Visceral Debut Broadens Readers Boundaries: The Other Room by Kim Triedman

 Visceral Debut Broadens Readers Boundaries: The Other Room by Kim Triedman
   
  Review by Teisha Twomey

I first became acquainted with Kim Triedman as a poet at a recent reading of her work in Cambridge. It was with that background that I was looking forward to reading Kim Triedman’s novel.

The Other Room is a novel about a marriage between two grieving parents, Claudia and Josef, three years after the sudden death of their one-year-old daughter Lily. Their individual sorrow plays out in unique ways.  In the aftermath of the death, they each reach outside of the life they once built together, attempting to find comfort. The consequences correspond well to their individual personalities. Claudia and Josef both withdraw from one another and turn toward other individuals who seem able to fulfill the needs that not being met in their own union. They develop separate lives that exist outside the guilt and resentment lingering between them in hopes of filling the void left in the wake of Lily’s death.

The loss of a child not only haunts Claudia and Josef, but has extensive and wide-ranging influence on their loved ones. Those who once felt they knew this couple intimately are at a loss over how to respond to this tragedy. As Claudia and Josef adapt to  life without their daughter, the gradual recognition that they have lost the ability to comfort one another only intensifies the bitterness souring their relationship.

          Triedman is adept at conveying character’s conflicts and sorrows in a way that is immediate and  persuasive. Her experience as a poet resonates in her prose; her language is lyrical and inventive. The most striking feature of this novel is the strength of Triedman’s imagery and the way in which she skillfuly employs the subtlest of details in the most profound ways.

This novel also reveals Claudia’s meditations in the wake of her daughter’s death through a series of journal entries.  Recorded in Claudia’s “Blue Notebook  they offer much insight into Claudia’s perceptions and her grief even as she begins the healing process.

Claudia describes them as, “One way to broaden the boundaries of an otherwise stunted life.” Through these stolen glances, the reader is able to piece together the interactions between the story’s characters and their observations of one another, finding in them clues to the mystery behind the tragedy of Lily’s death.

Triedman gives size and shape to Claudia and Josef’s grief using insightful techniques. In one “Blue notebook” entry, Claudia recalls her daughter’s funeral. She writes, “That day it felt like there was nothing between me and the sky, as though the blueness of the December morning had weight to it, and density, like a septic lung. It pressed down on all so us, spreading itself thickly, displacing our bodies and our souls in different ways.”.What is striking and about Triedman’s portrayal of grief is the way she gives motion and weight to the the emotional response. Triedman’s use of the concrete qualities of space, movement, time and sound become the intermediaries to the character’s feeling. This way, she effectively communicates a loss too senseless and painful for the trite platitudes of commonplace condolences. By evading banality, Triedman steers her reader into the focused epicenter of bereavement using signals that are visceral to readers.

The reader is required to experience the impact of this family’s grief as if it were their own. Triedman captures how emotional sentiment is innate, rendered through the quantified space of the expanding distances occurring between two bodies, the endless expanse of a dining room table, for example, or through a character’s posture, tone or gait. She breathes life into the emotions felt after loss, recreating their sense of frozen stillness, breathless reticence and cagey shuddering. The use of objects such as frayed satin blankets and fingers raking back and forth across swollen lips convey fathomless regret and bewilderment in a way that penetrate readers completely. These features animate the narrative and connect the interweaving storylines.

Often the unsaid is more moving in this novel than the spoken word. The most compelling moments occur during the breaks in communication where the reader is truly made to feel what it is like to clutch desperately at the smallest threads of understanding. We learn more in what is appropriately unspeakable, in the interlude of stifled dialogue and in the shock of regret when what is said is said in the wrong way. The narrator moves from room to room as this perception of stillness and silence contracts and expands around and inside them, as if someone has hit the mute button on their realities. The reader is made to feel the words forming at the base of Claudia’s throat, the tightening in her jaw, the ear-splitting silence of a room with no windows, a mouth dropped open without sound coming out. Also present are moments of hope as the reader becomes urgently aware of  the small comforts of memory and forgiveness seeping in. There is significant compassion to be considered. We see these moments of pardon, much in the way Josef experiences them: his wife’s smiling eyes bring a persistent bit of optimism suggesting that each of us is capable of forgiveness and understanding.

Triedman paints each character with such specificity that we grow to understand them. Gradually, through the careful peeling away of layers, the reader is able to comprehend  Claudia and Josef’s actions. This tender and precise revelation is one of the details that makes The Other Room so successful. Self-forgiveness unfolds in a without relying on conclusions that are over-simplified or one-dimensional.  Ultimately, the reader trusts in the multi-faceted nature of the characters’ rebirth.

I would recommend this novel to any reader who enjoys highly descriptive and emotionally charged prose. The inventive lyricism and striking fervency of the narrative is enormously effective. The visceral language and imagery that Kim Triedman has employed in order to transmit the emotional state of her characters will likely entrench any reader willing to commit to the thoughtful and measured meditation of this ardent poet and novelist

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Teisha Twomey

 Teisha Twomey was raised in New Lebanon, NY. She is currently working on her MFA in Poetry at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA. Teisha Twomey’s ('13) poem, “How to Treat Pretty Things,” was published in fall/winter 2012 Issue of Ibbetson Street #32. Her poem, “Coming Home,” was published on Fried Chicken and Coffee in October, 2012 and her poem “Cheerios,” will be published in the Santa Fe Literary Review.

