Two Colors Of The Soul: The Selected Poetry Of Dmytro Pavlychko

 

 
Two Colors Of The Soul:

The Selected Poetry Of

Dmytro Pavlychko

Copyright 2012© by Dmytro Pavlychko

Cervena Barva Press

Edited and with an introduction

by Michael M. Naydan

Somerville, Massachusetts

Softbound, 90 pages, $17

ISBN: 978-0-9883713-0-9

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

When reading a translation of poetry, usually one poet has translated. In this volume of Dmytro Pavlychko’s verse the Ukrainian-to-English is accomplished by eight translators.

One would think that eight different people bringing a Ukrainian poet to the English speaking word would result in an uneven, choppy book. However, the opposite is true in this presentation by Cervena Barva Press. The eight translators have made a unified collection, bring to English readers a Ukrainian poet who deserves wider recognition.

In the poem I Must, translated by Dzvinia Orlowsky he presents us with what Americans would refer to as a “bucket list” but is more like a self-awakening:

I Must

I must read books

so that I won’t become blind.

I must speak

so that I won’t grow mute from grief.

I must hear a song

so that I won’t fall deaf with silence.

I must fall in love

for joy to move toward me.

I must see my friend

for the day to become brighter.

I must write a poem

for my heart not to break.

I must work

to feel worthy of bread.

I must die at midnight

so the in the morning I may rise again!

In a poignant encounter with the Chernobyl dead zone, Pavlychko tells us how a possession once owned by someone might feel about no longer being owned.

The Plaything

(translated by Aliona Sydorenko)

In the Chornobyl dead zone

in a hut on a bench

there sits a man

sculpted of clay

the likeness of a god

unafraid of the radiation

He has been sitting for fourteen years

looking at the door with sadness

waiting for it to be opened

by his maker

the blond-haired boy

But the boy does not come

does not open the door

and the clay man

continues to sit and wait

A number of Pavlychko’s poems have built in irony, none more ironic than Too Late Too Soon in which we discover how unnecessary we are:

Too Late Too Soon

(translated by Aliona Sydorenko)

In whatever century

you’re born,

it will always be too late and too soon!

Too late, because everything most important

in this world

has already happened without you,

too soon, because everything most important

in this world

will happen without you too.

Pavlychko’s poetry is truly in the Eastern European mold which if you have not discovered you should. The photograph of him on the back cover is one of a stern, hard person who has lived through a lot, seen even more. Graying, balding with thick eyebrows and deep set blue eyes, Pavlychko looks more the stern politician than poet.

However, make no mistake his poetry is deep, accessible and worth a reading – and to be sure you enjoy its fullness, read it twice.

________________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

Author, King of the Jungle and Across Stones of Bad Dreams

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 8

John Keothe’s 9th, ROTC Kills: the Poetry of Articulated Consciousness

John Keothe’s 9th, ROTC Kills: the Poetry of Articulated Consciousness




by Michael T. Steffen





Poets dissolve or digest their inherited turns of mind and come into their own unique idiom, and from there can talk themselves into what they become. Few un-shield this talent as does John Koethe. In “Like Gods,” one of the inserted prose meditations of his new book of poems ROTC Kills (HarperPerennial), the poet unravels this line of thought:



despite the certainty I have, I’ve no idea what I really am, or where, and as for “searching nature,” I have no idea even where to start. These matters mean the world to me, and yet no matter how I come to grips with them, they slip away. I and here and now are ever present, yet they vanish in the act of apprehension, as a poem turns into language as you write it down (p. 37).



How agile a thought: something disappearing is like something appearing, so long present being, hello poem. The representation of a thing supplants the thing itself, which isn’t even a thing since Koethe’s scrutinized and elusive ideal, topos, inspiration is “the whole of creation, through the long song of myself” (“The Whole of Creation,” p. 21). For all the grandeur and homage to patriarchy in the spirit of this declaration, which underlies a continuity of optimism or acceptance throughout the book (“acknowledgment” may be the term, Koethe’s correlative for Whitman’s “embrace”), the composite of his discursive and fluent self portrait is well dampened, ordinary, anecdotal—and riddled with self-examining insights that transcend confession as they transcend personality into a broader sphere of cultural and philosophical supra-common place.

An honored poet disciplined in Philosophy, Koethe also surprises us with his utterly contemporary candor and unflinching fluency. In this sense, the poet makes himself plain, accessible, identifiable—especially at the opening of his poems which seem just to come out as from a breath momentarily held:



There are feelings you expect to have

And satisfactions you hope to find

In the course of an ordinary day…

(“The End of the Line,” p. 1)





There are four movies that I saw

Between the ages of ten and fourteen that became

Parts of my life, for what that’s worth…

(“Alfred Hitchcock,” p. 12)





Even Koethe’s more speculative topics are brought up in this direct, easy manner:



I love the past tense, but you can’t live there.

