book, however, that marks a more mature (but no more reticent) voice, where Smith’s sense of his own humanity seeps in and mixes in with his other concerns, reflectively.  “When It’s Time to Go,” is a perfect example of this latter development:

            It was quarried deep beneath the earth

                          where it is dark

                                        and light comes only

                                                       with a chisel

                                                                       or dynamite

                                                                                     and is everlasting

            except that some part of the stone retains darkness

            and holds it deep within its heart

                          while the boot soles of other hearts bounce off.

            You wander there

                          after the thanks

                                         and you go home. (p. 354)

We sense this relatedness again, and with no less eloquence and with no less concern for the greater humanity, in “Beyond the Season” from the book Grassroots:

            Winter is a type of entropy

            where the wind socks down mountain valleys

            heaving boulders from frost cracked perches,

            spreading alluvial plains across the heart

            white and then gone as wind boils tarmac.

            If there were time I would say we wait it out . . . (p. 577)

The Collected Poems of Jared Smith is testament to a life of poetry well lived, and we by virtue of Smith’s generous voice, are members of this well-lived life, too. To read the poetry of Jared Smith is to stand beside him, to live with him “in the plate glass window factory, [where] the workers never go home / not even when they fish dark rivers beneath the stars” (p. 261). The Collected Poems is a work that carries with it the weight of consciousness.  It is not the consciousness of glowing embers, but rather, of the igniting breath. 

The Unselfish Memoirist: Ploughshares Founder

The Unselfish Memoirist: Ploughshares Founder

DeWitt Henry reads at Endicott College

by Michael T. Steffen

This Thursday evening (28 March 2012) the Endicott College reading series, organized and hosted by the founder of Ibbetson Street Press Doug Holder, welcomed memoirist and founding editor of Ploughshares DeWitt Henry as its guest speaker. While Mr. Henry’s seminal associations with Ploughshares, one of the most respected literary magazines in America, would be enough to draw interest on any campus – and Endicott faculty and student turnout witnessed to the occasion – the readings and discussion given by the speaker highlighted Henry’s memoirs, in particular passages from Sweet Dreams a family history (Hidden River Press, Philadelphia  2011). It is a book of great patience and personal research, which Thomas Larson best sums up:

Ranging from early childhood to the death of his parents, DeWitt Henry’s Sweet Dreams is among the more unselfish memoirs you’ll encounter. What’s so engaging about this book is Henry’s kaleidoscope of family mishaps and cultural adventures that involve him in someone else’s becoming, which, in turn, come to be his own. The memoir portrays with warmth and grace how we mature in the crowded many more so than we do in the isolated self.

Reading from a few of the more dramatic passages of the book, Henry spoke of the implicit “contract” between the memoirist and the reader, binding the writer to stay faithful to things and accounts as they were and happened – opposed to any inclination he may have to embellish. He suggested the responsibility of the memoirist, in particular, to confront the damage behind the scenes of the fantasies much of literature’s euphemistic tendencies produce – even betraying the allurement of his book’s title, Sweet Dreams, evoking the candy factory his father owned and operated.

     For those who have read Sweet Dreams, it would be hard to think that much – if anything – had been added or omitted. That said, Henry revealed that his brother Chuck didn’t altogether agree with him on all of the accounts of their childhood.

     I hesitate to give much detail of the book, not only for the reader, but with an instinct that the heavier matter of Sweet Dreams is DeWitt Henry’s to tell. Before the reading, I had a chance to chat with him about some of the book’s memorable marginalia, the hushed nearly sacred aura that banks used to have, the milkman dropping pints of milk and cream off at the door in the morning, bailing hay on a ranch in Colorado… These few instances don’t begin to account for the wealth of detail in the book, yet remind me of the source of pleasure and meaning I received reading it. Henry’s memoir served as a pathway to the things and events of my own young life, from childhood on through to my struggles, fears and modest accomplishments as a college student and then as a teacher and writer.