Review of A GLIMPSE OF YOUTH, a collection of short stories by Gary Beck

 
Review of A GLIMPSE OF YOUTH, a collection of short stories by Gary Beck, Sweatshoppe Publications, sweatshoppepublications@gmail.com, available on amazon.com, 2013, 130 pages

Review by Barbara Bialick

Gary Beck, a long-time, theater director who lives in New York City, has published a number of books, plays and translations, fiction and poetry. His plays have been produced Off Broadway and toured colleges and outdoor performance venues.  In this new book of short stories, he takes us back to his 1950s early teen years, where he starts out innocent and then gets dragged into a street gang “to avoid being beaten by them”.  With excellent detail and action, we leave the protagonist, Billy, age 18, at the end of the book, out of the gang, and living on his own for the first time in the city of New York, where he gets emotionally blasted by the death of his first love.

The first story, “First Time Out” is about a hiking trip with some questionable friends his father called “hooligans.” They want to get a boy scout handbook for ideas, but to get one, our own protagonist recommends, “Let’s go to the library and steal the book an’ we can find out now…”

Off on their trip to Fort Lee, New Jersey, the author writes, “Finally feeling like the first heroic Americans who first reached the Pacific Ocean, we found the bridge.” Later he writes, “The forest had a strange aura to city boys, venturing into the wilds for the first time. Unfamiliar bird cries, crackling, rustling underbrush and mysterious shadows had an eerie tenseness for us.” Never mind the child predator that tried to pick them up in his car…  They triumph of course,cutting off part of their trip and almost kill one of their own with an ax, thinking he was a bear…

However things get bad in the gang life he soon enters. In “In the City Lost,” Beck writes “Our lookouts came running toward us. Behind them, halfway down the block, was a dense mass of thirty-five or forty boys walking slowly toward us…My hopes for the police showing up disappeared…I rushed towards them, I hit one of them with my belt, and he stumbled off holding his head…” And the battle goes on.

This book would be of interest to people who came from Brooklyn in the 1950s or want an engaging collection about wayward teenagers.

Beck’s chapbook Remembrance, was published by Origami Condom Press. The Conquest of Somalia was published by Cervena Barva Press—a Boston area small press and poetry scene publisher from Somerville, MA.  He published many other books as well.

You’ll certainly want to read the last story in the collection, where Billy is out of the gang and looking to work at a book store corporation. He has love at first sight for Kuan Yin, “whose hair fell to her shoulders, amber and subdued. Her glasses portholed the blue chambers of her eyes and concealed the brief elegance of her nose…”  They have coffee and a perfect date much too hard for the reader to believe. But disaster strikes. She does not show up at work next time.

Finally Billy gets the horrid truth. “Somebody called the main office this morning and told them that she died yesterday. I’m sorry…”

I recommend this book because it is just as well written as many famous authors I have read. You won’t be disappointed.

The Exchange By Sophie Cabot Black

The Exchange
By Sophie Cabot Black
Graywolf Press
Minneapolis
www.graywolfpress.org
ISBN: 978-1-55597-641-5
75 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Sophie Cabot Black calculates her poems into place, line by frozen line. The sharp chill and bracing rarified air within her stanzas catch the unwary reader by surprise. Only by stepping back, outside of Black’s sparsely worded but aphorism-laden constructions can one see the details of an elegant ice palace emerge from the blinding whiteness of her blank hospital-walled universe.

Black’s subject matter includes the numbing illness and death of a close friend as well as the frosted up finances of Wall Street traders. The poet looks at this material through a prism of starkness and Kirkegaardian- like spirituality.

In Afterlife, the collection’s opening poem, Black locates her version of heaven in the childhood from whence she came. The poet says,

This much I remember. But to solve
Where you are you must finish. Ahead a color
Best called white in a room that appears

Unlike any other. Everything used
To get there will fall away. And to look back
Is to watch the child lie down on the floor

In the exact outline and angle I once was
To see what I saw. To take on the precise edge of
How it ends is also where it begins.

Notice the two pithy aphorisms embedded above. Both bear repeating: “…But to solve/ Where you are you must finish,” and “…To take on the precise edge of/ How it ends is also where it begins.” Certainly Interesting. Undoubtedly Clever. And possibly, in the ensuing context, wise.

Confronting death is never easy. For a writer seeking immortality it can become doubly hard. Life’s fateful flaw shadows all of us from the moment of birth. The poet’s persona instructs the writer to walk the afflicted horse backwards in time,

Walk the road backward,
Thick with trees, out through to pasture

Where the bucket hangs ready to fill,
The truck cold, the doctor still asleep.
Your knees without mud, the handbook high

Upon the shelf, the needle as it waits for the question
Not yet asked. Morning untrampled…

Details show their universal depth and history in the poem entitled Biopsy. The poet describes the hospital room,

…he is still afraid
And so I lie down first, which is to say nothing
Except I am not him, concentrating on the manufactured

Tiles above us, which came from somewhere far
And were brought by truck or rail to this city
Where in time they were laid one by the other

To make a ceiling, sky below which we lie
Picking out the stars…

Chemotherapy, another hospital poem, portrays suffering in restrained but emotional detail. It’s consummately done. Perhaps too consummately done. It shows comfort, but also seems quite scary. Here’s the conclusion of it,

…think water, think water,
And he manages to make out one nurse
Up against the bright and it takes everything

To tell her what he needs, as if he had come upon
The one tree still standing, and understood
She promises nothing, who in her uniform

Was all that was ever asked for and who
Could hold him as he has never been held.

Early in the collection Black sets in place the curious pose poem The Son. It gives a very sparse rendition of the Abraham/ Isaac story, almost an outline until the very end. Abraham appears as a sad old man, a man who is a part of mankind’s past. Isaac is the game changer, the master of a new universe, a universe that celebrates life and understands the nature of luck.  Here’s the money lines,

…son who saw the end of day
as ecclesiastic, as blaze. Son who in time made all other sons listen to the
story of the old man who got all the way up and who without looking
back went over to the other side. Who disappeared as if searching for
other sons. As if done. Son who walked in quiet and calm, having come
back down, alone. Son for whom nothing was changed, was changed, and
in the changing changed the world.