I love the stories you believe add up to you,

Though they never do…

(“Stele,” p. 17)





No one has to write any special way—

You make it up as you go along. I started

Writing this way—no thoughts at first,

Then a lot of words in the guise of thoughts,

Then real thoughts—a long time ago.

You can write or think about death directly,

Or you can write about it by indirection

And delay…

(“1135,” p. 52)





The self-possessed poet can also talk himself out of whatever it is from his cultural inheritance she or he can no longer embrace. Identifying illusions, specious persuasions and disappointments provides a major current in the poems of ROTC Kills. The mere passage of time makes an illusion of things and ideas which once were able to animate. This is a pivotal theme in the collection’s title poem “ROTC Kills.” In the articulate consciousness of the time being, memory, past events, for Koethe, crop up not to merge with and season the present but to stand in contrast to it, for comparison:



I’m retired, I’m sitting in a house I made

In my imagination years ago, that now is real.

On the walls are posters from the Harvard

Strike in 1969 I saved for their designs

And then forgot about, and now they’re here:

STOP HARVARD EXPANSION, STRIKE

FOR THE 8 DEMANDS, and then the best of all,

In small red letters with three red bayonets,

rotc kills (pronounced rot-cee kills). From here inside

Time seems unreal, I’m back in graduate school,

But then the mind ascends and time becomes objective,

I’m myself again, at home again, and sixty-four.





Time becomes objective, not because Koethe is repossessed by lost time that has come to suffuse an otherwise tenuous, somewhat hollow present. Unlike Proust’s madeleine, the posters from the 1969 Harvard student strike conjure nothing any longer memorably tangible or attainable for Koethe. In this instance of confronting particularly the cultural revolution of the sixties, time becomes objective because Koethe goes back and forth between the breech of then and now, separating himself from the perishable enthusiasm of that time (whose martyrs include John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and no less Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimmy Hendrix, to name only a few).

Just what it was that made Koethe an apostate to the age of Aquarius, he himself is at a loss to pinpoint. Yet that choice, or inclination, has come along with him to this September day of his memory, metaphorically in the September of the poet’s life as the days grow short, and also suggestive of another September day when the U.S. was again sorely protested, even contested. Moving from a Four Quartets-like aerial view of the big picture, with a pinch of Stevens, back to his personal journal voice, Koethe confronts his break-up with the protest movement:



The particulars of a life, the pattern of a life:

These are the poles the mind, in the guise of a poem,

Floats back and forth between. The calm elation,

The deflating sigh: the trees are tossing in the wind, the leaves

Unfurl their silvery undersides, the soft clouds drift across the sky.

Time may be an abstraction, but it makes the days go by,

The days I never thought I’d see, when the music of the sixties

Lost its way, became too faint to hear, the voices fell away,

And then it all came down to me. What were those eight demands?

I can’t recall to save my life. I lived there, I breathed that air,

And sometimes some of it drifts back to me. “You should join PL,”

Paul said as we were sitting in the lounge. Picketing

The GE plant in Lynn didn’t much appeal to me, so I just

Said it seemed too hard to square with being married

And finishing my degree. “Yes! That’s what’s so great about it!”

He replied, as I rolled my eyes. Or Jonny Supak’s plan

To hold the chairman (Rogers Albritton) hostage in his office:

“The kids are stealing underwear from Filene’s Basement,

Asking for the Red Army! ‘Where’s the Red Army?’ they’re asking!”

It felt so all-important at the time, in a surreal way, the endless

Back-and-forths, the forums, teach-ins, meetings and analyses, strategic

Planning sessions (“But—but that would be capitulationism!”),

And look at what it came to. I didn’t even vote in 1968

(Chicago was too fresh), but on election night found myself

Nostalgic for the Hump, only by then it was too late.

(“ROTC Kills,” pp. 30-1)



This passage was especially resonant as John Koethe read it at the Lamont Library at Harvard on Wednesday November the 7th, the evening after this past autumn’s elections. He chatted before the reading about the election results without indifference, though he wasn’t demonstrably political either. An impressive introduction was made for the poet by the Woodbury Poetry Room’s curator Christina Davis. She had just returned to Cambridge from helping her family in New Jersey in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. Koethe read from the book at a table in front of a microphone, being recorded—though this wasn’t Beethoven’s 9th , it was Koeth’s 9th book of poems—for NPR.

