Mass. Poetry Festival to Feature Pulitzer Prize Winner Sharon Olds and 10 Other Headliner Poets

Mass. Poetry Festival to Feature Pulitzer Prize Winner Sharon Olds and 10 Other Headliner Poets

            By Jacquelyn Malone  (Mass. Poetry Advisory Board)

At last year’s Massachusetts Poetry Festival J. D. Scrimgeour, a poet and member of the festival planning committee,  was setting up a table for the book fair. A stranger walked by and asked if she could help. As the two positioned the table, Scrimgeour asked her name, and she replied, “I’m nobody! Who are you?” Scrimgeour replied, “I’m nobody, too.” And the two strangers, laughing, began to recite alternating lines of Emily Dickenson’s famous poem before they went their own merry ways. Not your typical stranger-in-the-street meeting.

But it is typical of the ambience of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Last year over a crowded lunch table, more than one person commented on meeting someone at the festival who could become a good friend.

This year’s event, which runs May 3 through 5 in Salem, Massachusetts, will not only have Pulitzer Prize champs like this year’s winner Sharon Olds and previous winners Tracy Smith and Yusef Komunyakaa, it will have camaraderie like that Scrimgeour experienced.

Jill McDonough described last year’s festival, which also took place in Salem, this way: “Shining pedestrian walkways filled with poetry, poets, people who love poetry.” McDonough was talking about a city where store windows sported poems, shower curtains with poems written on them, and bars of soap in paper wrappers with snippets from poems. Like last year’s festival, this year’s will have a poetry trolley car circling the various venues in downtown Salem with poets reciting poems in route from one event to the next. It will have a typewriter orchestra tapping out rhythms of symphonies – or poems. There’ll be a a small press and literary magazine fair, and, back this year by popular demand, a reading by Steve Almond of the winners of the annual bad poetry contest.

Many of the participants in the Saturday session Dead Poets among the Living have ties to Somerville and local group, Tapestry of Voices. They are Lainie Senechal, Kathleen Spivak, Doug Holder, Kirk Etherton, Lucy Holstedt, and Harris Garnder. They will be reading Robert Frost, e.e. cummins, John Greenleaf Whittier and other poets no longer with us, pairing those classic poems with some of their own. The poets will be supported by a talented jazz trio.

The three day program includes poetry readings, workshops, panels on poetry, music, and visual arts, including a Cinco de Mayo reading on May 5. The Peabody Essex Museum, which provides the venue for many festival events, has a special series of programs for families, such as Make Your Own Magnetic Poetry.

There’ll be a session on taboos subjects like race, sex and class. Some of the other sessions include a panel on war and social consequences, the reading of poems about pregnancy and motherhood, a reading of the nine Common Threads poems selected by Mass Poetry for discussions in book clubs, libraries, senior centers, etc.. across the state.

And there will be slam and spoken word performances to delight young people. And their elders.

Each day features headliner poets:

On Friday evening (at 7:30–9:30 p.m. in the Atrium of the Peabody Essex Museum) poets read poems about the humor and the dysfunction of family, Michael Jackson and the Hubble telescope. 

The poets are:

Tracy K. Smith (Life on Mars), winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Nick Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,) poet and memoirist.

Jill McDonough (Where You Live), who chose the poems for Common Threads this year.

Saturday evening (at 7:30–9 p.m. in the First Universalist Church of Salem) three writers demonstrate the extraordinary possibilities of poetry to reveal the personal and political experiences of American life.

The poets are:

Sharon Olds (Stag’s Leap), 2013 winner of the TS Eliot Poetry Prize and this year’s Pulitzer Prize poet.

Terrance Hayes (Lighthead), the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry winner.

Eduardo C. Corral (Slow Lightning), whose first collection won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.

Sunday afternoon (at 2:15–3:15 p.m. at PEM’s Native American Gallery)

The poets are:

Arthur Sze (The Ginkgo Light), Santa Fe-based poet and recent winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize.