The aphoristic last line delivers some impressive power that seems to echo throughout the book.

The poem High Finance deals with the manipulation of knowledge essential to a trade. The poet like Isaac knows what the stakes are. That’s her advantage. Black puts it this way,

…The uncertain
Is taken into accountas each of us
Prepares for more than is necessary

To be near what is almost  ours
And to watch for defect, even damage can be useful.
To have it all known, your business…

In the poem Preservation of Capital the concept of exchange strikes home with its dreadful life and death connotations. Here’s how the poem opens,

Risk as part of the equation means
You go nowhere without it. In one pocket
The noise of plenty; the other, dread. Each coin

Brought forth is explained
As necessary. You find yourself at the bank
Of a river where everyone gathers; you put

Children at your feet, divide the bread..

The poet injects enough ambiguity that the setting neatly switches from Wall Street to a biblical location in the same stanza, sometime in the same word. Consider how she uses the word, “bank.”

Isaac speaks in the last poem in the collection. He is facing a brave new world. His story reverberates. People gather, gain knowledge from Isaac’s story, then leave. The poem ends thusly,

…And here am I

Who withheld nothing. And there the white
Always in the tree. You go
Where you need to go until it does not

Matter. You do not matter. There is
The window. Open. Now go through.

Yes, life is a trade-off. Invest your time with Black’s exquisitely done, coolly delivered poems. You’ll be amazed at the dividends.

Poet Dan Sklar: An American Primitive

Poet Dan Sklar

Dan Sklar has been described as an "American Primitive" by other poets in the region. And they mean this as a compliment. Sklar is a PhD and  a professor of Creative Writing at Endicott College, and he writes with a no-frills and emotive style--that cuts to the chase and cuts the ... well you know what.  His latest book of poetry is titled  Flying Cats: Actually Swooping  ( Ibbetson Street Press). I talked with Sklar on my Somerville Community Access TV show Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.

Doug Holder: You have won a number of awards for teaching excellence. I often hear you and your students screaming when I am in my office at Endicott College early in the morning. Is this is a good indicator of an engaged classroom?

Dan Sklar: ( Laughs) Well it depends on what you are teaching. But that particular course was play writing. And in that course we were doing scenes. So in scenes people are usually arguing and fighting--there is conflict. I think you should wake your students up. You wake up their minds. Talk to them like human beings. The first few minute of the class I always come in with a story. I also use dreams. When you talk about dreams suddenly everyone listens, because everyone dreams. You ask them about their dreams.  I always bring in something that makes them listen.

DH: You are also a playwright. Recently you had a play staged at the Actor's Studio in Newburyport, Mass. entitled Hack License. What was the play about?

DS: Well--it is about a woman taxi cab driver--22 years old, from Louisiana. And all these New Yorkers come into her cab. And they all come with their problems. And they insult her. But in spite of this she solves their problems. She is also looking for a man. He has to paint like Charles Burchfield. Burchfield was known for painting pictures with bright colors, storms, flowers, volcanoes vivid yellows, reds and greens.

DH: What playwrights have influenced you.  Eugene O'Neill for instance?

DS:I wish I could write like Eugene O'Neill. Every time I start to write like him it comes out like Neil Simon. Saroyan is a big influence. George S. Kaufman, and Thornton Wilder are also.

 
DH: You use a lot of comedy in your writing.

DS: Yeah--but I never mean to. It just happens.

DH: Walt Whitman and Charles Bukowski are inspirations for you. Whitman seemed to embrace the world, while Bukowski was misanthropic. What appeals yo you about these divergent voices?

DS: I like Bukowski's freedom. I am lusty as nature like Whitman. With Bukowski I like his sincerity and honesty. Bukowski has a poem that states that he has a bluebird in his heart that he tries to drown with whiskey.  But the blue bird is still there. It is a beautiful poem. Whitman is full of love and contradictions.  Like Whitman, I contradict myself, so I contradict myself. I am filled with contradictions. And Bukowski is filled with contradictions.

DH:  Your new collection is  Flying Cats: Actually Swooping ( Ibbetson Street Press). Where did you get the title from?

DS: I was watching a TV show about the future in which there were no humans on the planet. And I started to fall asleep but I heard: "In the future there will be flying cats. And I perked up. The show talked about how in the future when there are no humans the cats will go back into the trees and fly....actually swooping. So I wrote a poem about the future where cats will fly--people will ride horses--and take trains--life will be slower.

DH: You seem to be an eternal optimist. It must be hard to maintain.

DS: Yes. When I am with people it is not hard. Especially with students. I brood when I am alone. When I go to a coffee-shop by myself I get depressed. It is creative depression. And good writing comes from it. It's like the Russians. A Russian has to suffer.

DH: Lisa Beatman, a well-respected poet, described you as an American Primitive.

DS: I like that label. When she says primitive I love it. It means basic, primal...there is nothing fancy about it. I take it as a compliment. I use very little metaphor in my poetry--if I come up with it it is by pure chance.

DH: Like William Carlos Williams your poetry is about things.

DS: Oh. Absolutely. My last book with Ibbetson Street was  Bicycles, Canoes and Drums--all primitive things. The future is going to go back to basics--like horse drawn carriages, etc....

DH: In your new collection you have a poem  Poetry Mind -- that deals with you trying to keep from becoming standardized. Do you think people today are thinking less outside the box?

DS: I don't know what other people are thinking or doing. But I think folks should not be so enamored with technology. There are too many screens around. All of this is going way from nature. When you go away from nature--destroying it becomes less of a problem.