Though nothing especially was made of it that evening, the reading at Harvard was significant as a return to the place of social events and the poster that gave the book its name. It may also be significant that very recently Harvard had occasioned another event which also marked a turn-around in attitudes between the community and its military presence. On September 21, 2011 Globe journalist Mary Carmichael wrote,



In a ceremony freighted with symbolism, Drew Faust, Harvard University president, lauded the Navy’s ROTC program and officially welcomed it onto campus yesterday, ending four decades of frosty relations between the university and the military and laying the groundwork for increased recruiting at the school.

(www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2011/09/21)



During the reading, Koethe clarified that he had taken the title for his book, not as a provocation against the ROTC, but in recollection of the posters as symbolic for the sixties protest movement, and went on to mention he had known many students who had benefited from participating in the ROTC by getting into good colleges.

These are considerations good to keep in mind approaching the title as it is with its undeniable self-contained meaning: ROTC Kills. And so Koethe gets to say two things at once. Poetry may differ from other kinds of writing in several hardly tangible or provable ways. Defiance of logic may have a special haven in poetry, where every coin can be turned for its two sides. Koethe’s poetry, beyond the ambiguities of his feeling for the sixties, doesn’t flinch at contradictions, which evolve rather as paradoxes and polarities.

Even one of Koethe’s main premises, the song of the self, is scathingly self-examined:



I’m a sucker for the private place,

Though it’s boring once you’ve found it:

You’re always right, which makes being right

Worthless, and yet you want to stay there

Even though you hate it…

(“Locus Solus,” p. 39)



Good books of poetry surpass the simple review’s capacity to betray them much. ROTC Kills is a work of personal mastery in its scope, generosity and forthrightness that holds the reader’s attention with a lot of familiarity in idiom for our ease and some truly breathtaking insights for our wonder. It is good for several reads.



ROTC Kills

Poems by John Koethe

$14.99/96pp

HarperPerennial

Somerville Writer Thomas R. Bransten Brings a Novel of Abduction, Intrigue and Romance set in France to the Paris of New England.

Somerville Writer Thomas R. Bransten Brings a Novel of Abduction, Intrigue and Romance set in France to the Paris of New England.

By Doug Holder

   A Somerville writer acquaintance of mine took me to task recently for using the phrase “The Paris of New England” to refer to Somerville. He said anyone who would compare Somerville to Paris has not been to Paris. And he is right, I haven’t been to Paris. So I was a glad to meet Somerville resident Thomas R. Bransten at meeting of the Somerville Bagel Bards.  Bransten was in Paris working as a reporter for the United Press International and the International Herald Tribune where he covered among other things the protracted French war with Algeria, and two kidnappings:  one of four year old Eric Peugeot, heir to the automobile fortune, and the kidnap-murder of seven year old Philippe Bertrand, which had most of the world in  a state of shock and outrage. The novel Bransten wrote “A Slight Case of Guilt” also involves a kidnapping of a young boy from a prominent family.

 Bransten has lived in Somerville for a number of years and moved from San Francisco to Massachusetts with his wife so she could pursue her PhD at Harvard. For a long while he was an agent of Prudential Prime Properties in Somerville, run by Somerville native sons John and Jim Duccelli. Bransten lauds the civic spirit of Somerville, and its easy accessibility to Boston and the outlying environs.

   Bransten, 81, went to France in 1959  “To look for a woman I thought I was in love with,” he said.  He studied psychology at the Sorbonne, but realized he needed to make a decent living when he started  a family. So he decided to try journalism, and after striking out numerous times he managed to secure an unpaid internship of sorts with the International Herald Tribune.  

Eventually he was offered a job on the night shift, where he worked from 11PM to 10AM—6 days a week. Later he graduated to the day desk—and went on to write many important stories.

  Bransten recalled his days covering the Algerian War for Independence from France. Not only did Algerian rebels commit terrorist  acts in Algeria, but they bombed cafes and buildings in Paris. Bransten told me he was minutes away from being killed by a bomb planted outside the offices of the newspaper Le Monde.  Because he got sidetracked, he missed walking by the building by minutes.

   His novel “A Slight Case of Guilt” is loosely based on a kidnapping that took place during his stint as a journalist in France.  For the purpose of the novel it is set in the Burgundy wine country where a young heir to the Ville De Courtray fortune is abducted.

  Bransten will be having a reading of his novel at the Book Shop at Ball Square Feb  24, 2013  1P.M, smack dab in the Paris of New England.

