Writer Eli Jace: A Somerville Scout

Writer Eli Jace:   A Somerville Scout

By Doug Holder

  Eli Jace walked into the Bloc 11 Café in Union Square looking like he stepped off the set of a Grunge rock band. He is a lanky young man with longish hair, and sports a beard in its seminal stages. Jace happens to be the Arts Editor of the local magazine the Somerville Scout. The magazine describes itself as: “Direct, Vibrant and Local.”

  Jace, 25, is originally from Arizona, and came to Somerville last April. He did a stint as a stringer at a small paper in the Berkshires. But when the job went south he wound up in the Paris of New England, Somerville, Mass. Jace has a degree in Journalism, and he works at Target in Somerville to make ends meet. Jace told me that he lives with roommates near the high school on Highland Ave. He likes Somerville because it offers him the chance to write about a highly eclectic group of artists and events that are part of Somerville’s landscape.

 I asked Jace what he writes about. He said: “ I concentrate on music and sports. One of my favorite pieces is about the post-apocalyptic performance/music group Walter Sickert and the Army of Broken Toys. The iconoclastic group performed at the local club  Radio.  Jace writes in his article for the Scout:

“There was androgyny, Kabuki masks, red balloons, girls disrobing at intervals, breasts with mustaches, breasts without mustaches, Native American headdress… an inflatable Bozo the Clown, and some of the most chunky, grizzled rock’n’roll in town. My eyes were like wall sockets stuffed with too many plugs.”

  Jace said the market is very sour for aspiring journalists and like many folks of his ilk he hustles and struggles to get by. Journalism is not Jace’s only genre. He is also a serious fiction and poetry writer.

  He usually writes in the privacy of his apartment, and likes to take walks to Davis Square and Bunker Hill in Charlestown to clear his head.

 Jace is also a consummate blogger. He uses this medium to create an audience for his work He tweets, and uses other outlets to spread his word.

I asked Jace about the Somerville Scout—his main writing venue. Jace said: “ It was started by Holli Banks, and it is going strong with sponsors and advertisements. I profile members of the arts community. I find them by searching the internet, Google, etc…

 There was a burning question I had to ask the young writer. “ Do you consider Somerville the Paris of New England?” This thoughtful reporter paused and nodded yes. Jace then left Bloc 11, and with his reporter’s gimlet eye he undoubtedly was looking for his next story.


   For more info:  www.elijace.blogspot.com

Somerville Writer Suzanne Cope: A Locavore in the City

Somerville Writer Suzanne Cope: A Locavore in the City

By Doug Holder


  Old habits die hard. Now I find myself gravitating to the window seats at the Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square, Somerville, Mass. It may be the darker environs in the back are less attractive as I press closer towards the 60 year mark--you know rage, rage against the dying of the light and all that sort of rot. On this morning I was at my window at Bloc 11 to shed light  on my subject for the day, writer Suzanne Cope.

 Cope is an Asst. Professor of English at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and lives with her husband, the musician Steve Mayone, on Laurel St. right outside of Union Square. She has lived in Somerville for 9 years, and is originally from Western New York. She earned her PhD from Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. Like many a Somerville resident, poet, and writer that I have interviewed over the last decade she loves our city. She told me: " It is the perfect combination of the urban landscape with the green landscape. It gives me plenty of material to write about."

  Cope has experience as a Trade Marketing Manager at the venerable publisher Houghton Mifflin in Boston, and this summer she is working on a special project to promote the reissue of the novel The Hobbit  in conjunction with a new movie being released based on this work.

  Cope writes primarily in the Creative Non-Fiction genre. She reflected: " Creative Non-Fiction has been under the umbrella of Creative Writing for a long time. It is really a creative union of non-fiction craft and fiction. It takes the form of personal essays and memoir. It deals with emotional truth and memory."

  Cope is also a Locavore. The name reminds me of some extinct species eons ago but in fact is according to Wikipedia: "A person interested in eating food that is locally produced, not moved long distances to market." And Cope writes a great deal about food. Her conversation is peppered with references to all sorts of cuisine. She is also an accomplished cook, and gets her ingredients locally. She writes about her culinary experiences on her blog Locavore in the City. She will also have a book coming out from a university press Locavore in the City in 2013.

  Cope said" I write about how food relates to culture. I am inspired by canning, familial meals, gardening, and my Italian heritage--which of course involves a lot of cooking.'