How You Were Raised

Whatever you were doing
why don’t you do
something else
No matter what it was
something else
was always better
You’re not going to cry
about it or anything now
You’re just stating
the facts of the matter
No matter what you were
doing it was no good
what good is acting in
plays—imagination is
for other people
art is for other people.
Something else is better
that’s just how it was
when you were a kid
and when you went
to college another one
was better—transfer
Don’t be an artist
or actor
or writer
or teacher.
There’s no money
in those things.
Do something else
Be something else
You can’t do what
comes naturally to you
what you want to do
because what you want
to do is not about how
to make money.
In 1958
in Greenwich Village
you saw a beatnik
and your father said
that’s a beatnik.

--By Dan Sklar

Glory By Linda M. Fischer

Glory


By Linda M. Fischer

Finishing Line Press

Georgetown, Kentucky

www.finishinglinepress.com

ISBN: 978-1-62229-327-8

26 Pages

$14.00



Review by Dennis Daly



“Let my voice mingle and drift where it may,” says Linda M. Fischer in her new poetry collection entitled Glory. Well, it turns out that her words drifted over the environs of Somerville Massachusetts and into the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square where Fischer’s chapbook was thrust into my hands by the renowned and bearded Bringer-of-Books.



The collection’s opening poem, Memorial Day Weekend sets out in loving detail the author’s relationship with her mother, her father, and her mother’s garden. Along the way Fischer establishes her bona fides as a nature writer with her apt descriptions, her sensory meditations, and her magical memories. Here is a telling section of that poem,



As I clear away dead stalks, reworking

a weed-blown croft until I can feel its bones,

I think of the gift from my father—a garden to tend—

at five, the scent of stewardship no less sweet

than tips of daffodils and narcissus reaching for the sun.

He contrived the borders that were to limn my world…



Later in the same poem Fischer lives in the moment which she directs according to her own will. Future considerations like ownership are beside the point. The poet explains,



…What I have begun

for her I do as much for myself, to compass

what is possible in the time we have left to us.

She talks about the gardens “enhancing the value

of the property,” glossing over its inevitable sale.

I obsess about the perfect juxtaposition of purple

coneflower with globe thistle…

What’s important to Fischer is not merely the seasons or the anticipation of future blooms, but the memories which fuel her anticipation. Unlike Lot’s wife, she’s not one to look back, her memories are enough. In her poem Leaving she exults,



…I learned to rake—

a seasonal reckoning on the heels of adolescence—

piling up memories to last a lifetime

within a span of only ten years.

when I struck out on my own I never

looked back…



The poet’s green thumb extends beyond plant life to garden implements in her poem The Benches. She refurbishes two cracked and moldered benches from her mother’s garden. These benches had aged just as her mother had. In one sense it was part of her mother that was being brought back. Fischer describes the results,



…by the time

they fell to me who would imagine them rising

like a pair of resplendent phoenixes—new

red oak burnished in urethane, ironwork

powder-coated in its original color, pieces

fitted with identical nuts and bolts—so by

now I can almost credit The Resurrection.



The poem Frankly Ferns charms with its sexually suggestive language and witty puns. Apparently even the plant industry has caught on and markets the various types of ferns coyly. Consider this stanza,



Now, here’s a tempting number—hart’s tongue,

something of a braggart: a hardy “evergreen terrestrial”

tagged as perennially “fresh and erect.” Bearing

little resemblance to its brethren, it reflects a soupcon

of impertinence, likely, I think, to insinuate itself

into any social situation—its abundant foliage

“neatly puckered” as if it had every expectation of getting

a big sloppy kiss. Who could resist?



This poet not only looks at nature in her gardens closely, she also looks at herself looking. The results can be pretty funny. In Cheating the Deer Fischer’s persona dreams a veritable Garden of Eden with sensual stimulations of lilac scent, wayward breezes, diamond showers, and a rainbow of iris. She envisions Monet’s gardens spilling into place. Then the villainous intruding deer nips her beautiful buds. The plot thickens,



thieves, they slip in from the woods to browse,

their stealth footfalls rumored in the soft earth.

She may dream of her iris emerging from tight

cocoons like butterflies on the wing; foxglove

advancing like an armed battalion, lances held

aloft; the peonies swelling like gaudy balloons…

and well she may dream, among other things,

of dressed venison with a nice Bordelaise and fries.



The last two lines neatly transform the poet-gardener into Hannibal Lector.

Fischer’s poem Hubris deals with mankind’s attempt to control his environment. The poet sets up another humorous situation when she goes to war against weedy grass. On her hands and knees she pulls tufts of it out. Her daughter catches her in the act. Even tiny lawns are afflicted by this lighter variety of invading grass. Trust me. I know. Here is a description of her battle plan,



Doggedly she stalks outlying tufts

like a huntress, shrugging off the likelihood

that someone will think her daft—half

stooped, peering interminably over her toes.

She tries to justify expunging one

unruly invader from a host of others,

and can’t—the thrust sufficient unto itself.



The title poem and the last piece in this collection celebrates morning and rebirth and hope and in a sense immortality. The poet gives a pantheistic view of the waking world. She becomes the fox that coughs in the distant wood, the hawk that feels the earth’s living breath and the snake coiling in the sun. As she observes she becomes part of the rhythm of life and with her human awareness she exults in the music and beauty of it all. She sums it up this way,



… I will cultivate my garden

and I will move to the rhythms of the living earth.

I will listen to my heart and I will sing

when I cannot help but sing, and glory—

glory!—for this is the morning of my life,

and this is the way the day begins.



Read this lyrical wondrous collection first thing in the morning. It will make your day.