The Black Buddhist by Meikle Paschal

The Black Buddhist   by Meikle Paschal   (Ibbetson Street Press)  http://ibbetsonpress.com  $15

Review by Afaa Michael Weaver

In sentences that are as sincere as they are nostalgic, Meikle Paschal gives us a valuable portrait of the journey of his life from the poor neighborhoods of Boston to the comfort of a consciousness furnished by the loving kindness of his Buddhist principles, principles that save him from the bitterness and resentment that can occupy the mind of someone who has fought adversity for his entire life. An African American man gifted with unusual intelligence and a keen intuition, he is lifted also by a penchant for forgiveness. As a reader, I am especially endeared to his portraits of a Boston I could never have known, the old Boston of the mid twentieth century. Paschal seems remarkably adept at recognizing and seizing the chance in life, even when he was not aware of the fuller meanings of his actions at the time. He implies repeatedly that something saved him, and it is that hope he offers the reader, namely that if we would just believe there is a way, the way will reveal itself to us. He is not blind to the tragedies of life, as he notes the people who did not have or see the chance, people who fell victim to things we would rather not imagine, but he offers his own encounters with those chances. He explores the vicissitudes of upward mobility in stories that are insightful and inspiring. In admitting the perfection possible in life, he admits the imperfections, the double binds, the impasses, and he continues on with life, even as the apparent paradise proves itself over and over to be only that and not something ultimately real. Paschal lets us see only the journey is real.


To order: 
http://tinyurl.com/cxgxdhh





Afaa Michael Weaver

Simmons College




**********************************************************************************

******Afaa Michael Weaver (born 1951 Baltimore, Maryland) formerly known as Michael S. Weaver, is an American poet, short story writer and editor. He is author of numerous poetry collections and his honors include a Fulbright Scholarship and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Pew Foundation. His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including Callaloo.

Born in Maryland, he studied two years at the University of Maryland. Then he entered the world of factory life alongside his father and uncles and remained a factory worker for fifteen years. He started 7th Son Press and Blind Alleys, a literary journal. He graduated from Brown University on a fellowship, with an M.A, and Excelsior College with a B.A. He taught at National Taiwan University and Taipei National University of the Arts as a Fulbright Scholar, and was a faculty member at the Cave Canem Foundation's annual retreat. In addition, he was the first to be named an elder of the Cave Canem Foundation. He also studied Chinese language at the Taipei Language Institute in Taiwan.

He teaches at Simmons College, and is director of the Zora Neale Hurston Literary Center He is Chairman of the Simmons International Chinese Poetry Conference.[4] Tess Onwueme, the Nigerian playwright, gave him the Ibo name "Afaa," meaning "oracle," while Dr. Perng Ching-hsi has given him the Chinese name "Wei Yafeng."

Except For That by Rachel Goldstein

Copyright 2013 © by Rachel Goldstein

Cervena Barva Press

Somerville, Massachusetts

Softbound, 33 pages, $8

ISBN: 978-0-9883713-1-6



Review by Zvi A. Sesling



From her bio on the back cover we learn that Rachel Goldstein is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She was born in Germany in 1946 in a displaced person’s hospital. At the age of two she moved to La Paz, Bolivia with her parents. Five years later, her family emigrated to Montreal, Canada where she completed her education.



I once sat on the Board of Trustees of the Zamir Chorale of Boston with Ms. Goldstein and never knew this information. However, I was impressed enough with her poetry to publish one of her poems in my online journal, Muddy River Poetry Review.



In this volume of poetry, which lives up to my high regard for work, Goldstein presents her parents’ story. Many of the poems, are sparse, direct and harsh. They reveal truths that some still deny, but cannot be denied when you read realities from survivors and their children. In House of Mercy we encounter the realism of dead children.



Children burn. We go on

without them – ashes, ashes.

The neighbors hack and sing:



Kill and clean

til your work

is done. Soon

the roaches

will be gone



A blue sky cobbles sorrow.

A boy tucks into a nun’s

old habit, keeps his heart

from freezing in the House

of Mercy. There is no mercy.



Certainly during World War II Jews under nazi rule knew no mercy. They died in Auschwitz, Bergen-Belson, Treblinka and other camps. She also writes about places wiped out, people murdered.







First Cousins, Once Removed



Yankush, Leah, Salek! See them

dancing beside the river. Here

the flour mill was once enough

for them. The willow still stand

faithful in leafy gowns.

Do not throw off their green

voices, the circle of voices ringing

in Shreniava.* There is nothing

here. Everything they know is here.



*my grandparents’ summer gather

place for all the young cousins





In another poem she writes For an Extra Piece of Bread, a recurrent theme in Holocaust poetry because a slice of bread – or even a piece of a slice – was a very valuable commodity, sometimes even keeping someone alive for a day or two, or if lucky longer.



For an Extra Piece of Bread



The prisoners were asked to name

the twelve sons of Jacob. One man

tried and tried, was beaten to the ground.



The commandant’s wife came by.

All prisoners were ordered

to look away. My father did not.



He saw how she stood, legs apart,

ten little fox heads, open mouthed,

dead, smothering her breasts.