     Importantly, in our somewhat egocentric society, DeWitt Henry, in his writing as well as in person, conveys the notion that a self, the “I,” is, “unselfish,” composed so much of the things and people surrounding the observer’s consciousness – all we take in dearly, with challenge or discomfort, as encouragement or threat to ourselves.

Listening to Henry, I thought of the poem “Keeping Things Whole” by Mark Strand:

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in

to fill the spaces

where my body’s been.

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

To keep things whole.

The Instrument of Others Leonard J. Cirino

The Instrument of Others

Leonard J. Cirino

Lummox Press 2012

ISBN 978-1-929878-33-8

$15.00

“If they had their way” is the first poem in this book

and it lets the reader freely wonder throughout the their

thoughts without fear, because without free thought or

free form, a lot of the contemporary writers and readers

would be boxed in by stricter forms, such as, keeping in

a straight line and if your not into freedom, I suggest,

dear reader, you might want to read another book of poetry,

more suitable to your inclinations, because this book

is about freedom:

“the Bishops would kill me

as would the heathens and heretics,

the Commies, and surely the fascists.

At best, the do-gooders and quasi-liberals

would silence me because

if I were to call myself anything

it would be mystical anarchist;

my thoughts like birds,

always flying free.”

Modern Greeks name holiness as 'bright sadness.'  Cirino refers

to light as, “but a pale sorrow” and my sorrow ebbs in knowing this;

this is the first time I've read Cirino's poetry.  This grieves me, knowing

there is no other way to speak with him, to let him know how inspired

I am by his work, his words, his poems shine on the page. I will

content myself with communing with his poems on the page. “all I can

put in the bag of this poem.” Each and every one of his verses,

leaps over the moon:

“A Sacred Madness

I didn't want to listen but the wind, the sea,

howled the world's blood-stained torments.

I turned my thoughts inside my ears

and there a scarlet madness screamed.

Behind the sky, the moon succumbed

to dawn, the twilight gleamed in pain.

My head bowed to darkness,

life was wretched, struggle dreary.

Years later I lay down in woods

and bloomed among the ferns.”

The cruelty, for me is, he writes the universal truths, the song

we all want to sing but we get caught-up into the worldly net

and then we are left without those few poets who can bring us

into the cathedrals, temples, or the landscape ecstasy, brought

to us through the music, words can and must bare. The poems

are, at times, as religious as they are anarchist:

“In a Church

        for Akhmatova

In a church or another place with music

some men die with a tortured beauty,

but women, women's poems are fire

written into the ash of history.”...

Who else in these contemporary times, can pave the way,

who can purify our thoughts, who can just let the want to write

with night beauty. who writes with true ocean verbs. Do you know

how hard it is for me to write a review for this eminent book?

It feels unbearable, like cutting down a tulip magnolia tree

in full bloom. The book must be read and not reviewed:

“Unaware I'd Fallen

Not knowing where I'm going, I walk

in the dark, unaware I've fallen

and landed on some moss. Soft

and comfortable, it's my bed for the night.

I curl up and pull my dog close. She sighs

and moans in her sleep. Arm for a pillow,

I watch the moon fall off the western edge.”

The reader would be foolish not to have this book on their

shelf or on the floor next to their beds.

“Less is More-Two Geese 

for Ava

Not much nest making left, we've had our share.

Now we're like homing geese, tipped wing to wing.”

Irene Koronas

Reviewer: Ibbetson Street Press

Poetry Editor: Wilderness House Literary Review     

Certified Lunatic and Master of the Impossible Tomas Kubinek

Certified Lunatic and Master of the Impossible 
 Tomas Kubinek
March 29- April Fool’s Day (April 1)
Presented by ArtsEmerson
Playing at the Paramount Center
559 Washington Street, Boston, MA

