Endicott Writers at the Gloucester Writers Center Nov. 20

Boston Strong/Boston Proper/Bunker Hill Community College

 Doug Holder reading at the Boston Strong/Boston Proper Reading at the Mary Fifield Art Gallery at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston.

Bagel Bards Anthologies: 1 through 8 to be part of the Permanent Collection at The Somerville Public Library

 

 

The Bagel Bards

 

 

 

 

Just got word that the Bagels with the Bards ( 1-8) Anthologies will become part of the permanent Local History Collection at the Somerville Public Library. The Bagel Bards is a group of poets, playwrights, novelists and short fiction writers that have met since 2004. Originally the Bards met in the basement of the now defunct Finagle-A-Bagel in Harvard Square, but now preside every Saturday  morning at the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square in Somerville.There are over 100 members and a core of 25 to 30 folks who have shown up every Saturday for almost a decade. The group was founded by Doug Holder and Harris Gardner.

Somerville Historical Collection

http://www.somervillepubliclibrary.org/localhistory/policy.html

 

 

Bagels with the Bards 1 to 8  http://www.bagelbards.com

 The Bagel Bards

We have a vibrant community of poets and writers who meet to chew the fat every Saturday morning at Au Bon Pain in Davis Sq. Somerville Massachusetts. Our membership reads like a Who's Who in the Boston Glitterati.

These now famous bards have produced an annual book for the five years. sample it:

Bagels With the Bards #1 

So it came to pass that a couple of poets ‐‐ congenially munching their bagels in the spacious basement refectory of a bagelry called Finagle‐a‐Bagel on JFK in Harvard Square, all the while conjecturing upon the potential mental, spiritual and perhaps even physical salubriousness of occasional social interface with other human beings likewise blest or cused to pursue the word, to ply their craft or sullen art, in isolation ‐‐ gave birth to the idea of Bagelbards. At any rate, here it is: The First Annual Bagelbards Anthology, in celebration of the first full year of informal weekly Saturday morning gatherings of Bagelbards in the aforementioned spacius basement of Finagle‐a‐Bagel. Read it, and eat.

Bagels With the bards #2

It all came to fruition the day we made our first bagel, after a few energetic drafts of the thing. It got up from the table, shook its rolling shoulders, yawned from the hollow core mouth of itself, and began to dance. At that precise moment, the miracle came as sure as the Matrix Oracle would have predicted from over her pan of cookies. Sunlight hit the bagel, and it became lines on the floor, long lines that would have been perfect for any chorus line, but instead filled themselves with words, words that made promises to all of us. These words spoke the premise. The poet is a baker although he may never have the dough. We looked at each other and knew this was our creation myth, this dance of language on some piece of paper, or in our hearts, or in the burrowed brow of the manager trying to wrap his head around the idea that poets gather in the corner of his place on Saturdays and spend a few hours living, living, living. O bard, a bagel has become a poem.

 Bagels With the Bards #3

Bagel Bard – noun. 1. A poet that is glazed and ring-shaped whose poetry has a tough, chewy texture usually made of leavened words and images dropped briefly into nearly boiling conversations on Saturday mornings— often baked to a golden brown. 2. –verb. To come together in writership over breakfast. To laugh so hard at an irreverent statement that the sesame seeds of the bagel you’ve just eaten explode from your mouth like grenade shrapnel. Welcome to the third Bagelbard Anthology. As some of you know (or can guess from the above definition) the Bagel Bards meet every Saturday morning at a designated spot. We breakfast in the original sense of eating, but also, because most of us are so busy working on our writing careers that we often find ourselves starved for great conversation. Well, the Bagel Bards breakfast hang is not only a place in which to do the aforementioned, but also to observe characters who themselves could be the subjects of poems and fiction.

Bagels With the Bards #4

The Bagel Bards are a group of poets varied in age, race, gender, who meet, share poems, discuss poetry, drink lots of coffee, chew a bagel if so desired, sometimes sell their books. The atmosphere is generous and open to all, and you don’t have to be a poet to attend. What I find most exciting about the Bards, people here are not conscious of reputation and achievement, but love the poem and good friendly unpretentious talk. That doesn’t mean that pretensions don’t exist if that’s what you desire, but the coffee is strong, the people sincere and are publishers of small press magazines, pamphlets and books. If you want to be in an atmosphere that is intelligent without self-involved, convoluted literary talk of people who need to prove themselves and announce themselves as artists, here is a place to find the pleasure that good literary company may offer. — Sam Cornish, Poet Laureate of Boston, MA