Some of these poems are before the war, some during and others post World War II yet each poem is poignant, piercing and a valuable contribution to the still growing oeuvre of Holocaust literature. I found this volume of poetry a superb addition to my collection of Jewish and Holocaust poetics. I think every reader will find this volume both accessible

and valuable to own.



____________________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

Author, King of the Jungle and Across Stones of Bad Dreams

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 8

The Cranberry Island Series by Donald Wellman

Reviewed by Pam Rosenblatt

Donald Wellman’s The Cranberry Island Series was published by Dos Madres Press in December 2012. Like his Prolog Pages (Ahadada, 2009) , Wellman has written another book that sometimes offers a challenge to read and understand. That’s probably because Wellman is working with literal translations, or transliterations.

The Cranberry Island Series has essays that are not reads that you can simply sit down, turn the pages, and figure out what this author is writing about. To read The Cranberry Island Series is to have the book in one hand and a dictionary/thesaurus in the other. Or, more practically, you can utilize internet access.

                In this book, Wellman writes in a multitude of genres: essay, poetry, translation, autobiography, family history, and more. A most intriguing piece is “A Poetics of Transcription” in which Wellman discusses Charles Olson’s Maximus. Wellman writes, “I am seeking to go beyond projective verse and approach a practice that is more nearly my own…” In this essay, Wellman analyzes how Olson takes prose and puts it into poetry without changing any of the words. It’s called:

                …metaphrasis…,

                                     Weather

                                  comes generally

                                              under the

                                                                     metaphrast.]

…a process that occurs in moving from prose to verse as in the

many examples that are to be found in Maximus.

Wellman does nice work translating The Seafarer from Old English(ll 1-65a) into modern English. He writes in a lyrical, steadily moving style that is easy for the reader to read and comprehend. Perhaps this is because Wellman is being true to his writing style:

I want to speak the truth, to tell

about my travels and the hardships

which I have endured, the feelings

in my breast when I heard the keel

groan, terrible heaving of the sea

Nights I had to keep a close watch

clinging to the prow when the boat

plunged, seas breaking over ledges

Chains of ice, held me fast by the

legs, iron fetters of frost Sorrow

sighing hot in the heart like fire

I fought hunger and mind sea weary

from watchfulness. You who have it

all so easy on land don’t know how

poorly I fared on the cruel winter

sea, loneliness, longing for close

friends  Rime, icicles in my beard

Hail-scur flew  I heard naught but

hammering seas   Gannets sang to me

The ducks played games to amuse me….

Wellman’s poetry is clear, original and captures the reader’s attention, as seen in “Memorial Day”

No one  took my photo when I wore the uniform

In those days we did not wear it in the streets.

Instead we dressed like the kids back home

and sang, “Lay lady, lay across my big brass bed.”

Everything was bigger then and the smell of wax

and shoe polish mixed with acrid tobacco

and made us unhappy to be men at all

but I had a child, a golden tender boy for whom

the sparkle of a ring on a chain meant incandescent joy

and his mother nursed him in the forests of Oregon

where we lived for a time under a translucent tent

and fished in the Three Sisters with a Cherokee

named Joe. The blue glacial waters turned flesh

to ghost white radiance and the war continued.

The journey through the pages of The Cranberry Island Series is not a lazy one. It keeps your mind active, and the book is quite a memorable read.

Diverting Angels by Deborah Diemont

 

Diverting Angels

by Deborah Diemont

Copyright 2012 by Dos Madres Press inc.

Dos Madres Press

Loveland OH 45140

Softbound, 43 pages, no price

ISBN 978-1-933675-75-6

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

For those of us who live in New England Deborah Diemont seems a candidate to replace “Wrong Way Corrigan.” She spends winters in Syracuse NY, with its lake effect snow and summers in Mexico. So being bi-lingual, one would expect the poems in Diverting Angels to be in English and Spanish. However, it is all English, which is a benefit to many of us.

The books is one of sonnets, broken into different construction: 14 lines, the standard sonnet, 4-4-6, 4-4-4-2, 4-4-3-3 and of course 8-6.

These are fascinating poems telling stories about people places, things that keep you into each one through the fourteen lines. Take for example Housemate a bittersweet, humorous verse in which we learn that furniture and jealousy make a bad combination:

The walls loomed a metallic oyster gray.

The lamps, Tiffany roses upside-down

bloomed to themselves. Stray artifacts broke ground

in dusty corners where the baby played.

For less than half the rent – the room in back –

I shared the lap dance of another’s life,

cast iron rusted with soap, a hobbled bike,

a garden overgrown with Grickle-grass

Perhaps we’d be friends now if I hadn’t paired

my shaky antique chairs with missing screws

and her deco table, showing too much wear

before I stained with my mug. Nor stared,

discreetly, at her new boyfriend’s tattoo,

a butterfly that straws fermented air.