Gail Mazur (Figures in a Landscape), Cambridge-based poet.

Sunday afternoon (at 3:45–4:45, PEM’s East India Room)

The poets are:

Yusef Komunyakaa (The Chameleon Couch), 1994 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Kevin Goodan (Winter Tenor), a poet with Massachusetts ties.

Erica Funkhouser (Earthly) ), a poet with Massachusetts ties.

During the festival more than 100 poets will engage with thousands of people. Admission for all weekend events is $15 or $7 for students and seniors.

The website www.masspoetry2013.crowdvine.com provides a complete schedule of events, a list of book stores for festival buttons sales (your admission to events), and a social media platform for festival goers to pre-register for events.

See you there!

So Spoke Penelope by Tino Villanueva

So Spoke Penelope

by Tino Villanueva

Grolier Poetry Press

Cambridge MA

Copyright © 2013 by Tino Villanueva

60 pages, softbound, no price given



Review by Zvi A. Sesling



For twenty years a woman waits, waits for a husband to return. Men come to her home— a different kind of siege, they want her to pick a new husband. They want her home, her wealth, her body. What’s a woman to do?



Poet Tino Villanueva who won an American Book Award in 1994 for Scene From The Movie GIANT has written another volume of poetry which deserves a prize: So Spoke Penelope – the woman under siege in her own home.



However, Penelope is no ordinary woman, she is the wife of a king, and no ordinary king.

Her husband is Odysseus, king of Ithaca and Homer’s hero.



As Villanueva envisions her, Penelope is a strong woman, one who many women today would not only admire, but of whom they would be jealous.



Take for example the poem How I Wait in which Penelope tells of her loneliness:



Today I sit by a window, my spirit

swimming out into the deep-azure-blue of the sea.

I’m a woman waiting, in love with a man,

and in love with the love had.

I took an oath with myself to wait,

and keep passionately waiting

even after the great shining of the sun has worn away



I pick up my sorrow and carry it to bed,

and wait some more

before sweet sleep weighs down my eyes.

Next day I rise,

and hear myself speaking words of all-abounding hope

…and go on waiting. These things I say aloud

to have clear thought,

to keep the day alive.



I’m a woman waiting,

waiting with the restlessness of sea-waves

repeating themselves in her head

like messages from afar.

Villanueva has also written some wonderful lines as from Today I did Almost Nothing comes this line, which, within the context of the poem stands out as a paean against war:



Thought about war

…war that spoils the ties of love and mocks my marriage;



Or from God Of Extended Blue Waters:



make the heart soar on wings of contentment



Then these lines from The Suitors:



Those blasted blustery brutes:

the crudest of the crude crowding my thoughts.

Rain or shine,

it’s them again—rowdy louts befouling the air

with the rough language of their praise.



The book concludes with Twenty Years Waiting with the opening lines of:



Just when I thought the star-lights of love

no longer shone for me, that I’d stand apart,



a woman, living more on lament than hope

down the stairs into the hall I went to see



the beggar-man who the day before had walked

straight into my gaze; who was no stranger begging,



but truly Odysseus, the man I love the way a woman

does just the one time….



This book is brilliantly conceived and executed by Tino Villanueva. Placing himself in Penelope’s mind and delivering a stunning extension of Homer’s original is a truly remarkable achievement. So Spoke Penelope fascinates, and there is no need to have read Homer to get understand Penelope’s plight in the context of Odysseus’s twenty-year absence brought about by war, a centuries’ old stain on the human condition which Villanueva shows from the view of she who waits for the return of her love.



This volume of poetry is highly recommended and should bring awards to the author.



_______________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling is author of King of the Jungle (Ibbetson Street, 2010), Across Stones of Bad Dreams (Cervena Barva, 2011) and the soon to be published Fire Tongue (Cervena Barva). He is Editor of Muddy River Poetry Review, Bagel Bards Anthologies #7 and #8.