  Cope seems to be the kind of teacher who would easily engage her students. She teaches at Grub Street in Boston as well as Berklee. She finds that her students at Berklee are very creative and open minded due to their creative musical backgrounds. On her teaching method Cope explained: "I strive to have them write about something they care about. I want them to write from their own experience. If there is a personal aspect to their writing they will be more engaged in the work." Cope has used the memoir by the late Jazz artist Charles Mingus  Beneath the Underdog and profiles of other musicians to spark her students writing.

  Cope usually writes in the privacy of her own home. But now and again she ventures out and you may see her profile in the window of the Bloc  11 Cafe or the Sherman Cafe in Union Square-- yet another young writer thriving in theParis of New England--Somerville, Mass.

All This Dark 24 Tanka Sequences By John Elsberg and Eric Greinke

  
All This Dark

24 Tanka Sequences

By John Elsberg and Eric Greinke

Woodcut by Ogata Gekko (1873)

Cervena  Barva Press

Somerville, Massachusetts

www.cervenabarvapress.com

32 Pages

$7.00

Review by Dennis Daly

When my wife and I first got married I enthusiastically plied her with little presents. For each of the usual gift occasions (birthday, Valentine’s Day, Christmas) I spent an exorbitant amount of time shopping for items that would be eye catching, express some delicateness of inner feeling and also be doable within my paltry budget. Some guardian angel inevitably transported me to the creaking wooden floors of Daniel Lowe’s in Salem Massachusetts. It was an old fashioned department store/ curio shop with a main showcase at ground level and an upstairs gallery. Every table exhibited marvelous creations for all to see: music boxes, German clocks, Irish crystal, Chinese China, seascape and landscape prints, gargoyle lamps, doilies, etcetera from seemingly every exotic place on earth. Each item considered for purchase I had to handle, turn at angles or upside down, all the time being careful not to horrify my fellow shoppers by dropping it and thereby asserting my credentials as the clumsy oaf that I appeared to be and, indeed, was. Then, of course, in another tricky motion, I exhibited my subtlety to all dubious onlookers by putting it back in place exactly as I found it. These poems by John Ellsberg and Eric Greinke remind me of those elegant and sometimes strange pieces of miscellany sold in that yesteryear treasure-shop.

A tanka (meaning short poem) is a Japanese traditional poem made up of thirty-one syllables in five lines. The poems are usually two tiers with this syllable structure 57577  . Although the term tanka appears first in the early twentieth century, it comes from a 1200 year waka (Japanese poem) tradition. Waka poems in this form show up in Japan’s first known poetry anthology compiled in the eighth century.

The authors of All This Dark order their tanka poems in sequences of three, each sequence with a suggestive title.   Some of these sequences bring you to the edge of a story line. Some suggest surprising associations. A third group seems to pull you in to a deep elegance, admiring the curves and the geometry of the poetic words. Some overlap all three groupings, depending on how you read them.

The poem Drifts suggests the fluidity of life, both in the sensory world and the unconscious. The first tanka uses the a runic symbol suggesting randomness and the image of a blue heron transcending itself, peering into the future. In the second tanka a green snowplow attempts to order the dream-like snow drifts. The crystal flowers disappears and the landscape changes. Here’s the third tanka,

outside my   window

low branches     bow in sorrow

a spider in the corner

works out his karma

while owls sleep     in the deep woods

The allusions are unmistakable as we move into the drifts of unconscious and transitory karma.

In the poem Dreamer, a leaf becomes almost mythical. Color intensifies into weight and the weight becomes the volume of a dream which delivers when stroked by the artist. It goes this way,

a leaf falls

with the weight     of color

when I bend

to lift it     the trees murmur

“motherload”

the palm

of this hand     is inclined

to feel obliquely

stroke it     & it becomes

a dreamer

The poem ends oddly but wonderfully in a Chinese restaurant with the poet writing and eating fortune cookies.  Intrigued? I was.

Memory is a sequence that is part commentary on the art of poetry and part lament for the fragility of our landscaped memories.  The poet happily says,

O the lure

of memory     the stream

in the valley

of my parents’ farm

fish still spawning     into light

But then it dawns on him how expensive this area has become to live in. But even worse he can’t seem to find the sounds in the landscape that he remembers as part of his loneliness of that earlier time.