 Bagels With the Bards #5

The work here is as individual and unique as each contributing Bard. Delighted readers will find a variety of styles and forms, including ekphrasia, prose poems, villanelle, and free form poetry. Between these covers can be found little day-to-day deaths, dreams, and wounds, lost causes and dead ends presented in playful, whimsical, and experimental ways. If you haven’t discovered the Bagel Bards yet, start with their latest anthology. Short of having breakfast with them at the Au Bon Pain, reading the results of their Saturday mornings is the next best thing. — Laurel Johnson Midwest Book Review

Bagels with the Bards #6

Once a year, we celebrate our writing by putting together an anthology. It is as democratic as our gatherings — if you’re a Bagel Bard, you’re in. But this year I asked each Bard to submit three pieces, so I could choose among them. I’m glad I did, because I always found one piece that was stronger than the other two. Consequently, I think you’ll find this an interesting collection, with styles as varied as the personalities of the Bards. Enjoy! — Lawrence Kessenich, Anthology Editor

Bagels with the Bards #7 

If you were to ask me about one of my best days or my most memorable poetry experiences I would fold them into one and say the day I met Doug Holder he invited me to the Bagel Bards at the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square, Somerville MA.  I had not heard of the group, but from my first visit I was made to feel at home, like walking into a living room  of cousins I had not yet met. This group, however, was far more eclectic, diverse and totally literary. Men. Women. Caucasian. African-American. Seniors. Young. Jews. Christians. Novelists. Teachers. College professors. Mental Health workers. Artists.  I probably have not named them all, but you get the idea: a melting pot of heterogeneous creativity. Here were people with whom I could associate on many levels. 

I am told it started eight years ago.  Doug and Harris Gardner, another fine poet, decided to start “Breaking Bagels with the Bards” - now known as the Bagel Bards.  It began modestly with a few people and has grown to as many as fifty on any given Saturday.

Bagels with the Bards #8

Nine years ago two poets Doug Holder and Harris Gardner, were having breakfast when they decided to form a writers social group, “Breaking Bagels with the Bards.”  This is now known as the Bagel Bards. It began modestly with a few people and has grown to as many as thirty-five on any given Saturday.  From initially a small group, Bagel Bards now has more than one hundred and twenty members.  To join, one need only attend once. There are no attendance requirements, no dues, no fees.

Who comes to these Saturday gatherings?  Well, you might run into Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish or maybe novelist Luke Salisbury.  Then again, poet Afaa Michael Weaver may be there.  Poet, memoirist and teacher Kathleen Spivack may be found chatting. Gloria Mindock editor of Cervena Barva Press, is usually an attendee. And there are many more wonderful writers who have been published, and a number of others in the process of writing or finishing books. Most have seen their work in print, in hard copy, or online

How Fire is a Story, Waiting, Melinda Palacio (Los Angeles, Ca: Tia Chucha Press, 2012)

How Fire is a Story, Waiting, Melinda Palacio (Los Angeles, Ca: Tia Chucha Press, 2012), 107 pages, paper. ISBN: 978-1-882688-44-9. 14.95

Review by Joanne DeSimone Reynolds

Nothing less than the four elements and a fierce love of home guides Melinda Palacio’s first collection of poems, “How Fire is a Story, Waiting.” And by home I do not mean only the barrio of her upbringing in California or the Mexico of her ancestry or the cities of the south and the west she now calls home, but the bare fleshy hands of her grandmother at the stove. Because, after reading the first, and title poem, a reader fairly feels the generative power of those hands. Here is the first stanza of the poem from the section titled “Fire:”

My grandmother caught the flame in her thick hands.

Curled fingers made nimble by kaleidoscope embers.

Fire burns hot and cold if you know where to touch it, she said.

Who wouldn’t want a grandmother like this one “with her deep, cinnamon stick voice . . .// Her body, heavy with worry for two families and three lifetimes . . . tuck[ing] Mariachi dreams under her girdle. Lullabies escap[ing] on mornings / warmed by her song falling into gas burners turned on high.” A few pages later in the poem “Abuela’s Higuera” the woman’s strength, both literal and of her character, is witnessed as the poet lets her do the storytelling: “I remember the time your father was trying to kill my / daughter with a brick. Beneath the shade of my fig / tree, he beat her. Your abuelo told me to stay out of it. But if / it weren’t for me, the good-for-nothing would’ve killed / mija with a brick. On my way out the kitchen door I / grabbed my rolling pin.” Talk about cool under fire.