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



Review
By Amy R. Tighe




(The notes I scribbled in the dark during the performance say “laughter was held tenderly in the room.”)
Sell that old silver tea pot and that vintage Hawaiian shirt (yes I know you look great in it) and take the grandkids and also every other kid you know and your auntie too and go see this show. Right now. It’s only here this weekend and you need it now. I’m sorry. Ditch the brunch party. Better yet, take the entire brunch gang. Just go alone or do what some unrenowned Emerson student did—he or she gave 10 tickets to the local Boys and Girls Club and helped kids get hungry for real art and then- amazingly—let them be completely served by Tomas Kubinek, Certified Lunatic, Master of the Impossible and most definitely, an artist to experience. In his opening remarks, Rob Orchard, Executive Director of ArtsEmerson, movingly reminds us that budgets for the arts are being cut everywhere. Tonight, we see what we could lose and also, what could be ours to reclaim.

There is a song called “The Road I Took to You” by Barbara Keith that says “the way back home to me is the road I took to you.” An evening with Tomas Kubinek could be called “the Clown I Took to You” because he brings us back home to what it means to be human, together in a human crowd, completely present to the enormous human possibility we each have. This is NOT a return to the nostalgia of vaudeville although there are charming and compelling moments of that. It is NOT quaint. It is NOT cute. It is a forecast to what happens when an artist brings a disparate community together where wonder and laughter are our founding members.

On the subway, on my way home, I suddenly realized there were no t-shirts, no plastic cups, no overpriced brochures. No dolls. There was nothing for my 9 year old niece to drool over. There was just my heart opening. This is NOT Disney on ice. This is gazing into the edges of humanity and creativity and having a guide who loves you and loves humanity at the same time, and on your time, wants to play. With you. Okay, that may sound grandiose, especially when you consider there are only a few props, one man and bad chicken jokes. But I come home empty handed and mind fed. How did that happen?

Tomas Kubinek was about 4 when he saw his first circus. At age 9, he performed in front of a council of magicians and at 13, acquired an agent. He has been performing ever since. He is both ethereal and pedestrian, truly a magical combination. Born in Prague, escaped to and raised in Canada, Kubinek studied every magician, clown and circus act his parents allowed. He has spent his lifetime learning from international masters and performing on the world’s stage.

My knees are pretty much the same age as his and yet, his knees speak Wikipedias about the power and delight a career focused on being simply human brings. He does a dance with his knees and six shoes which seem impossible, and yet as he does it, he acts as if it’s the easiest and most enjoyable dance anyone could ever do. I want lessons. Don’t worry, I already have the shoes.

Like any good street performer, Kubinek gets members of the audience to play. One man, over 50, comes up on stage and in front of a full theatre, transforms into a master acrobat under Kubinek’s safe guidance. At the end of the trick, he is asked “Did you ever think you could do that?” And the man says quietly, “No. Never.” We are stunned. We saw him do it. He was amazing.

By now, we have all been transformed into Kubinek’s playmates and the Paramount has become our beloved playground. After the performance, Kubinek comes out to the front of the stage and welcomes visitors, talks to all of us, and engages respectfully with the children who come to ask him their wide-eyed “How did you do thats?”

This is also why the performance is remarkable. The audience was composed of a healthy number of children, the adults that love them, regular theatre goers, students and other clowns. And somehow, through Kubinek’s generous mastery, we were all included in this evening of intelligent, fortifying and inspiring play. The children in the audience got to see adults happily play. The adults got to see children learning from another human. (I asked the 11 year olds next to me what they thought. They had told me before the show that they loved their computer games, but afterwards, they thought he was totally awesome and made them want to learn magic.)

We all got to be a part of the play.
Go see it. Bring whomever you can. And welcome home.

Swimming In A Southern Reservoir by Laverne Firth

Swimming In A Southern Reservoir

            by Laverne Firth
 www.finishinglinepress.com  $12

Review by Alice Weiss

            As a reader who spent half her adult life in Louisiana, Laverne Firth’s poems were a call to homesickness and desire.  The poet cast me back to tender awful moments, for example, suffering through  the “Southern Summer,” 

                        our stickiness

                        carried over into humid nights. . .