The tanka sequence entitled Aggression knits together three thumbnail stories fully related by wondrously efficacious images. A mad anarchist becomes emblematic of evil aggression. Wild crocodiles give voice to instinctual aggression. A kung fu boy somewhat ambiguously portrays aggression as a form of self-defense. After the violence ends, each scene turns peaceful in interesting ways: the anarchist retreats to a safehouse; the crocodiles inhabit a still lake; and the adversary of the kung fu boy is in shock.  The second tanka tells it this way,

three wild crocodiles

tore     at a piece of chicken

in furious rage

the water churned skyward

moments later     a still lake

Luckily the template for aggression always seems to require a return to the rest position.

The woodcut displayed on the cover of this breathtaking chapbook is just about perfect. A Japanese blacksmith forges a blade infused with the spirit of little foxes which hovers above him as he works. A timeless image of artistry! 

These tanka sequences, like the blacksmith’s blade, are inspired and the chapbook itself is a little masterpiece. The authors and Cervena Barva Press should be proud.

Hiking to Siberia by Lawrence Millman

Hiking to Siberia

by Lawrence Millman

sunnyoutside

www.sunnyoutside.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-934513-37-8

118 pages

$16.00

Release date: October 2012

Review by David P. Miller

Although my experience with international travel has bloomed during the past decade, I’ve been sticking to the straight and narrow. With only one exception, my annual trips, accompanied by my wife, have been occasioned by professional summer conferences. So although I’ve met a lot of interesting people and negotiated restaurant menus in different languages - more or less - I’ve also spent a lot of time in convention centers. Nice ones, granted, not absolutely identical to each other. Lawrence Millman, on the other hand, declares in his bio that “if a place doesn’t have a website, he’ll immediately pack his bags and go there.” For example, at least three times in Hiking to Siberia, he visits islands that aren’t consistently included on modern maps. This makes his travel tales a whole lot more interesting than mine. Which is pretty faint praise for a collection that’s as consistently entertaining and well-told as this one is.

These twenty-one tales take us from the Arctic to Borneo, Iceland to the godforsaken Mexican island of Clipperton (“The Worst Place in the World”). Their brevity - the title story, the longest, tops out at eight pages - and the ease with which Millman relates them sometimes belie the extraordinary lengths involves, in effort and risk as well as distance. On the one hand, we can laugh with him at his dilemma in Micronesia, consuming certain parts of a male fruit bat at dinner, in the perhaps mistaken belief that it was normal and expected (“A Feast on Fais”). On the other, his sudden plunge into Greenland’s Angmagssalik Fjord threatens death from hypothermia, though he’s saved by the application of a remarkably domestic home remedy (“Into Cold Water”). These are stories easy to read, easy to enjoy, but quite something else to have lived through. Throughout, Millman shows his genuine interest in and respect for the people he meets and cultures he negotiates, not to mention regard for the uncompromising landscapes he finds himself negotiating.

Being the sort of reader I am, I’m taken by encounters with unexpected details, sights and events only revealed while seeking something else. In “Hiking to Siberia,” while Millman attempts to retrace Lillian Alling’s semi-legendary journey from New York City to Siberia, he encounters “a moose skeleton wrapped up wire like a mummy” on the Yukon Telegraph Trail. While temporarily “Marooned” on the island of Mingulay in the Outer Hebrides, he finds “a crofter’s cottage, now hardly more than a heap of rubble, and … the remains of an old hand loom.” Then again, Roseau, the capital of Domenica, features a public bathhouse in the middle of a cemetery. And Millman discovers a McDonald’s wrapper deep in the forest on Culebra, an island without a McDonald’s.

My own favorite in this collection is probably “I, Sky Burster.” The briefest entry, at three pages, it is barely a narrative, although not quite a prose poem. A conjunction of moments during an afternoon on Western Samoa, Millman struggles with adjectives in his notebook, answers the questions of local children about his torn-up papers, experiences the role of palagi or “sky burster,” as Westerners are named, and later views a blue balloon, picked from his pocket, float across the sky and out to sea. Although there’s clearly a larger story behind all this, we don’t need anything greater to savor its uniqueness.

This beaten-path traveler has only one suggestion, and one criticism. The suggestion: I find myself wanting to know more, to learn more from Millman about the people, the situations, what happened before or after. It appears that this collection began life as magazine and newspaper pieces, but sometimes their brevity seems a little abrupt. And the criticism: bats aren’t rodents (p. 70). They’re chiropterans, the German Fledermaus notwithstanding. But that’s hardly an occasion for a corrected edition.