Ms. Diemont has intriguing titles such as A Modest Blindness, Mountain and Spine, Face Book, The Last Time I Read People, The Poet in Victoria’s Secret™, Photos in Newsweek. All the poems live up to my expectations. They provide insight into a poet whose views ultimately coordinate with life, all types of people and of course, the reader.

In Mountain and Spine

I like the mountain, I adore your spine,

the way you stand as if pulled by a string

toward the sky, palms turned out by your hips.

And how you steeple, arch, curve down to dive.

How emptiness exacts a transformation –

dog-to-cat, child-to-warrior, a tree

where right foot meets the left thigh easily.

Your toes dig in like roots, and your frustration

powers down, with knees and chest and chin

against the floor. I like best when you clasp

your hands in prayer, right at the end, akin

to someone who believes. Roll up your mat –

crave nicotine, pour coffee. We’re aligned,

my tree, my mountain. I adore your spine.

If find her poems compelling in that they don’t go where I expect them to go, like Grandmother, which begins one way and end another is typical of Diemont’s verse.

In To Dye Or Henna a whole lifetime passes in fourteen lines, an explanation of a woman’s thoughts and her history.

This is a book of poetry I savored and which I believe you will as well.

____________________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

Author, King of the Jungle and Across Stones of Bad Dreams

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 8

Earlier Lives: Poems By Sara Dailey

Dos Madres Press

www.dosmadres.com

ISBN: 978-1-933675-86-2

79 Pages



Review by Dennis Daly

Can writing poetry console? Can it deliver solace in the face of unbearable grief? Perhaps more to the point—can poetry do or accomplish anything that aids ordinary people in coping with the human condition? I think so. Apparently, so does Sara Dailey. Her book of poems, Earlier Lives, looks at anguish in an angular, near scientific way that includes sharp observations and a hygienic reductionism. Together Dailey’s collection of poems deals with the traumatic loss of her younger brother in a motorcycle accident, made more intense by her broken family history and the subsequent closeness of their sibling relationship. Throughout the book the poet studies the various facets of her overwhelming sorrow and that very act seems to engender a useful catharsis. Indeed, Dailey lords over her tempestuous territory with absolute control and the reader gets to see this commanding poet define a very difficult subject.



“Listen and I will fill your ears with truth,” says Dailey in her opening and introductory poem, Globe Artichoke. She lets her readers know that they are in for a rough, not a smooth experience. The tipped spikes and leathery scales need to be worked through and the density needs to be thinned out. The poet continues,



…What you desire of me, sparse

in proportion to what you will discard.



Ardishauk, ground thorn, artichoke:

Like a throat full of accordions

in a sommelier’s nightmare,

Come taste my heart.



Dailey’s persona, in the poem Dressing for Funerals, studies her every move, watches her dress appropriately for sorrow. She says,



But it is always sorrow

that moves you from speech.

In the mirror, your face, sepulcher,

practices humanity,

feels skin soft over bones,

the racketing click as jawbone clenches

and teeth tier into caged smile, mouth a cave

Aristotle would never see

his way out of.



Black linen slides over hips,

sways in rhythm with the body’s rocking,

how it shoulders sobs

like cliffs being crested by waves…



A Recognition of Being Left Behind is another poem which makes good use of a mirror. The poet sees her brother’s features in her own face and describes the phenomenon thusly,



When you became no more than my haunt,

ash bits boxed on the mantelpiece,

I sometimes felt the bathroom mirror



was my enemy, showing skin pale like

paper or oak brown eyes, a crooked smile

no longer shared



by anyone. You startle in my heart

like blood welling up, brother.

Who’s to know my secrets now?



The poem entitled Mary to All Her Painters insists the reader confront the reality of death (like the poet confronted her younger brother corpse). It’s never pretty when you’re caressing your dead son. In this case the material feel of the dead Redeemer is a carcass of meat or a formless octopus. Mary additionally admonishes her painters on the state of her being. She complains,



I’m never dirty in these paintings,

despite how far I might have walked,

and the flush you see is faith

not the red of too much weeping.



None of these paintings show

how the hard stones of ovaries

shrank to the dead pits of plums

or how I turned my face away.



In the title poem, An Earlier Life, Dailey’s persona relates her engagement with life before her brother’s death and after it. She once lived with risk and joy and lighthearted love. No more. The poet says,



…Not this life.



Here it isn’t like riding a bicycle.

You must relearn the falling,



the getting up after,

even the willingness to try.