                        we crossed our fingers

                        wished . . .that quickly

                        time would claim the season.

or in “The Fill of Summer,” “rustlings in the grass, and the havey breathing/ we always take for granted.”

The poems evoke the simple  tropes of Southern rural experience, porches, circling chicken hawks, singing through rows of cotton, but they also  rise past the conventions of Southern writing because

they are populated with family, growing boys, Deacons, and singers.  Of aunts on the porch (I count five in the poem),” Distances,” Aunts seem to crowd on a porch. The poem is structured  according to their birth order.  The youngest, who speaks of men, the two oldest who do not, and “Two aunts sandwiched in between/start an argument.  A frog is heard,/ loud, near.”  A speaker,a little boy is listening and doesn’t quite get what’s going on . . .”Things become complex.”  It is a poem where the title seems to pinch all our perceptions with irony of the distances living close creates. 

            Further, I find the In addition, Firth manages to portray the  struggles  Black families endure in the context of institutional racism with amazing grace.  In the voice of mourners at the funeral of  a woman in “Everybody Was Impressed,”

            She must have been happy  how could she

            have not been so after nine birthings, sixty years

            of heavy domestic service, most of it in the best

            of homes,

and in “From the Time I was Born” singing through the wounds, and miseries,

             for my chance to breathe. . .

            My grandmother sang and sang and sang

            through the rows of cotton, through the

            two hundred pounds she would pick in one day.

We are conviced that “From the time that [he} was born, [he] knew singing.”

Review of POETICA MAGAZINE, CONTEMPORARY JEWISH WRITING, SPRING 2012

Review of POETICA MAGAZINE, CONTEMPORARY JEWISH WRITING, SPRING 2012, www.PoeticaMagazine.com, PO Box 11014, Norfolk, Virginia 23517, one-year subscription $19.50, Editor-in-Chief, Michal Mahgerefteh



Review by Barbara Bialick, author of TIME LEAVES



I just gave POETICA a great report on their Holocaust edition. But this issue is a little more elusive as it is a “general” issue filled with Jewish voices rising just above

stereotyped or “typical” to fresher modern wordplay, as in “A Supermarket Sonnet” by Ehud Sela:



“Today by the produce section/an old man sneezed a few times/...Disturbing infused sounds/From overhead speakers/And squeaking carts, rusting/at metal wheels, pushed/By elder Jewish women, crooked/By time-lost calcium,/And their sight/Glazed by a cataract’s veil…”



Also clothed in newer imagery is “Zachrenu L’Chaim (Remember Us Unto Life)” by Beth SK Morris:



“I still see him walking/in that pigeon-toed gait/the old sprinter with a high hurdler’s grace/ ‘Keep going’/…feel his strong hands/lifting me out of the dirt and glass/in an open field where I’d gone down/trying to ride my bike too fast/’Don’t Worry’/…but I can’t recall his voice--/his pitch his rate the pattern of his speech/Why are the other memories so clear when/the sound of his voice is just out of reach?/’Soon Enough’”



There are 41 poets represented in this issue as well as beautiful cover art depicting scenes from Israel in hues of turquoise, green and pink, “Dreams of Israel” by Melanie Lewis, that would make the curious reader want to grab a copy.



Meanwhile, bordering near “typical” yet with the twist of visiting New Jersey from out in Oregon, is “Challah in New Jersey” by Lois Rosen, which rises above the familiar east coast Jewish family dinner. “Yearly pilgrimage east from Oregon/to the old ways: Marian, the linear napkin/on her hair darker brown than the crust/…We slow down to savor the egginess, the hint/of honey that continues dissolving in your mouth…”



For anyone interested in reading a good literary journal with Jewish themes,

POETICA would make a good gift subscription.