***** David P. Miller began writing poetry at 52, in 2007. This leaves aside the political doggerel he composed in high school. His work has been seen in Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, and he has read at Stone Soup in Cambridge, MA. He was a member of the multidisciplinary Mobius Artists Group of Boston for 25 years. He is a librarian at Curry College, in Milton, MA, and is grateful for the Curry faculty creative writing group to which he belongs, for their support and encouragement.

Harvard Square's Lowes Theatre to Close in July : A Poetic Response

Harvard Square's Lowes Theatre to Close in July 

  I have been going to that theater from my my undergraduate days in the 1970s to now, a man decidedly in his middle-age.  I can only imagine what they will replace this grand ole' venue with, a scented soap shop?/ body lotions?/new expensive-pretentious bistro?/ cutting-edge chain clothes store?/ --another Starbucks?  How about a new idea?--condos!  I will miss this joint--and the many others that have disappeared from the Square--  Here is a poem for the theater:

Best--Doug Holder





Harvard Square Theater



To spend the dog days

in the darkened theater

 My Last Tango in Paris

a hot three hour

respite from the heat.


The midnight mass

of the faithful

the rituals

the memorized chants

to the Rock Horror Picture  show


I will grab a  beer

from the ghost of the Wursthaus

then get a seat in the back

the flickering of the dark cinema

a two hour balm

before I hit the hot street

then it's gone.....


------ Doug Holder

Two Star General By Grey Held

Two Star General

By Grey Held

Brick Road Poetry Press

www.brickroadpoetrypress.com

ISBN-13: 978-0-9841005-8-3

ISBN-10: 0-9841005-8-X

57 Pages

$15.95

Review by Dennis Daly

In the best of circumstances the relationship between father and son tends towards complexity. Even a game of catch, the American emblem of that relationship, often devolves into rebellion when the boy tests his new found adolescent freedom against fatherly restraints and concerns. Now add to this paradigm a father who doubles as a military man, a leader who gives orders and expects immediate obedience. And finally add to this mix the rank of general; the father and leader now becomes a strategist who often must, and certainly should, sacrifice individual compassion for long term outcomes. Now we have an interesting and combustible consociation of dependency and paternal kinship.

In Two Star General Grey Held’s persona confronts his father and commanding general at odd angles and with the sensitivity and transcendence of a new-found understanding of human decency. The poem Under his Command gets right to the point,

We go to the Commissary

Drug Store so he can buy me

aviator sunglasses, though

what I want is the Elvis Presley kind,

but he says, not

for a two star general’s son!

He takes me to Uncle Sam’s Barbecue,

which I’ve never liked,

so he can get his favorite ribs.

In the same poem he puts his fathers’ serf-absorption in its proper military context. He relates a very telling story how his dad

...once drank scotch with McArthur

and told him, I know you and I will get along just fine.

He just took it when McArthur answered,

if there’s any getting along to do, Sir,

you’d better be the one to do it.

If your well-respected superiors have a way of making you feel small, it is only natural that those under your command, including a son, will get at least a taste of similar treatment.

The poet divides his book into two sections. The first sees life through a general’s eyes. In the second section the son of the general becomes the poet’s persona.

In the poem Fort Benning , Georgia  1942 the callous but sensible general describes his technique of training raw recruits how to kill using a bayonet. He says,

… I make them practice

sticking their weapons between the vivid

ribs of Savannah’s put-down

dogs I have them hang by rope

from branches of the drill field’s oaks.

I want them to feel resistance and retraction,

to witness the propulsion of sudden

blood—so much the better…

This hardened man knows how to save lives and in his own way—once you get by the stabbing of the dog’s bodies—cares profoundly and imaginatively for the humanity of his charges.

To be hard is one thing but to be totally aware of it is quite another. Awareness after all leads to consideration of feelings and all around sappiness.  The general explains in a poem entitled Sleepless,

On the army cot, I kiss the palm

of my own hand, wishing it were

my sweetheart. I miss the way

her instinctive fingers could amaze

her Steinway, one note rising, one note

kneeling. I have been 2 years 5 months

gone…

Back to the father and son relationship. Being a tough-ass dad is bad enough, but being an absentee dad easily trumps other short comings. And absentee-ness very often begins in the beginning.

The opening of the poem entitled Day My Son Is Born puts you inside the general’s conflicted head and it’s not pretty,

My son reports for duty

as the cord gets cut.