And she does try. The Poet turns scientist and like Gregor Mendel she reads the microcosm of nature and sees her brother’s genes inside herself. She meditates on this in the poem, Gregor Mendel’s Peas on the Anniversary of my Brother’s Death. Following this train of thought to its logical conclusion, she comes up with an interesting question. Dailey asks,



When my blood at last spills,

or my body gives in to entropy

and finally rests, brother

will you still be there

in the strands of me, in DNA

like threads in the loom

of some cosmic weaver

leaving each breath

a silver shimmer?



Dailey composes a good number of Mendel poems for this collection. Her persona seems soothed by the sureness of scientific research that connects humans into families. Mendel becomes a surrogate for God. Not only does he breed animals, manage bees, and grow peas with desirable traits, but he offers a hope for coexistence between Daileyand her longed-for brother. The poet in her poem entitled Mendel, Age 27, Breeds Mice in His Room at the Abbey explains,



Because I wanted to believe in something with ease,

without doubt, your name was a prayer on my lips, words



sung into the air like a hymn. I was grown up far too young.

Unavailable mother. You know, the old story where child



sees parent as fallible, learns to trip lies off their tongue

because it is kinder than truth. I spent summers in the wild



overgrowth of weeds with skinned knees while she cried

behind a locked door we learned not to open. I created plaits



of clover and dandelions, found beauty by making it. When my brother died

years later I dreamt of your mice and plants, Mendel, wondered about traits



he would have passed on, the heritage of heredity…



In poem after poem the author portrays herself in as vestigial. Dailey expands on this concept in a poem entitled, That you are gone is but a fact. She says,



…like tailbones, a crude appendix

formed, structure without function, left behind.



Of loss, recall that even elephants grieve—

The need to touch the bones will make them pause,

Interpret, rage through huts like nettled wind.



As I read through this heartbreaking book of first rate artistry it occurred to me that the poems were working on yet another level. There is a tradition in Ireland and the Scottish highlands called keening. A group of professional mourners are contracted by the bereaved to formalize the grieving process. Each performer has a poetic purpose and together they lament and wail as a chorus. The effect of this sometimes disturbing performance can reduce the inconsolable to merely a singular sadness or even an acceptance.These poems do that. They are the keeners. They work magnificently for the reader. I hope they also deliver comfort tothis deserving poet.

Ed Hamilton: One of the last Chelsea Hotel Bohemians, and author of Legends of the Chelsea Hotel: Living with Artists and Outlaws in New York’s Rebel Mecca

By Doug Holder

  It was the kind of winter day you may remember from your childhood, before things became so heated. Bone chilling winds whipped my face making my cheeks look like they were reddened from deep embarrassment.  On this morning I was to meet author Ed Hamilton at the Grey Dog Café in the Chelsea section of Manhattan to talk about the glory days of the famed Chelsea Hotel in New York City. Hamilton, 53, a longtime resident of the hotel, and author of the book Legends of the Chelsea Hotel, had an interesting tale to tell about this bohemian flophouse.

  The Chelsea Hotel on 23^rd St. in the Chelsea section of Manhattan has a unique history. Built in 1883 it originally was a residential hotel that housed the stars of the theatrical world. But over the years it was also the home for an eclectic group of literary, visual and musical artists of all stripes. The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas stayed at the hotel and was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital in the Village where he died from the result of drinking himself to death mostly at the famed White Horse Tavern ,near the environs of the Chelsea. William Burroughs reportedly wrote Naked Lunch at the Chelsea, and Kerouac is rumored to have had a fling with Gore Vidal in one of the rooms, and some believed he completed On the Road there. Arthur Miller hung his hat there in his pre and post Marilyn periods, as well as noted Punker and Poet Patti Smith and the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. (As recounted in Smith’s acclaimed memoir Just Kids). And of course Sid Vicious and Nancy met their infamous end in a gone-to-seed room in the Hotel.

  For many years the hotel was run benevolently (more or less) by Stanley Bard. Since 1957 Bard had made the Chelsea a welcoming refuge of sorts for young artists to make a go of it in the big city. He provided rooms at a reasonable rate for aspiring artists, and was often forgiving if they came up short with the rent. He sometimes took payment in the form of a painting or labor. But Bard was pushed out. Now with gentrification, condo conversion, astronomical real estate prices, the days of the Chelsea Hotel and others if its ilk are certainly numbered. With Bard’s removal the Chelsea is undergoing renovation and all the artwork that gave the building its unique flavor has vanished. Many of the permanent residents have been evicted. Hamilton told me a total of 58 have been forced out. Sixty residential apartments are left.  Hamilton said: “I was in court for five years, but I finally won the right to stay because I have a Rent Stabilized apartment.”  Indeed, Hamilton , who has been at the Chelsea since 1995, is the last of the breed who came to this hotel and lived the life of a bohemian writer, in a room lined with books, and a bathroom down the hall. He and his wife have lived outside “The broad lawns and narrow minds of the suburbs,” as Hemmingway once wrote.