Such a ferocious mother-love. The woman’s center holds and her story becomes inspiration.

And as she comes of age, the narrator will call upon this inspiration to help make sense of the troubled world around her. In the affecting poem, “El South-Central Cucuy” she states: “My uncle said I wouldn’t have a life. Sorry, la little Minnie, he snarked, / Dah, ha, ha, he laughed. / If the Cucuy doesn’t get you, the Bomb will.” “Cucuy” is a kind of boogeyman, the fear of which is weighed against the fear of nuclear annihilation. But, it is a more immediate fear that preoccupies the narrator. For her, walking to school or sitting on the stoop can be deadly. The poem continues with this description of her neighborhood: “. . . a battle field with its random bullets, / helicopter searches for who knows whose father, brother, son, / enemies of the state, the police call them. / . . . Welcome to my barrio.” She has few protectors; her father, we soon find out, is in prison. On the rare occasions when she sees him, usually in prison, she wonders: “How do I talk to the charismatic lunatic, my father, the criminal with the psycho gene and tangled gypsy beard?” from the poem “Dancing with Zorro’s Ghost.” And, it would not be unreasonable for a reader to ask: How does a girl walk through that barred gate? And why should she have to? In answer, the narrator offers a list poem titled “Things to Carry.” Here is a sampling: “Twenty one dollar bills for vending machines . . . A sealed package of tissues . . . Photo tokens for a family portrait in prison . . . Your ID locks you in and sets you free . . . you force a smile . . . but the last thing you want is another prison visit.”

Fortunately, the narrator carries within her the light of her grandmother’s flame which frees her to explore a more playful tone. Here is the concise lyric “disconcerted crow” from the second section titled “Air.” One can feel the crow’s frustration in the deft handling of the first stanza:

if only his bird suit fit, he

grumbles and caws, drives

away his dove friends, he

pecks at uneven bristles, he

flaps and folds starched wings.

familiar feathers hang all wrong

like borrowed funeral clothes

Playfulness, too, in this excerpt from “New Orleans Native Son” found in the book’s third section, “Water.” Note how another imposing literary insect is brought to mind:

. . .The

lone rat rustling in

the banana tree won’t

bother me. Crows wait

for my sweet slumber, dive-

bomb the neighbor’s yard.

There is one creature

I can’t ignore.

His primordial wings

spread colossal and proud.

He looks bigger poolside

as feelers twitch, sense a party.

The Mexican-American experience is no less essential to our collective national history than other immigrant experiences. Many of us define ourselves with one or more hyphens. And with immigration a hot political topic, Palacio’s narrative is timely. A survey of a few of the first lines of the poems is indicative of the easy mix of our cultures as well as of its tribulations:

My sister dances salsa at Stephens’s Steakhouse

His heart thumps Panama, where’s he’s from

Swim with your clothes held high above the water

Her name’s irrelevant if all you see is color

Dip your feet into False River

Joann wants a job, but not that one

There is longing in these poems, as well. And hard-earned, if sometimes quirky, wisdom. In the poem titled “Laughter” there is a palpable yearning: “ I long to be cradled by cloud, sus / pended and sheltered. I listen to the words of the Grand- / mother Spirit. My elder says look beneath your skin and / you’ll see the loneliness in your veins . . . I laugh harder / because the wild woman is my mother.” And from “Water Mark:” “A river runs beneath my house / white foam, greenblue mud, a Eureka stream of gold. / Water so urgent, rushing like a stampede, catching / tomorrow’s California claim jumpers // Wild west talk of black bears and banana bread. / Don’t leave your doggy biscuits in the car. // The river rattles innocence and much to my surprise my heart aches / for the child I once was, before broken levees and the / floodgates of hell descending upon my town.”

Palacio’s poems are marked with nothing if not dignity. “Iron Cross Suite” which is the final poem of the collection from the section titled “Earth” is written with tenderness, but also with an unusual and endearing wit. A long form elegy, it recalls the heartbreaking desperation to obtain last rites for a mother; and it is interwoven with elements of the Catholic Mass and the last of the mother’s advice. In such a moment of terror, urgency is the operative word, and the desire of the mother to say something meaningful to her daughter resonates with touching grace: “Bless this house with passion. // In memory of me, / Don’t go out with your hair wet. // You have my blessing to live your life, grow up. // . . .Do you still give equal weight to chocolate and boys? // Talk to me. I hear you, though my life on earth is over. // I live between orange clouds and the moon. // . . . See my orange cloud when you most need me. // . . . Do this in memory of me.”