And where am I?

off somewhere buffing

Two silver stars…

On the battlefield numbers rise in importance beyond the personalities and flesh and blood they represent. In the poem Spit the general makes this clear,

More men arrive, enough to plug

the holes in three battalions.

They are just rounds of ammunition,

replaceable parts in the Machine.

The poem Landmines also gives us scary insight into this general’s mind. The general explains,

If you were to dismantle a bomb,

ask the right question of the fuse.

Rely on tweezer-work to negate

the panic side. Remember

every overtaken village must be dissected

into friend or thin transparency.

Don’t assume the innocence of the nameless

shanties…

Good generals never assume innocence.

In the poem, Home of the Brave, the poet’s persona, now the son, observes closely as his mother tapes up the general’s broken toe and fuels a precious moment of family happiness as she

starts to laugh

huge laughter,

until tears drag rivulets

of eyeliner down her cheeks.

And my father, who rarely

seems happy, seems happy’

almost proud…

In Skeet Shooting the poet back up a bit and accepts some of the blame for the strained relationship. He says,

Marry within the faith,

be a soldier, not a poet.

And why didn’t I scream, I’m not you!

but blamed him instead.

Lately, he’s stopped playing

the part of gunpowder to my trigger.

In fact the poet had become just like his father, but without the military necessity.  He confesses in the poem After All:

Didn’t I have to convince you

when I left to start college

you needed a new typewriter,

so I could take your old one with me

determined as I was to be a poet, just

because you were not.

In the poem, Balance is the Riddle the general now becomes the child and the poet kneels to tie his shoes. In Veterans’ Day Parade the poet steadies him during the festivities. And finally in Death of a General the respectful and dutiful poet-son says,

I take off his false coat,

put on this shroud, stitched from thunder,

buttoned into mud.

These are honest poems not easily written by a poet who comes to terms with a decent man in a difficult but necessary profession. Both father and son deserve our admiration.

Poet Jean Monahan : A Meditative Writer

Poet Jean Monahan : A Meditative Writer

By Doug Holder

I like to write my poetry amidst the din of a café—the atmosphere for some reason makes me able to focus.  Poet Jean Monahan needs quiet. For her poetry is a form of meditation—and at times painful meditation.

 Monahan, is a single mother, works a full time job, and tries to write when time allows.

She is the author of three books of poetry: Hands (chosen by Donald Hall to win the 1991 Anhinga Prize); and Believe It or Not and Mauled Illusionist, both published by Orchises Press (1999 and 2006). She has received several awards and an artist residency at Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and magazines, including Poetry, The New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, and Salamander, as well as in several anthologies. Her MFA in Creative Writing is from Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

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

Doug Holder: In the manuscript you sent me Pomegranate you write a lot about fruit.  You could say it is a kind of a fruit bowl of a collection. What is it with you and fruit?

Jean Monahan:  (Laugh) Maybe I am a fruitcake.  I have always liked to use inanimate objects and just let them speak for themselves. Something like a pomegranate has so many historical references. One thing that I read was that some people consider this fruit to have been present in the Garden of Eden. With all the seeds inside this fruit it could represent the galaxy. Fruit, of course can be pretty metaphorical. I was working on this manuscript and I began to realize that I had a number of poems that dealt with food. Food has a lot of associations for me.

Doug Holder: When you lived in East Cambridge you wrote in a small, separate room. Now, in your house in Salem you have a room to write. We know that Virginia Wolf talked about a writer having a room of one’s own. Do you need a room to write—to write well?

Jean Monahan:  It is interesting because there are so many ways people work. When I am ready to work I have to be in a meditative state. I need quiet—absolute quiet. When I used to be in the East Cambridge apartment I used to put on a fan or something to create a low level buzz or white noise. Writing can be excruciating—so you need to eliminate the distractions and just focus. The room I have now is wonderful because it is a lot bigger than the little alcove that I had. I am less focused now than I was then because my life is different.

Doug Holder: In an interview I read you say for you—poetry is a form of meditation.

Jean Monahan: Yes I don’t formally meditate. But I find when if I am writing a poem that is going to work as a poem inevitably I will get into a meditative state where the poem comes out of my unconscious rather than my conscious state. That’s hard to do. And since I have not been writing much the last few years it is harder to get in that state. When I was writing regularly I knew the poem was going somewhere when I didn’t know what was coming next.

Doug Holder: You went to the Columbia University MFA Progra. Who did you study with there?