Interview with Poet/ State Rep. Denise Provost

Denise Provost

Interview with Poet/ State Rep. Denise Provost

with Doug Holder



Denise Provost writes:


"I started writing – mainly, but not exclusively poetry – as a child. I got a full scholarship to Bennington College during my sophomore year of high school, based in large part on a manuscript of poetry. In my senior year, I decided to go to law school, after having decided that I was not suited for a graduate degree in English literature.


I graduated from Bennington in 1971, started law school in 1972, graduated from law school in 1982. I worked as a lawyer for the City of Newton, then was recruited by the City of Somerville, to work for reform mayor Eugene Brune. Working in local government gave me ideas about how government could become more transparent and responsive. In 1993, I ran for Ward Alderman in Ward 5, coming very close against a long-time incumbent.


The incumbent resigned a year and two weeks later, and the Board of Alderman appointed a replacement. I ran against the appointee in 1995, again coming close. After that second defeat, I figured my political career was over. Then, in 1999, the ward 5 incumbent did not run for re-election, and one of the at-large aldermen made the same decision. I ran for the latter seat, and won.


I served on the Board of Aldermen for almost seven years, running for state representative in a special election. I won that election in February, 2006, and have since represented Somerville’s 27th Middlesex District.

As my children got older, I found I was writing more poetry again, and decided that I needed a teacher. I was accepted into Susan Donnelly’s poetry writing workshop in 2010. Since then, I’ve had poetry published in a number of print and on-line journals."



I had the pleasure to interview Provost on my Somerville Community Access TV Show Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.







Doug Holder: Are there any canonical Somerville poets worth mentioning?



Denise Provost: Sam Walter Foss. Foss Park is named after him. I believe he was a poet during the early 20th Century. He wrote some good poetry actually.  His poem about Prospect Hill is used every Jan 1st when we go up to Prospect Hill to raise the first flag.



DH: In your statement it mentions your poetry manuscript helped you get into Bennington College. What was the theme?



DP: I wrote about ideas, and observations. At one point I did a series of poems about each one of the colors. I wrote about nature. I wrote about ideas I encountered.



DH: What got you started as a poet?



DP: I liked it. And I also think I started because I was very fond of song. One of the things I like about songs is that they have meter. And usually they have rhyme. Early on thoughts would would come to me in the form of metric rhymes' little bits of lyrics. I would make up new lyrics to different melodies. And at some point these turned into poems.



DH: You are a graduate of Boston University Law School. Why did you not stick with a literary career?



DP: I remember the application for Bennington asked me what centuries did I want to specialize in. I was convinced that I wanted to be a Medievalist. And then I got to college and I started reading other material, and I realized I couldn't spend my life with metaphysical poets of the 15th Century.



DH: Do you think you would make a good poetry teacher?



DP: Possible--maybe even probably. I have worked with young people. I have a good eye and a good ear. And I know I am a good editor. I edited professionally for the New England Journal of Law and Medicine.



DH: Are you familiar with any lawyer/writers?



DP: Well of course Franz Kafka was a lawyer for the German Workers Compensation System. Andrew Marvel is a favorite poet of mine. He was a diplomat and in the British parliament.



DH: Do you write political poetry?



DP: Occasionally. Sometimes I am inspired by the newspaper to write poetry. And sometimes it is rather satirical. I love Calvin Trilling. He writes wonderfully, funny political poems. Even when they are not topical anymore they are fun to read.



DH: Has what you write about now changed from when you were young?



DP: No. Every bit of that WOW! response I had as a kid I still have. If my subject matter has changed it is because my world is much bigger now. I have children now, although I don't write about them that much. I write a lot about things I remember. Like once I was at the gym and saw a woman who reminded me of someone I knew years ago. I decided to write a story about her in the form of a sonnet. Sonnet-writing is a challenge for me. I have to say everything I want to say in 14 lines.



DH: The poem is never finished, right?



DP: As Paul Valery wrote: "The poem is never finished it is abandoned."



DH: David Slavitt--a noted poet, author, translator etc... ran against Tim Toomey, a state legislator, and lost by a landslide. He told me that poets would make good politicians because they have built in shit detectors. Your take?



DP: I think that if you are a self-disciplined poet, and you listen very carefully--you have to have one. It helps you hone in on the essence of things.







The Deal

Crafty Bob, and his good friend, Mr. Wynn,



woo Foxborough. They make a solemn vow



that the great Pleasure Dome that they’ll put in



won’t turn the town to Vegas, or Macau.







“Bucolic” is the way Foxborough will stay.



No high rise buildings, or parades of cars



will spoil its home town feel, or Patriot ways,



but make the tax base plump; leave life unmarred.







I don’t live there. It is not up to me



to trust these wealthy gentlemen, or not.



I’ll watch Foxborough’s courtship, and I’ll see



if the Deal can be marketed, and bought.







I’m certain that the one per cent must know



what benefits the rest of us, below.



– Denise Provost







Water Chestnut Pull, Mystic River







There was a time when every day in June



I woke anticipating summer’s fields;



picking wild strawberries; my good fortune



then to enjoy that sweet and fragrant yield.



But this June day another harvest brings



out on the weed-choked river, where we glide,



dragging up water chestnuts’ living strings



of leaf, stem, root, and seed-pods, dripping slime,

pulled up from sulfurous, anaerobic mud.

We pile our baskets with each reeking mass.

Our boat rides lower with this captive load;

we haul in truckloads full; the hours pass.

Though sun-ripe fruit would satisfy my greed

I’m well content, uprooting noxious weeds.