  According to Hamilton the building was bought for 80 million dollars by a Moroccan family headed by real estate mogul Joseph Chetrit. Hamilton said:  “ It is a huge conglomerate that bought the Sears Tower in Chicago and other far flung interests…the Chelsea is only a mere speck of dust in the whole perspective of things.” It seems that many of the tenants who were not evicted were bought out for well below the market rate. Hamilton does not want sell, and certainly not for a price that will not allow him to stay in Manhattan. Hamilton said he tried to enlist famed punker and poet Patti Smith, the author the awarding-memoir set in the Chelsea  Just Kids,  but she ignored him. Finally she came out of the closet, but according to Hamilton, decidedly on the management’s side.  She agreed to do a concert for the tenants that was supposed to introduce them to the wonderful new world of the Chelsea Hotel  under Chetrit. Hamilton feels she was working for the management, in spite of the common knowledge of the evictions and the destruction of the interior of the hotel. When the tenants threatened a book burning, in addition to the media deluge spurred on from Hamilton’s Chelsea Hotel blog, Smith reneged.

  Hamilton and his girlfriend Debbie Martin came to the Chelsea after Hamilton’s stint at the University of Maryland, where Hamilton was teaching philosophy and working on his doctorate. But Hamilton did not really like the academic life. He was a product of the suburbs, and he was horrified to think he would wind up in a conventional lifestyle near some strip mall. Hamilton and Martin always knew about the Chelsea and its rich history, and they were determined to come to New York City to live there. According to Stanley Bard to gain entrance into the Chelsea was harder than getting into an Ivy League college, but the duo got in through a sublet. Since then, with the help of Martin, Hamilton started the Chelsea Hotel Blog, and penned the book Legends of the Chelsea Hotel….

  Hamilton made a point in his book to write not only about the famous folks who lived there but the unsung holy fools as well. Hamilton said: “The everyday folks who lived in the Chelsea brought this weird energy to the place. I think this contributed to the creativity of the Chelsea. I am sure some of the great works conceived here as well as the obscure were fired by the sparks in the atmosphere.” Hamilton told me that many artists, even after it was long apparent that they didn’t have the talent or luck to make it on a big scale, stayed on. Most folks after achieving some sort of success moved out. For the ones that stay it can be a negative experience… a reminder of what they are not.

  I asked Hamilton about some of the long term residents who are still pursuing their passion. One lady Bettina G. has been in the hotel for many decades. She is a visual artist, and a young artist who lived in the Chelsea, Sam Bennett, produced a documentary about her. According to a newspaper account she had her paintings stacked to the ceiling, and she was partially living in the hallway. Gerald Busby a current resident and a protégé of Virgil Thompson had early success (He wrote the film score for Robert Altman’s 3 Women), then went into obscurity and now has been rediscovered.

 Since I always have had an interest in the poet Charles Bukowski, I asked him if the Buk ever spent time at the Chelsea. Hamilton thought Bukowski spent one night or so there—and the poet mentioned the hotel in a poem and short story he wrote. Hamilton then went on to tell me that Harry Smith, the noted archivist, ethnomusicologist, experimental filmmaker, also known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, was a resident as well. He died at the Chelsea in 1993.

 I remember in the late 70’s when I came to Boston I lived in a number of rooming houses in Boston and Cambridge. One, the Irving Inn in Cambridge, advertised itself for Lean Pocket Transients. The other was on Newbury Street in the Back Bay of Boston. Many young people and not a few artists were able to get a reasonably priced room in the city to pursue their art or passion. When I came to the city there were a number of these places. Now they have seemed to have disappeared. Hamilton said this is true of New York as well. Rent Stabilization is vehemently opposed by the current city administration, and tenants can’t stand up to the moneyed interests they are in conflict with.

  Hamilton, continues to write fiction, his first love, and has had his work in online and print journals such as Penduline and Omphalos. Some of his fiction is loosely autobiographical and at times deals with is life growing up Catholic, and all the repressive baggage that comes with it. Although Hamilton’s Legends of the Chelsea continues to sell and sell well; he is having trouble finding an agent for his fiction.

  Hamilton has hopes for his fiction as well as for the last outpost of bohemia, the Chelsea Hotel. He thinks the chances that he and his partner will remain in the Chelsea are slim. But hope springs eternal…and he still holds a candle in the encroaching darkness. Hamilton is a creature of the city—he needs to breathe the asphalt, blink back at the blinking neon, and pursue that ephemeral light that the artist seeks. And the city, this Naked City—New York City, that has a million stories, is the one that will keep the pilot light of his creative life burning.