He regularly reviews for the Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

New Nave Gallery Annex Opens in Somerville

A New Space has opened at the Nave Gallery in Somerville, Mass: The Nave Gallery Annex. It will be hosting art exhibits, readings, etc....

Here is what is happenning now:

The Knit Art House in Crochetville


April 13-May 5, 2013

Curated by Tori Costa



Opening Reception

The Nave Gallery Annex

Wednesday, April 17

6-8 pm directions

facebook



Gallery Hours:

Wed-Fri, 6-8 pm

Sat, 2-8 pm, Sun, 2-6 pm



Extended Hours During Somerville Open Studios:

Fri, May 3, 6-9 pm, Sat, May 4, 12-8 pm

Sun, May 5, 12-6 pm

Tino Villanueva and the Craft of Waiting

Tino Villanueva and the Craft of Waiting

article by Michael T Steffen

Penelope, the wife of Odysseus from Homer’s epic song about the wandering man of many ways, is the classical figure of long-suffering faithfulness awaiting, twenty years, the return of her husband from the Trojan war. Entreated by a pack of greedy, boisterous suitors, she embodies the craft-worker of the separated couple, weaving and unweaving a shroud in order to stave off the wooings of the suitors who insist and insist that Odysseus is dead and that she remarry. In SO SPOKE PENELOPE (Grolier Poetry Press, Cambridge, 2013, ISBN: 978-1-891592-02-7) acclaimed poet Tino Villanueva himself patiently looms an extended meditation of 32 poems from the persona of this most memorable character of world literature, enacting and reflecting the concentrated task of craftsmanship (in weaving, in poetry…) as a creative preoccupation to help pass the time of waiting, with the potential intensity of the endeavor:

One day I managed from early dawn to dusk,

then until the brightness of the morning shone again

to keep on weaving, to get it right. And there it is

folded up across the bed in color and in cloth.

("In Color and in Cloth," p. 31)
　
My own impression reading through the poems several times was of admiration, admiration for the elegance, charm and clarity of Villanueva’s language, making allowance for poetic diction rare for our times:

when the golden cloth of dawn rose

out of the sea (p.13)



The wind blows,

and I can hear the leaves of orchards breathing (p. 23)

　

Still and all, Odysseus,

grief-giver of a husband, destroyer of hearts,

let me not die aching in one place (p. 35)

　

While the maids on their knees

kept grinding and sifting wheat and barley grain,

(six-hundred someone said)

measured into baskets big (p. 58)

I also admired the patience of the book, which imparted a slight anguish, which is the anguish of Penelope herself in suffering the long passage of time and its frequently felt futility.

How many women, I wonder, have waited like me,

like me by the sea, with a racing caring heart,

women who waited, stood waiting,

lay waiting like me? (p. 16)

　

Here on Ithaca, alas, we had no favoring rain today,

no sun.

And I, who am Penelope, living mother of a living son,

neither got Odysseus back,

husband whose love I miss on awakening,

nor chose to take a suitor as my man. (p. 34)

What’s more and must be said in this battlefield of love:

time and time again I love you,

then I go the other way

and love you not. (p. 35)

　

The book works its spell of another time and another place on you by maintaining its foothold in Homer’s mythic world, which may chafe some readers in our generation-hab world who may crave to recognize more familiar language and elements. This yet poses the question of how a poet may discipline and mind her craft to be a builder of bridges. That is from the terminology of Ifeanyi Menkiti, whose introduction to this book is so generously informative with details of the poet’s biography and bibliography, and eloquent in his argument for an ecumenical mission for poetry. The bridge the poet builds spans across the differences of the cultural barriers of time and space, so that she is not a mere "tribalist" chronicler of the historical moment. Is poetry what gets lost in translation, as Robert Frost famously coined the definition? Or is it found in the consideration to survive translation? Who will the readers of the year 2053, 2113… be able to appreciate? It’s a staggering yet pertinent question.