– Denise Provost

Galway Kinnell Reading at Longfellow House Sunday July 28 at 3pm

Galway Kinnnell

                          Galway Kinnell Reading at Longfellow House Sunday July 28 at 3pm


                                                          hosted by NEPC             

by Michael Todd Steffen

Blesser of animals, photogenic wanderer in Calcutta, fasting bear-blood tracker with knives in his two fists, cabin feverer, hush-singer to a daughter woken from nightmares, Galway Kinnell took up permanent residence in American poetry by finding presence of mind and speech in some of the most bizarre (a criterion term Baudelaire digested from Poe) scenarios, situations and personae. ‘He’s as solitary as Thoreau’ –I’ve heard my mind utter after reading one of his singular eclogues.

Kinnell should need no introduction or promotion. He is a sequoia among our living poets, and one of those rare readers who brings the music that you hear when you read his poems to the lectern.

He will be joined by poets Brendan Galvin, Greg Delanty and Daniel Tobin at the Longfellow House, 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge, on Sunday July 28 at 3pm. The event is hosted by the New England Poetry Club (NEPC) under the rubric IRISH AMERICAN VOICES. It is open to the public and free of charge.

He Looked Beyond My Faults And Saw My Needs By Leonard Gontarek

He Looked Beyond My Faults

And Saw My Needs

By Leonard Gontarek

Hanging Loose Press

Brooklyn, New York

www.hangingloosepress.com

ISBN: 978-1-934909-31-7

88 Pages

$18.00



Review by Dennis Daly



Lucifer, God’s favorite, now fallen, angel graciously invites us into his looking glass world made up of perfumes, strange sex, strong drink, idols, and impending death. He does this through the imagistic poetry of Leonard Gontarek. Oh wait, I have this backwards. Leonard Gontarek invites us into his emotionally charged and arty version of hell on earth. The poet does this through Lucifer’s angelic, albeit horny, persona. Hmmm… perhaps I had it right the first time.



Although the movement in these poems is linear, the interjection of dreamlike images and surreal logic beckons the reader elsewhere and leads him into cul de sacs, detours, and neighborhoods off the beaten road.



In Gontarek’s opening poem entitled Autumn Sonata the poet considers Jackson Pollock, a fallen angel if ever there was a fallen angel. According to the poet Pollock saw the world as a burning cruise ship. Sounds about right! Pollock’s work also engendered a strange calm into some of his most chaotic compositions. Gontarek sees equivalent natural landscapes, where shadows deepen on autumn leaves. The poet (or is it Lucifer) is onto something here. He cautions rightly against cavorting with the darker powers. Gontarek concludes with some pretty intriguing lines,



Pollock once sat in a field with an elixir,

after selling his soul to the devil.

A mixture of whiskey and dusk.

It looked like the glass was frothing,

but it was ordinary mist.



Recently I looked at a Pollock painting

which, always sacred to me,

looked like a bunch of paint piled on a canvas.

One of the saddest afternoons.



Even angels walking the earth have second thoughts about their nature and their choices. Gontarek details his misgivings after twenty-five years of writing poetry in Hymn, a short poem, which makes the point wittily. The poet says,



I am stepping out, just now, for stamps.

Terrorists pull up in a silver Mercedes—

the newer, American model—spray Uzis in my direction.

I fall to the ground, riddled with doubt.



I bet that there are quite a few poets out there that can identify with those lines.



A little bit of hell on earth can be a good thing. For instance the poet finds God or at least religion between Little Pete’s Diner and the windy corner of Pine and Quince. Nearby hunger spurs patrons into the inferno. Gontarek lovingly concludes,



…I undo your hair. Here the analogy breaks down.



The line is long at Dante’s Ribs. The leaves exquisite, combust.

A fly lands on the heart. Evening follows.



The poet-angel penning these poems contents himself with love and mysteries rather than seeking meaning in life. He interchanges dreams with reality on a whim or rather as part of his artistic makeup. There’s little sentimentality here. Here’s how he puts it,



…God fingers us, all night long.

Cars skirl the wet streets. Brilliant red cars.

Leaves don’t so much fall, as



are dumped into wet needles.

Difficult to tell dream from the other thing.

Inhabit this world when I damn well feel like it.

Compassion is not a requirement.



Gontarek’s poem Loop is a wonderful continuum of imagery praising the seekers of worldly knowledge and the limits of that same knowledge (think Garden of Eden Tree of Knowledge). The poem opens this way,



The trees are infinite. A particle of bird sits on a branch.



The clouds, scum-caked bottoms of boats.



Heart, dog on a 20-foot leash, awake and restless, goes so far.



Praise, infinite. The trees have made us for themselves.



I want to know death, smear of red, understand.



Anonymity can be a necessity in the environs of hell, especially for an angel, fallen or not. Gontarek sets his poem The Summer in a strip joint. The poet’s persona explains,



Nothing to do, but finish

my Absolut, keep to myself.



Take in a show. Nightclub

gone to seed. Erotic act:



Leda And The Swan. Leda

of course, a woman. The swan,



not necessarily a man.

Try not to look at the others,



On the way in, and out.



The poem entitled Email is made up of ten short erotic fragments of varying intensity, some balanced with a touch of melancholy. The theme seems to be the ambiguity (hell, the excitement) that exists in Gontarek’s infernal regions. Consider this one fragment,



Afterward, I go to hell like a bullet from a sad man.

Beautiful nude women, trees, along the way.

Take off my clothes, you said, so they tear.



Sometimes conferring with fellow angels only confuses things, especially while intoxicated. The poem Notebook V expresses some of the poet’s exasperation. Here’s how the poem opens,



The angel asks if we have thought things over. Close, her perfume on you.

God watches on TV.



Karma ran over my dogma.

Vodka, cocaine, Gap cologne cocktail.



Do I know what I mean? My sister in any windy

Garden, cupping a praying mantis like a green flame.