Jean Monahan: I studied with Richard Howard. Tom Lux was there briefly. A lot of people would come in for a week or so and then we would have the regular faculty. I had Bill Matthews—he was a big influence on me, as well as Molly Peacock. Dan Halpern was running the program. The stuff I learned there was great. The environment was stimulating. Very competitive. A lot of people in the program had degrees in English.  My degree is in Psychology. There were a lot of conventions and understandings about writing that I didn’t have. In a way that helped me because I wasn’t overly influenced by some of these notions. And yet there were a lot of things I needed to know.

Doug Holder: You have described writing like mud wrestling with a pig.

Jean Monahan: I think even when I wrote regularly—and more at ease with it; I found it very hard to get to the place where it was working.

Doug Holder: You taught in China around the time of Tienanmen Square Riot in the late 80’s. Did you know poets then? Was there more powerful writing because of the danger of living under an oppressive regime?

Jean Monahan: I was teaching English to university students. I helped them speak English. If someone was writing powerful poetry they didn’t tell me about it because things were quite oppressive then. One of my students told me Mao was a poet. He wrote in the tradition of the poet/warrior. So Mao utilized poetry—metaphor to convey his ideas. He wrote in a tradition of recognizable metaphor.

Doug Holder: There is often an element of surprise in your work.

Jean Monahan: You can’t engineer it consciously. Sometimes you write a poem and you are surprised. A thought can come about in the writing process that surprises you—but it rings true. I like it—it doesn’t happen often. When I don’t see it coming—that’s a thrill. 

Doug Holder: What is a poem? 


Jean Monahan:  Richard Howard said to me: " A poem is a made thing." There is a very big difference between poetry and journalism, as well as diary writing, a letter, etc... A poem is the initial impulse and then all that shaping and crafting.

 

Life After Water

In the life before water, we were rock.
Molten. Singed. The heat was in our mouths:
it took our words away.

Now we swim in the lake of vowels. I and you.

Water is about drift and change.
The trick is to embrace what absorbs
and dissolves you, let each stroke pull

the shadows into light.
When you step on a fish, you take on its power.
The edge of the lake is where we end.

In the life after water,

wind speaks with a louder voice,
the sky is white with dying stars.
Only those with water in their ears

can hear them fall.

originally published in Two If By Sea MIT Oceanographic Institute newsletter--Archives, Summer 2000 and both appear in Mauled Illusionist

Steel Valley by Michael Adams

Steel Valley

By Michael Adams

Lummox Press, 2010

103 pages

$15.00 USA

www.lummoxpress.com

Reviewed by Pam Rosenblatt

Michael Adams’s Steel Valley is a 103 page book filled with poetry, prose, and letters that make you aware that there are worlds outside of Boston, Massachusetts. And Adams’s worlds, or places, are memorable and filled with Adams’s appreciation of man-made as well as nature-made environments.

Adams’s poem “The Soft Fires” brings you quickly into the first of his worlds – his life as a youngster growing up in Steel Valley, south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, amidst the steel industry’s final years. Here you find Adams mixing steel industry imagery with sexual imagery to create metaphor:

:

The Soft Fires

I stepped into the fires in the cathedral shadows of the furnaces,

in thrall to a life alloyed of iron and flesh.

It was Pittsburgh where I was tested and tempered,

Pittsburgh that entangled within me the chained indifferent fury

of industry and the unquenchable drives of the heart.

Our first time was in her second floor apartment

in South Oakland, where the city tumbles

down the bluff through blown trash

and woodland to the furnaces of Hazelwood.

The house was tumbling too, but slowly,

succumbing to gravity and the landlord’s indifference

to paint, caulk and shingles. We didn’t care, we

were young, newly free, had lightning

on our minds. The maintenance of structures or love

beneath bay windows that had resigned

the battle against wind and rain, leaving

long streaks of rust in the mustard yellow walls,

flecks of plaster on the sheets and a persistent smell of mold.

Ah, but that night –

there was a red glow

in the belly of the clouds from the furnaces, rain

hammered the windows and the October branches

of the sycamore battered the house.

I tasted the wind and rain and the sulphur grit

of the mill as I entered the fires and found her rhythm,

and we rocked together, welded by our hunger.

The storm’s thunder mixed with a deeper sound,

striking through the earth from the mill,

felt more than heard, some great machine

forming and shaping the bones of our city,

a monster hammering

deep in the soil and rock.

The night, our city

beautiful

molten

riven to the core.