Still, relevant both to individual and tradition, Villanueva’s meditation comes to a luminous affirmation from the long-suffering spouse about the insight she has gained as to the carefulness of her affections and surrounding:

I’d been for years at

the heart’s low-ebb, but wise about men set before me,

and gods disguised. Now the man long-awaited

had washed ashore into my room: I opened my eyes

and saw, past the ceiling, an expanse of sky

and Odysseus sailing steadily above me. (pp. 59-60).

Interview with Meikle Paschal: The Black Buddhist and his spiritual journey

Left  Doug Holder   Right  Meikle Paschal   at the Somerville Community Access TV studios.

Interview with Meikle Paschal: The Black Buddhist and his spiritual journey

With Doug Holder

  When Meikle Paschal arrived at his first meeting of the Bagel Bards at the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square, Somerville, he was the only black man in a sea of white, pasty faces. But he did not seem fazed--he weaved through the crowd like he was at home at the joint—striking up conversations, and cracking the dry air with his wit.  30 or 40 years ago this may have not been the case.   Paschal , a native of the mean streets of Roxbury, was a self-described Angry Black Man.  He was uncomfortable in his own skin, fighting the pressure of a racist society that he felt kept the cards stacked against him. Now, in his 60’s, he is a very different character.  He found his way through the practice of Buddhism, and is transformed into a rather contented  man in the  autumn of his years, as  Frank Sinatra once sang.   Today he is a  respected educator with the pedigree of a PhD, and a home in the tony suburb of Lexington, Mass.  I interviewed Paschal about his new memoir The Black Buddhist: A Spiritual Journey (Ibbetson Street Press) on my Somerville Community Access TV show  Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.

Doug Holder: Meikle you were in the tradition of the Angry Young Man some decades ago. This literary tradition , and this dynamic in society, goes way back and of course it involves the working class railing against the system. And you added another factor on the plate—you are a black man. What specifically were you angry about?

Meikle Paschal:  Actually I don’t know what I was angry about. It was sort of a persona you kept so no one would bother you. If I looked like a pushover—even girls would come up to me and challenge me to a fight. So I had to have this edgy, urban demeanor so that people would  leave me alone. When you are a young person and in that domain it’s ok—it serves a purpose. But when you finish school and go out to the workplace, and still have that angry edge, it limits you. If you are looking for a job people label you as an angry black man. From that image all kinds of generalizations get passed on. People don’t get to know you. They just tread lightly around you.

DH: You embraced Nicene Buddhism.  Why did you go there –did western religion fail you?

MP: I had an experience when I was quite young. Probably around 14. I had my first sexual encounter in a hallway. My family members were practicing Catholics. So I started feeling guilty and went to Confession. I made the mistake of saying I committed adultery.  And this priest almost started to come through the screen to get at me. He told me never to see the girl again. But she lived upstairs so I wondered how that was going to be possible. I started thinking something was wrong about this. I was on may way out. It was a long trail. For a long while I went to Atheism—you know when you are dead you are dead. After I grew up and grew more accepting of the ways of the world, I realized that I didn’t quite know what was going on. Then I had this experience. It was with my mother-in-law. I  had stayed with her awhile to calm down after completing my dissertation. One day she fell down  in the front yard and never recovered. It turns out that she was riddled with cancer. She died shortly after. One night after this I went to sleep, not thinking about here or anything. In the middle of the night she came to me  just as clearly as you sitting here. She sat at the edge of my bed and told me that everything was going to be all right.  It was such a beautiful experience. I cried; I called my mother and tried to get some understanding. And I began to realize there is more going on in this world that I can understand.  And this lead me to the path of reading. And in my reading I feel into what the Buddha actually said. It lead me to some thoughts I had during my own life. I saw them clearly articulated now. I read even more and I sought out some people who were practicing Buddhists in my family. I became ready to embrace it. It has become a way of life. And this way of life has diminished the Angry Black Man persona. The meditation, etc.. has made me feel more at home in the universe.