The Buddha hears all prayers with his big ears. buddha error.



Goddamn Sacre Coeur is everywhere.



And later in the same poem you get this riveting and spot on line,



I wait for the rusty factory gate to open. Drinking in dawn, pitching woo

to archangels.



Artistry brings intensity and forbidden knowledge. And with that seems to come a sense of surveillance. The poet as fallen angel describes the sensation as follows,



… A twig snap, just as expected.

A voice, stern and fatherly, hushes the extras, or has he just imagined it.

Moon, cylindrical-shaped in pond. Everything heightened in crosshairs of God.



Brave fire and brimstone if you must, but buy this book. Leonard Gontarek is a heluva poet.

Flower Map by Deborah Leipziger

  Flower Map

by Deborah Leipziger

© 2013 Deborah Leipziger

Finishing Line Press

Georgetown KY

ISBN  978-1-62229-321-6

Softbound, $14, 25 pages

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Flower Map simply put is about love—these are love poems and they are sexy, sensual, exciting. Take for example Sueῇo

I sleep inside your sleep

Your touch in my touch

Your hand resting on my side

Guitar curve of my body

In the night you whisper

“It’s like an exotic island”

The moon reclining into the night

Your sweat in my pores

I dream inside your dream

Awake inside your morning

Don’t you long to be the other half of this poem?  Can’t you imagine yourself in the dream?  Ms. Leipziger has a way with her romances as Awaken informs us:

Your body presses against my back

arousing me awake

touching through the golden silk sheath

that falls all around me

Morning hovers over us

like a blanket

You cover me completely—

how you come crashing into me,

each time a new ocean

Your breath bites on my clavicle

Your pulse in mine

Brazilian born she has lived in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands which adds to her distinct imaging.

This book is also about loving her children.

Morning

My little daughter next to me,

her profile luminous

like a painting.

Her skin is like the morning,

warm and softly lit,

not alabaster

like her sister’s,

but golden peach.

Her face is a geography of the places I love,

of everything I know.

I am an admirer of Deborah Leipziger’s poetry for two reasons: first the sheer beauty of her poems and second the ability to make love seem like more than mere physicality, more than base emotion.  When I edited Bagel Bards Anthology 7 hers was the lead poem. 

Finally, the last poem in Flower Map is about making bread, challah to be specific and

it is a metaphor for so many things: poetry, relationships, love, life and family.

Here are some lines from How to make challah which provides insight into her wonderful talent.

Make a well./A deep well to contain the grief./Pour the yeast water into the well./Let it seep in./Add 3 eggs and 3 tablespoons of oil./Take off your rings.

Read the rest of this poem in her book. Read all the poems.  Pick a quiet place where you

will not be disturbed. Turn off the phone. You will want to concentrate and ruminate. Enjoy.

_____________________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

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

Review of CATHERINE REFRACTED

Review of CATHERINE REFRACTED, Pure Slush Vol. 7, edited by Matt Potter, June 2013,
http://pureslush.webs.com/store.htm, 100 pages.

Review by Barbara Bialick

In “Catherine refracted”, the editor and his anthology of chosen authors have fashioned a charming and gregarious biography written as separate story vignettes about Catherine the Great, straight out of Russian history. Catherine, born in 1729 as Sophie, is known for her vast power, ribald party ideas and various love affairs with the men of her court.  Editor Matt Potter writes that “Catherine’s accomplishments are too too numerous and too too varied to mention here…suffice to say that if an accomplishment is mentioned in this book, it’s probably true.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t first quote Susan Tepper, a Boston small press and poetry scene author. Her first-person story is titled “Two Grigorys”, and begins “Onging it is an extremely bitter winter, though all our winters are dastardly cold. My bed is a fortress of misery. Both my
Grigorys have been absent past a fortnight, one off waging battle in the western regions, the other laced in the arms of my French cousin, Isabelle, a haughty princess capable of the worst treacheries…”

In her doldrums, says Tepper, the empress is tired of embroidering seat cushions and drinking Vodka. After her “dwarf minister” suggested she exile both Grigorys to the Isle of Elba, she “sentenced the dwarf minister Soleninkoff, to death by firing squad. As he was dragged away I felt a certain pleasure sensation, similar to the pleasure that I receive from my two Grigorys…”

A funny tale by Sarah Collie is called “Transvestite Balls” and actually describes the various sexy and hairy men in their ball gowns. “Stifling a giggle, she thought the lieutenant’s violet, off-the-shoulder gown was a brave choice, especially since he had so much dark chest hair…”

“The Kings and I” is a well-titled history by Kim Conklin Hutchinson, who writes “Yes, history does repeat itself. From up here, it’s a bit like watching oneself in a play…over and over. It’s fascinating how one little Prussian woman can become the source of so many passionately believed rumours, innuendoes, and outrageous legends…History isn’t fair. Neither is life. My real death was even more undignified, a form of passing that I share with another kind of later monarch, the king of rock-n-roll…” Unfortunately I had trouble deciphering what the death was…

Well, you get the idea. This Pure Slush volume is one of many such Slush literary magazines on intriguing themes such as “obit”, “versus”, “gorge: a novel in stories”, “real Pure Slush”, and “notausgang: emergency exit.”

Editor Matt Potter is an Australian-born writer who keeps a part of his psyche in Berlin, he says. Susan Tepper is the author of four published books. Her most recent title is “From the Umberplatzen”, a flash novel set in Germany. Her novel, “What May Have Been” (with Gary Percesepe), Cervena Barva Press, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2010.
Sarah Collie has lived in Scotland, Australia and now England.  And, Kim Conklin Hutchinson is an AmeriCanadian living on the border”, she says. Her stories and films have appeared widely.