Lorca at Sevilla By B.Z. Niditch

Lorca at Sevilla                                                    (B.Z. Niditch)

By B.Z. Niditch

March Street Press

Greensboro NC

Marchstreetpress.com

ISBN: 1-59661-169-3

65 pages

$9.00

Review by Dennis Daly

These poems by B.Z. Niditch roll in at you like ocean waves with the incoming tide, one after the other, inexorably, reinforcing the poet’s internal imagery with an insomniac’s edgy persistence. Even the cover portrait of Frederico Garcia Lorca is repeated as the title page and again appears after the table of contents.

As a matter of fact, one of the poems in this attractive book entitled Memory is printed twice, first on page 16 and then again on page 64. I suspect this is simply a production error. Nevertheless, the logic of printing this particular poem twice does make odd sense, given its title and context.

Many of the poetic images also repeat, but with different twists and varying impacts. In the poem, The Disappearance, an anonymous child vanishes along with all connections to civilization,

the child disappeared

as the lasting echo

trembled in the wind

she or he was

as anonymous

as war itself

a town vanished

along with

an empty room,

an unmade bed,

sunglasses…

Yes, the sunglasses especially; the smallest details of human life have vanished from the landscape. Not surprisingly, the very sex of the child is undetermined in this wartime mystery.

The persona in the poem Missing Person has taken to sleepwalking.  Madness has supplanted humanity as he looks forward to deal with the reality of death. Even the sirens of memory are powerless over this morbid meditation,

With sleepwalking

madness,

daily nightmares cut off

infantilized cries

of every motioning memory…

Under the Marquee uses memory as a time machine to deliver the human reality of seemingly past, but still anticipated, moments,

beneath an oversized dark sky

waiting up for you

expecting your flattery

to make us human

if memory holds up.

As in this poem, Dictation, memories dictate the future and sometimes the future is not very pleasant,

…the pitiable

are hungry and cold

among grim neighborhoods

the future is crowded

with written promises

of wretched memory

on stone tablets…

Another disappearance takes place in the poem Absentia,

Fixing his torn scarf,

clothing words

in an open notebook

for a season

of scattered winds,

he forgets the universe,

and disappears.

Sleeplessness, bemoaned throughout this book, finds eloquence in this poem called Sleepless Poet,

you taste

a murdered blood orange

in the cool air

trying to capture

the A.M.

after hours…

In Mondrian Niditch speaks of the insomnia of the painter as part of a way of life, almost necessary to his art,

your painting disguises

then reinvents

an edgy maze

on a blinded surface

with an orange wash

along Dutch parchment

reminding the marred canvas

of dismantled visions

in your sleepless limbs

shaped by solitude

and traces of reveries.

The fears, the secrecy, and again the anonymity are palpable in Niditch’s poem, Budapest. I like this poem a lot. It not only touches on his continuing themes but it seems to add depth to the collection as a whole.  Here shadows from before wartime proliferate. The “lumps of sugar” in the last stanza really work for me,

Since I cannot

wake you

our fears

are battlefields

of a distant green

and we like angels

fallen in to lumps of sugar

only speak gravely

when the matre d’ leaves

Off the Cape combines a number of marine images to make the conditional point of nature’s enmity to man.  Between the morning’s coldness, the impotence of sails, and the jelly fish I’m convinced. The reddened sun desiring my friendship doesn’t warm me up.

The last poem in the book, Waiting Room, is Niditch’s masterwork. Like a number of his nature poems it is set in winter, only this time inside a hospital perhaps. It is the opposite of claustrophobic. There are empty chairs, that feeling of absence again, corridors that go on and on, and mirrors. There are white walls inside and there is snow outside. A Dali green vase with dried flowers sits strangely there. The poem ends with drama,

wishing to escape

on any trolley,

with an apple croissant

when my initials are called.

There is no unscathed exit this time from that drab institutional universe.  Timing is everything. Niditch understands this and writes about it in this book as well as any poet I know.

Sophocles' Ajax A modern translation Dennis Daly

Sophocles' Ajax

A modern translation

Dennis Daly

Wilderness House Press 2012

ISBN 978-0-9827115-6-9

“Athena! How happy I am to hear

your voice. The voice which of all

the gods is dearest to me.”