DH: Does the angry side ever rear its ugly head?

MP: Every so often I can slide. It is under control. It is relegated to the lower domains. When you become harmonious with the world this stuff doesn't come up so often.

DH: But sometimes isn't it a good thing to get good and pissed off?

MP: It doesn't work for me. Being a black man in this society, if I get angry, it would be a negative thing. Besides it makes me feel sick. I try to let things stay quiet.

DH: You talked about these incidences of foreshadowing in your life--in which someone would say something in passing for instance and it would be of great imporance. Do we often miss these signs?

MP: Well, I do feel we all follow a path. I have had occasions where I could of gone one way instead of the other. When I went down to the Induction Center during the Vietnam War I was very despondent because I thought I was going to be sent to the jungles to die. As I was coming home from the Center I just happened I looked up and I saw a sign for the U Mass Boston. And for some unknown reason I went in. I found the recruiters; they took me in; and I was accepted into college. And being accepted into college-- I am sure-- saved my life. I have had experiences like this in my life and I was able to embrace them. Your path unfolds before you. You have a few choices. You can stay stuck or you can evolve. The universe gives you information to hear; it is up to you to embrace it or not. That is the message I am trying to display in the book.

DH: Does your Buddhist practice manifests itself in your college teaching?

MP: My teaching is all about my Buddhist practice.  I teach Philosophy, English and Composition. I do tell my students that if they do have self-confidence, start a  regime, that the energy will flow. I don't get angry with them. I am accessible. It makes for a more harmonious classroom. We both learn and benefit.

DH: You use quotes throughout the book by Buddha. One is " What we think, we become."

MP: I truly believe this. It took a long time to believe in myself--to not be afraid that all these things were going to be taken from me. I have relinquished fear. I think of myself as a worthy person. I love being a calmer state of being.


To order The Black Buddhist... go to:      http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress 

Writers and New England a Many-Sided Mad Affair

                   Porter Square Books, Tuesday, April 23rd, 7 p.m.

 

 

 

 

"Writers and New England: a Many-Sided Mad Affair"

 

A presentation from With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz and Others

by Kathleen Spivack

 

This presentation is going to be fun--and relevant. I’m going to focus on New England (a major character in the book) and of course on Lowell, Bishop, Plath, Sexton, Rich, as well as some of the other poets around the time and place. What is it about our wonderful--and maddening--region that has had such an influence on writers? There'll be time for questions and comments.

 

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



 

 

PS: My two forthcoming workshops are already filling up, "Excellence" and "Publish (Before) You Perish." All genres and levels welcome; just bring whatever project you're working on, and writing materials. For more information, visit the Massachusetts Poetry Festival or the Cambridge Center for Adult Education.

 

Review of THE PHILOSOPHER’S DAUGHTER by Lori Desrosiers

Review of THE PHILOSOPHER’S DAUGHTER by Lori Desrosiers, salmonpoetry, Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland, www.salmonpoetry.com, 79 pages, 2013

Review by Barbara Bialick

In The Philosopher’s Daughter, Lori Desrosiers writes that the mystery of her life, indeed her own creation, starts in “Paris 1950” with the subtlety of ideas exchanged between her parents: “Blanch eats crepes on the Ile de la Café/…Leonard studies philosophy/…I am only a thought.”

Thoughts versus action is a theme as she paints her parents’ conflicting personalities with memories, until finally she herself is in her 60s, around the age her father died, and now she is the teacher, the poet, pulling images from her life story. In “That Pomegranate Shine” she writes “I was the wrong kind of bride/more sweat than glisten,/more peach than pomegranate/…Ten years later, I emerged shivering/…standing with my children…”

She eventually becomes a type of philosopher herself, like her father was in “Big Words”: “The cancer took his language first/those beautiful big words used every day/In fact, when I was little he taught me words/like ‘symbolic’ and ‘essential’…I would learn a thousand big words/if they could bring him back.”