Assassins Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim July 13-20 F.U.D.G.E. Theatre Company

Assassins

Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Directed by Joey DeMita

July 12-15

F.U.D.G.E. Theatre Company

The Black Box at the Arsenal Center, Watertown, MA



Review by Zvi A. Sesling

F.U.D.G.E. Theatre Company’s presentation of Assassins is an interesting presentation of an play from the 1990s. On the Broadway stage perhaps with more scenery, full staging and better amplification, particularly microphones, it is clearly an award-winning play.

Assassins creates a netherworld where men and women who attempted to assassinate U.S. presidents reside. Some of them have been successful and others not. Each assassin’s era features Sondheim-adapted music to reflect what was popular at that time.

F.U.D.G.E. and director Joey DeMita mounted a fine attempt at re-creating the play. Let me get to the shortcoming first: the music overwhelmed some of the voices. In particular, it was difficult to hear Kelton Washington as the Proprietor. While his facial expressions and strutting were perfect for the role, unfortunately the strong singing which he exhibited in Parade was minimized or lost. The same can be said of Jim Petty’s John Wilkes Booth and Jared Walsh’s two roles of the Balladeer and Lee Harvey Oswald. At times laid back and at other times emotional, Walsh was difficult to hear. However, when the ensemble or the assassins sang as a group, the voices were clearer. It also seemed that some of the timing was off. Hopefully, all these negatives were overcome in the subsequent performances because DeMita’s direction usually presents precision and Music Director Steven Bergman usually hits the right notes.

The performers who stood out—all of them good—were Ian flynn’s Charles J. Guiteau, Katie Preisig who portrayed Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme and an over-the-top Patrick Harris as Sam Byck, who caught the tape recording insanity the way one would picture Byck’s insanity. Of course the insanity of all these assassins and the would-be assassins was portrayed the way one would have imagined.

David Lucey’s costume designing was on target, particularly his 1800s designs of Guiteau and President Garfield. The Proprietor’s outfit seemed to fit almost any era, which is a grand accomplishment. PJ Strachman’s lighting helped add a noir like effect and Emily Taborda-Monroe’s minimalist set design helped create the right image.

Overall, the production was a fine effort and with a bit of tightening p here and there it will be a terrific production worthy of F.U.D.G.E.



____________________________________________________

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

Judah Leblang: A Middle-Aged, Jewish, Gay Man Chronicles his life in Prose and a Play.

Judah Leblang

Judah Leblang: A middle-aged, Jewish, Gay Man Chronicles his life in Prose and a Play.

By Doug Holder

  I got an email from a writer acquaintance Judah Leblang. It seems that his department at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. (that he worked at for years) transferred to Endicott College in Beverly, Mass.--where I teach. He also told me that he has developed a one man play based on his memoir (My Place: One Man's Journey from Cleveland to Boston and Beyond)  titled One Man's Journey through the Middle Ages. His memoir chronicles his youth in Cleveland, Ohio during the 60's and 70's, his attachment to that down-at-the-heels city-- and his life as a Jewish, gay single man. The show explores Leblang's fear, and loathing in Provincetown, Mass. (A gay mecca) one summer-- his rather sudden hearing loss, and the universal themes of aging and loss.

Here is an excerpt from Leblang's memoir about his grandmother, Cleveland, and the world beyond the broad lawns and narrow minds of the suburbs:

"I knew my parents didn't like to go into the city. My mother saw Cleveland as a cauldron of riots, crime and burned out neighborhoods, a place to avoid. Still, on a sunny day in May 1968, I was an eleven-year-old boy who knew that Cleveland was full of wonders like planes and trains and buildings that pierced the sky, miracles my grandmother and I would share like her warm pastry. And so my grandmother and I stood quietly as my mother drove off, back to the safety of the eastern suburbs.

Waiting for the bus, Nanny's maple tree rustling above us, I thought of other times, other adventures with my grandmother, when I was five, seven, eight. On special weekends, she would baby-sit for my brothers and I, bringing her pastry and her Jewish rye bread, her cough drops and powdery scent into our suburban home. At five, before the accident, I'd sing and dance for her entertainment, repeating rhymes I'd learned in nursery school-"Mary had a little lamb," "Humpty Dumpty," and later, "My Country 'Tis of Thee," which I'd warbled at a school assembly in Kindergarten in my thin childish voice. Later, I'd tell my grandmother she was beautiful, promise to marry her when I grew up. According to my mother, I was a little khnifenik, Yiddish for a "flatterer."

 

  I used to read Leblang's column in the Somerville Journal where he held court from 1999 to 2001. Leblang lives in Medford now, but he was a denizen of Teele Square in Somerville. Presently Leblang is a columnist for Bay Windows- a gay newspaper in Boston. His slice-of-life stories have been heard on NPR and many other radio stations. Leblang counts Somerville writers Dan Gerwitz (Formerly of the Boston Herald) and Randy Ross (Founder of Media Chowder--a networking group for writers) as friends, and the trio used to perform in the area with a piece about being middle aged.

 I asked Leblang why he feels he has a story that is worth being told. He said: “Memoir writers have been accused of being navel gazers. Hey...I am not Bill Clinton, or Nelson Mandela. But I feel I have a story that people can relate to. We all have to make choices; we all grow old; well all have to deal with loses." And Leblang tells his story with a winning combination of humor and pathos. Of being a single gay man

 of a certain age, Leblang said: "I am part of a subculture of middle-aged gay men that belong to a culture that puts youth and looks at a premium. It is challenging to meet someone near my own age for a possible relationship."

 Leblang will be leading a memoir writing workshop this fall at Somerville Public Library in Davis Square, and will be performing  his play in the area--check his website  http://judahleblang.com for more information.