Next, Adams transports you to the second place where he lived – Spruce Mountain, West Virginia in his poem “Spruce Mountain, West Virginia”:

Spruce Mountain, West Virginia

I wanted this earth to speak through me,

to tell you – he tried to make a living

of it. It’s true he failed, but there is no shame

in that. It takes more than a man and a woman,

and a small piece of land, to  build something that endures.

You saw the farms scattered on the mountain,

the small towns of the valley –

            Onega, Seneca, Circleville, Cherry Grove

They may not look like much but by God

they have staying power.  You don’t enter

a place like this lightly.  It takes generations

of blood and sweat flowing into the hardscrabble earth,

and not a little darkness.

The soil here is built of disappointment and fractured dreams.

Leave this land alone for a few years

and you may lose everything to its unassailable patience.

This thick woodland was once a meadow,

and the smell was not that of autumn leaves

and spring water, but the pungent odor of cow dung.

Here is where the house stood. You have to get down

on your hands and knees now, a beggar, dig

in the damp earth to find any trace.

Someone must have carted off

the few things I left that were worth anything

before they set the fire.  The rest is gone

to rust and the voracious creatures of the soil.

Look, there is the spring where we drew water,

next to it the big oak still stands, the one whose branches

sounded like small animals on the tin roof

when the wind blew in the autumn and the leaves were dry

but not yet fallen.

Right here was the kitchen where we would play

guitar and banjo and drink Jack Daniels straight up

until we were brave enough to venture

into the moonless November dark

to confront the mountain’s

unhouseled ghosts.

What words are fit to honor these mountains that rose

to heights unseen to this day, rose before

towering fern forests were locked in darkness

and began their ages-long decay

to the black rock we rend and gut this earth to find?

What words for these former Himalayas, softened by eons

of rain and the slow rafting of continents to today’s tree-

green hills?

            I say there is wisdom here, solace, and much of the sacred.

What do our few decades matter?

Someday our remains will be scattered in a place

not unlike this, a place of trees and sky

and rough-hewn land, a part, finally, of it all.

I wanted this earth to speak as it does,

undeniable and  unanswerable,

as the leaves, like the generations of men,

fall around us on this autumn day.

A man and woman and the great land.

Here for a season, for few turnings

of the wheel to endure, to love,

to give what we can.

Then gone.

Then Adams moves to Colorado.  And he writes a letter called “Wet Mountains      Jan 2003” to his deceased father about how he has matured, or “changed so much –”:

Wet Mountains                                  2003

Dear Dad,

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve written. But I

woke up – it’s the middle of the night but my bladder

won’t let me get a full night’s sleep anymore – and I was

thinking about you. It’s been 20 years almost to the day

since you died, and I didn’t even think about that but I

woke up with you on my mind, so I guess it was floating

around in there

It’s 12 below zero and the wind’s blowing pretty good,

but it’s warm in the cabin with a fire going. You’d like

it here.  The stars are so close, up here at 9,000 feet. I

think you’d be proud of me, building this cabin with my

own two hands, just like you did our first house back

there on Elizabeth St.

The world’s changed so much – I’ve changed so much –

that I don’t know where to start.    First off, I married

and pretty happy — been together over ten years now!

No kids, though. I don’t know why, just one of those

things. I always had something else going on and by the

time I stopped and looked back it was just too late.

…

I’m glad for nights like this, when I wake up and can’t get

back to sleep. A near-full moon shining on the snow, the

wind in the trees. You’d like this land – a high, rolling

country of sage and pines. You talked often of Colorado,

of how you fell in love with it in your Army days.

You know, it reminds me of Homeville, and of my farm

in West Virginia. You can’t see the high mountains

from here, just rolling tree covered hills and deep

valleys. I think that’s why I chose it. Funny, isn’t it? A

guy moves halfway across the country to get away and

then picks a place that reminds him of home.

Well, dad, that’s about it for now.

Love,

Michael

            Through his free flowing, descriptive and lucid writing style, Adams wins our attention. He writes about three worlds, or places, that are not easily accessible to us Bostonians: the steel mining industry that is basically longer in existence in Pittsburgh; Spruce Mountain which is located in West Virginia and is quite a drive from Massachusetts; and Colorado which is a plane ride or a many days’ drive to get to from Boston.

It’s a pleasure to read Adams’s Steel Valley not only for its quality writing but for the different but similar perspectives on life that Michael Adams depicts.