In contrast to her father, an author of books on metaphysics, “The city understood my mother/It was large and gritty, like her imagination/Escape to theater or opera always/just a cab-ride away…” Her father died of what she calls “star cancer”, a brain cancer, not long after they divorced.

She fears her mother’s death in “If, Mother…”: “When your tongue is quiet,/there will be no more stories/no more trips to 1930s Chicago,/no languid afternoons/on Margate beach/no Cape Cod Bay…” Also, no more Paris trip together, like “how we turned the wrong way/veered off the boulevard/how close that day/we came to death…”

Nowadays she claims “The World is Flat”—as when “a boy I know/drove off a cliff/following the GPS in his car./GPS systems think/the world is flat/no mountains, valleys or/boulders, no cliffs…”

Lori Desrosiers also published a chapbook, “Three Vanities”, Pudding House Press, 2009. Publisher of the “Naugatuck River Review” (narrative poetry), she has an MFA

From New England College in New Hampshire” and has been published in many literary journals. In 2010, she won the Greater Brockton Society for Poetry Award for “That Pomegranate Shine

New Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Release: Flying Cats (actually swooping) by Dan Sklar

  Dan Sklar Professor of Creative Writing at Endicott College has a new collection of poetry forthcoming:

                                                 Flying Cats  ( actually swooping)

                                                     ADVANCED PRAISE!

The refreshing thing about Sklar’s poetry is that it’s not that  carefully worked-over, avant-garde, conundrum, riddle-twisted work that is less interested in getting across ideas and emotions than puzzling and impressing the reader. Sklar is Mr. Tell-It-As-It-Is. Which he himself is very aware of: My poems/do not win/poetry awards/because/they re/not poems/at all.

Which is not to say that they don’t move, touch you, and communicate. By getting rid of all the technique games and getting to the human heart of things, Sklar is one of the most successful communicators around. His topics include the inner Thoreau, horses, funerals, war, bicycles, rain, aging, sex, opera, canoes (and the Iroquois), truck accidents....and there’s not a poem, story, or play in this book that you can stop reading once you’ve read the first line. Unreadable poets should take a course in Sklar, get readable, read this book.

—Hugh Fox, Founding editor of the Pushcart Prize



Fans of European 19th century verse, thick with symbolism and multi-syllabic, will find little to love in Dan Sklar’s work. Sklar’s poetry could be characterized as American Primitive, clean and bracing as creek water. Like Whitman, Sklar celebrates the mystery and profundity of the everyday. This is “guy” poetry, muscularly chronicling the days and to-do list of the contemporary American male, helplessly and joyfully committed to the challenges of raising a houseful of boys, teaching sleepy-eyed college students, and handling the ignominies of manuscript rejection letters. Sklar’s poems tumble and sing with enormously universal appeal.



—Lisa Beatman, Author of Manufacturing America



I say to the woman tonight out of the blue: “You know what I liked about that guy yesterday? He didn’t appear at all jealous or even slightly worried I might be better than him (whatever that means)… and in front of his students.” Dan, you’re a person who is self-assured and in a very good, rare and unpretentious way.



-- G. Todd Slone—The American Dissident



Ibbetson St. Press

25 School St.

Somerville, Mass.

02143

http://ibbetsonpress.com

Salem in Séance Poems by Susana H. Case

Salem in Séance

Poems by Susana H. Case

WordTech Editions

www.wordtechweb.com


ISBN: 9781625490025

93 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Witches (i.e. those who have signed the devil’s book) cannot get through the Lord’s Prayer without stumbling, or recite the Ten Commandments in order and intact. So, for a stutterer like me, saying "h-h-h-hallowed be thy name" in the greater Salem of 1692 could be the onset of some serious judicial trouble. And, indeed, all sorts of spasmodic tics, flaws and quirks convinced that pent up joyless citizenry that Satan’s diabolical plan to destroy the Puritan Church had neared its triumphal conclusion.