In the year 1980, restoration of the Sistine Chapel was

painstakingly begun. The general and not so general

public was dismayed by the clarity, the bright simple

colors that appeared from underneath the patina. We, as

an audience, to the masters paintings, fresco, thought

the build-up of dirt and dust that lay on the surface of

the fresco, was intentional and that the artist Michelangelo,

intended the effect that was being viewed. Perhaps, one

might view it as a natural intention and that would then

result in the decline of the pigment originally painted.
Personally, I reveled in the clean, unearthed images

in wonderful coral and blue pigments.

Daly's translation is indeed modern, not contemporary, but

modern in relating an ancient story/play that was meant

to be read and heard by a then modern audience. We being

the modern audience can now read what was then modern:

“Odysseus

… “I am on the trail

Of Ajax, possessor of the seven-fold

Shield. I've been following him for hours.

Last night he carried out an incredible

Attack against us. Or at least we think

It was he. The facts at this point are still

Not very clear. I have offered to track down

The perpetrator of the deed and discover

His motive. This much we know: our Trojan spoils,

All of our cattle and sheep, were found

Butchered this morning...”

After the controversy of the restoration of the Sistine

ceiling was lain aside, tourists once again gazed at a

masterpiece, in the knowledge, that what was being

seen, was indeed, the original Michelangelo.

Can we ever know, truly, if  Sophocles meant what

any translation tries to translate? My criteria for any

given translation is, is that the story or the play I'm

reading, is relate-able to my present or past circumstances

or experiences or to my cultural experiences. The trans-

lation needs to relate to the culture at hand, otherwise it

become lost in translation:

“Odysseus

I know of none greater. He is

My enemy and I hate him, yet I

Pity him also for his helplessness

In the face of misfortune and the shame,

The awful shame he will feel. For this touches

My condition as well. Are we-all living

Beings-mere phantoms, a moment's shadow?”

Daly has cleared away all the debris that so often falls onto

translations, that has fallen onto so many ancient plays. In

the introduction to Ajax, Daly writes.... “In Ajax, madness

leads to shame and shame leads to self-knowledge and

nobility...”  We come to a better understanding of

Sophocles, and his intentions in Ajax, because of the translation.

An account of nobility after a long traverse into madness,

the characters emerge clean, refreshed in understanding

the human directives as well as the feminine, higher voice,

Athena, that the characters participate with. The readers will

revel in the clear language and hear their own voices:

“Teucer

...O brother, let me

Lift you off this accursed weapon

Which boasts even now of your stolen breathe.

Did you guess that Hector, although gone

Before you, would be the parent of this deed?

How strange the fortune of these two men!

With the same girdle that Ajax had given him,

Hector was dragged to death under the wheels

Of Achilles' chariot. And this hateful sword

On which Ajax fell and died was a gift

From Hector. Only a Fury could have forged

This blade! Only the grim artisan

Of Hades contrived that girdle! These things

Like all others which torment men's lives...”

We the reader are in view of a great masterpiece, un-

covered, after many long years in obscurity, uncovered

after being buried beneath scholarship and rhetoric,

we the general populace, now get the gift of being

able to participate in this passionate work of art:

“Chorus

The matter of life a man may see

And from it learn a wisdom.

But who has sight enough

To envision the future

Or perceive his own fate?”

Irene Koronas

Poetry Editor: Wilderness House Literary Review

Reviewer: Ibbetson Street Press

FOUND IN TRANSLATION: Emerson Reading Series Presents the Pains and Pleasures of the Impossible Art

FOUND IN TRANSLATION: Emerson Reading Series Presents

the Pains and Pleasures of the Impossible Art

by Michael T. Steffen

     The Bright Family Screening Room drew nearly a full house last evening (3/12) for The Art of Translation, an evening in the Spring 2012 Emerson College Reading Series. And for good reasons. The topic is inexhaustibly interesting, and the participants, all familiar to the reading public, were generous, insightful and engaging.

     Each of the panelists were bound to address the difficulties of translation—or, one step further, the impossibility of a foolproof translation respecting the original’s multiple texts (pretext, subtext, context, para-text…), its nuances along with its literal sense.

At the same time, each of them agreed the nail-biting, hair-pulling endeavor of making a best translation (poet Michael Palma said, “It takes a hell of a nerve to do this kind of thing”) was, and each of them used the word, “pleasurable.”

     We were privileged to listen to DAVID FERRY at first lull us with talk about the inevitable differences between Latin and English, their syntactic estrangements, anapests and trochees, iambs and whatnot, only to burst into a passionate reading of Horace’s 

“O navis, referent in mare te novi/fluctus, o quid agis!” (“O ship, o battered ship, the backward running waves/Are taking you out to sea again! O what to do?”)

     Ferry spoke of the importance of “hearing” the cadences of urgency in the original, lingering on the Latin “fluctus, o quid agis!,” and suggested how he found his English equivalent in the exclamatory voice.

     MICHAEL PALMA, who has won awards bringing modern Italian poets to readers of English as well as putting out a fully rimed translation of Dante’s Inferno, argued on behalf of the “poetry” of poetry, its musical qualities, its rhythms and resonances as being every bit as important as its images and literal meanings. Palma spoke of Robert Frost’s famous definition: “Poetry is what gets lost in translation”; yet held firm that “good translators are good poets first,” and citing the artistry of Richard Wilbur’s work in formal renditions of formal poems, commented that “a good translation must be able to stand as a good poem on its own.” He aptly illustrated his argument: When he paraphrases passages from Shakespeare for his students, they often ask him why Shakespeare hadn’t just written it out that way to begin with…

     What reaction would we have to Ariel’s song, “Full fathom five thy father lies/Of his bones are coral made/Those are pearls that were his eyes…” if it had been written out as—

                        Your father’s corpse is gathering coral

                        about 8 or so meters underwater off the coast

                        and his faded eyeballs look sort of like pearls… ?

PETER FILKINS, a poet and translator of poetry in his own right, brought variety to the evening by discussing his work translating the novels of H.G. Adler, and “the unseen, invisible problems of translation.” It was eye-opening to hear Filkins point out the difficult task of “developing a voice” and maintaining “a consistent sense of tone and meaning” throughout a long narrative, while respecting the speaker’s unique character and point of view. With his colleagues, Filkins agreed that translation is full of thorns, yet pointed out that the problems of translation in particular made it a pleasurable pursuit.

     SHEILA FISHER, a scholar and author on Medieval and Renaissance studies, including The Selected Canterbury Tales: A New Verse Translation, made the ironic admission that she “translated English into English.” It bothered her that Chaucer wasn’t getting as much attention in the classrooms as Shakespeare and Homer, believing this so due to the difficulties of Chaucer’s Middle English (“So pricketh hem Nature in hir corages”). Alone amid her panelists, it was Fisher’s task to keep the original as present as possible in the translation, which led her through no fewer quandaries. Yet like Filkins, Fisher revealed the delight she found in working such problems as “brood, a thikke knarre” out as “and broad, a thick-thewed thug.”

     Many young faces were among the audience at The Paramount Center, aspiring writers and creditable students who were told how good a tool translation is in developing their own sense of the possibilities of language. David Ferry, elsewhere, has commented that the impossibility of getting a translation right has led him to much closer readings of texts than he would have had otherwise. And Sheila Fisher spoke of the “zillion tiny choices” translation confronts the writer with.

     So the evening came—time flying in the fun we were having—to what seemed an abrupt halt. So much having been said, with so much left to say: the original referable dilemma of translation.

     The Emerson College Spring 2012 Reading Series concludes with a reading by the poet CARL PHILLIPS on April 11 at 6:00 p.m. It will be held in the Bright Family Screening Room, 4th floor at The Paramount Center, 559 Washington Street in Boston.

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.