Susana H. Case uses her poetic rendition of these happenings to give voice to some of the twenty executed women and men of those times and also to describe the complicated motivations of the accusers and political backdrop involved in the progression of this hysteria. She also engages her subjects with direct comments creating snippets of dialog in many of her poems. This unusual convention is not always successful but when it is it adds mightily to the poem’s power.

In her poem Sarah Good Case summons the voice of one poor soul going through one hell of a midlife crises. Here is part of Sarah’s story,

…I know

the villagers cannot abide me: my poverty,

begging,

the turbulence,

curses I admit

I have made upon their livestock.

[You make excuses for them!]

But I must, I am wrecked

since the loss of inheritance

rights, my downhill slide,

know the ruin upon me

makes my eyes look hollowed out,

more like seventy than thirty-eight.

Even my four-year-old

gives evidence against me. And my husband,

William, affirms if I am not already a witch,

I soon will be one…

Yes, her husband William must have been one understanding son-of –a bitch.

Another one of the accused does better in the husband department. Elizabeth Cary, the title character of a more uplifting poem in Case’s collection, puts it this way,

though he has never broken the law

before, Nathaniel is influential

enough—mariner and merchant—to arrange

my escape from the eight pounds

of weight, from what would otherwise

be my fate. New York, bless

Governor Fletcher, no friend

of Massachusetts (the two governors

almost slug it out on Martha’s vineyard),

provides asylum. My husband

loves me. The others conspire to get what

we have, divide it among themselves.

For prison keepers who live in penury, and

for those like my Nathaniel

rich enough to assure salvation, praise

the Lord for the glory of bribery.

The poet gets a number of things right. The victims of the Salem Witch Trials are not model human beings. They are earthy country folk with their own fears and shortcomings. Case’s portrayal of four year old Dorcas Good, in the poem of that same name, by her mother, Sarah Good, is riveting. Sarah explains,

…My Dorcas,

four years old, a fluttering

little bird whom I suckled

not so long ago, I admit

is a disordered child. They searched

her too, found a nipple on her finger

which could nourish a snake. If my salvation

after death depends

upon her goodness, I am ruined.

This child, her ways wicked and strange;

All is fury, all is pain.

Case in her poem Without Powerful friends portrays the case of Bridget Bishop, who, among other things, was accused of killing her husband with the use of a voodoo doll. After the first stanza Case interjects an account of Samuel Shattuck’s testimony against Bishop. Shattuck complains that in 1680 Bishop had bewitched his eldest child. This section works quite well. Later on in the same poem Case’s updated language and comments work less well. Bishop speaks,

…If I zoomed three hundred

years into the future, those about me

would still wish me hanged.

[It’s true, it happens every summer

now in front of tourists]

So there it is. I adore my big hats,

taverns, my old house—unlicensed

place of amber-colored cider and play—

my play at shuffleboard,

have no reason for shame

from that forbidden game.

[I’d bet you’d like a cigarette.]

The section of the book called Accusations includes the poem Cursed Children. Case gives voice to Betty Parris, the nine year old daughter of Reverend Samuel Parris. Here the poet’s interjected comments are biting and effective. The poem begins,

…Household chores are difficult

for me. [You’re only nine, Betty Parris!]

I am sickly, do not know

why I should be sickly. Unexplained

sickness sticks to mother.

[Take a closer look at your father.]

I do not know what you mean.

In the poem Master Witch Case recounts the execution of George Burroughs. Burroughs, a former minister himself, does the unthinkable. At the hanging he recites the Lord’s Prayer without a hitch. What to do? Enter the helpful Cotton Mather. The poet concluding the piece explains,

The crowd grows apprehensive.

Everyone knows what a witch must do

is make a mistake.

Then for those unsettled

in the crowd, Cotton Mather reminds them

the hanging must proceed;

George Burroughs has been convicted

by a skillful and temperate jury

(and perhaps he is a Baptist).

Sad, corroded village.

Such was the darkness of the day—

These perceptive and passionate poems by Susana Case are not only well worth the read but a good way to give sentient voice to historical injustice. And poets certainly have a plethora of that raw material.

Plum(b) poems by Kim Triedman

 

Plum(b)

poems

by Kim Triedman

Main Street Rag

Charlotte NC

Copyright © 2013 by Kim Triedman

ISBN: 978-1-59948-408-2

Softbound, 78 pages, $14

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Kim Triedman lives with open windows and with her newest volume of poetry we stand outside her room and hear her thoughts. Reading her reveals even more and we

discover that open windows can tell us something about hearts, open and closed.

The first part of the book, “Plumb” plumbs the history of her house in ways one would not expect. It is the history of two lives, doors, basements, porches, windows, flowers, vegetables and more, all of it riveting reading because Triedman brings you into her world, her garden, her house, herself.

Terra Firma

Forgive me, but I don’t know where

to place my foot.

See how the landscape changes, just like that?

the peas, climbing; the corn?

Nothing is where one might expect anymore, reasonably

expect, given all that time and time

before. There are things I know –

eyes, of course, wet well; the smell of rain

on the tomatoes. Moons

in all their shiny outfits.

But seasons slide beneath our feet

and high above

a hard-bill flicker taps away

at punky time.

I would go there if I could –

the next place. I would find

a way to breathe.

In the “Signs” you see the relationship between Triedman being unsure where to place a foot, perhaps a metaphor for a relationship, and the geese that don’t seem to know where to go. Is there a relationship between fear and ambiguity? Does direction necessarily have meaning?

Signs

The hostas, for instance,

how leggy they grow

and those rickety ladders

of lusterless blooms. Look, I know

what it is –

an ending again, a sorting out

of times. I can lift my head and see

the contrails

parsing up a church-blue sky

and the old dog readies herself

for a winter

she may

or may not see.

Beneath the nasturtiums:

dried leaves hang

like crumpled paper hats.

We have been here before, you and I –

a north wind whispers yellow

to the trees, and the old wicker chair sits

waiting, putting on her poker face.

It’s only that wayward flock of geese –

recklessly ignoring all the signs –

only they don’t seem to know

which way to go.

In the second section, “Plum,” the next layer of Triedman’s personal thoughts are peeled to reveal more of her relationships: In Lost In Translation, for example we see loss in a different way:

I thought you said yes

or something like it, something

juiced, a plum, and time out there

calling and calling, moons swaddling us

like silvered gauze. I thought there were

eyes talking, mouths hearing

every single word, not to mention

the pulse.

But enough about you.

Perhaps you didn’t know

that when I tip my head the clouds

no longer matter, nor the light;

that the red fruits on the dogwood

fall without a sound. Even that

thing we made—glitter and fire

and silk—that thing we never really knew

how to hold,

I have lost that too.

The final section is “Laden” and continues her book-long theme of things as metaphors for life, relationship and self.

Pink Lady

Fitting, perhaps—these fruits

just beginning to turn.

I am laden.

Looking down I see

the childhoods—

dappled; apple

cheek’d.

I am the bearer, the witness

tree—

sheltering,

rooted,

unable to leave

 

The way athletes have career years, Triedman has produced a career volume of poetry, which is not to say past and future books have not or will not surpass this one. However, Plum(b) follows in the footsteps of those poets whose revelations about themselves and their relationships have propelled them to legendary status. 

Ms. Triedman has written much about a house, plants, trees and herself. Yet ultimately

this fascinating volume of sixty-two poems is about her – good love and bad, some happy moments and sad ones. You will see her from the outside in – and the inside out. She has left her windows open for you to discover her. This is a highly recommended book by an accomplished poet.

_________________________________________________

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