In all, “How Fire is a Story, Waiting” is both a broad narrative and a compelling personal journey. There are many poems here to admire. “The Blue House,” about Frida Kahlo, “Wooden Crosses,” about the markers in a cemetery where the grandmother’s children have been buried, and “Mesilla Sunset,” with its beautiful evocations of the shape-shifter: “The turquoise sky so vast, you’ll never see the same cloud twice. / Was it the coconut cloud, twisted like a bear? // Or was it you, shape-shifting, becoming a cicada, / buzzing in praise of Saturday’s pink twilight . . .” Topping 100 pages, the collection might have been tightened up a bit. But the poems, organized into four thematic sections, each separated by graphics that use a large appealing smoke-like font, are easily read and returned to as one might for nourishment to a stack of Grandmother’s tortilla

The Poet of Schools By Ken Zegers

The Poet of Schools

By Ken Zegers

Dos Madres Press

Loveland, Ohio

www.dosmadres.com

34 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Kip Zegers proffers, in his modest but compelling book of poems entitled The Poet of the Schools, pedagogical revelations of a very high order. His pieces eschew the standard slice- of- life fare for deeper, more psychologically based insights into teacher-student relationships. Some of these insights appear momentary, a chance perception, a fleeting acuity; others continuously draw you in to a nexus of awareness and sensitivity. But, be warned, this is not the Stand and Deliver world of Jaime Escalante with its optimistic logic and neat packet of inspiration. Rather, Zegers inspires by recording the little miracles which happen along the way during and sometimes in spite of the educational process.  Apparently, this high school teacher of 29 years reinvents himself each September to match his students’ needs. Zegers aptly titles the first section of his book Busy Being New. He means it.

From the collection’s opening poem, The Pond in Room 318 Zegers makes it clear where he’s going—fishing. He brings poetry as bait. He tries to hook those students with that spark of curiosity that every good teacher looks for, indeed, craves. This is how the poem begins,

In that room, Fall was a green surprise.

Entering class was paddling out

on a windy surface. I’d brought

a rod and reel and thought I had the perfect

poems to fish with. I lost them the first day,

but new tools rose to hand, proving

or disproving themselves by use.

Life in that room obeyed laws.

Not only do schools seem to have their own natural laws, they also have their own seasons. Autumn is the spring, the planting season Winter for growing, Spring the harvest time, and Summer, a time of emptiness. The poet puts it this way,

Fall is its fresh beginning, winter

Its abundance, spring the harvest,

And summer an empty field

The children are leaving…

If this sounds a bit like Peter Sellers’ Chauncey Gardiner in the movie Being There so be it, but it is a pretty cool metaphor nonetheless.

The poem Listening In begins with an extraordinary scene. The teacher takes a book , a fantasy novel, from his student. The student reacts with an autistic tantrum. The poem goes on detailing one after the other telling moments of student-speak. Here’s one,

…the 8^th grade girl

took perfect notes, kept one hand in the air,

and narrowed her eyes when I faltered: class

should be a certain way, a place  for “A’s,”

but her poem saw a homeless man buy

hot milk tea, a shop where broken hands

hold warmth. Then the year ended,

and she doubled back, “I was hoping…

I would not be forgotten.”

Reverse engineering, a concept not usually associated with educational theory, let alone poetic manifestations of teenagers finding their own voice, proves the perfect metaphor in Zegers’ short poem entitled Krazy Kitchen. The poet says,

Off with their lids! After a time

what’s inside the open jars turns green, fuzzy,

and it’s not mold, it’s apples

budding from applesauce, grapes

rising from jelly to the vine. This kitchen

has worried windows, no recipes,

and a stove whose pilot light

is difficult…

Personal involvement with students weighs heavily on some teachers—the good ones. Zeigers speaks to this burden in the poem called The Poet Of Schools Is Worried. The piece begins with him riding the “1” train down the Bronx. Observing the cityscape he notes the grinding process directed against those innocent souls who shine with awareness or who have found their voice. The poet continues,

…To his right he can see red jeans,

a blue bag, to his left an olive sweatshirt,

and in his head, hears day old voices, “7 hours

sleep,” in a boy’s voice, “that’s over 3 nights.”

“Coming back to school has begun to seem

pointless,” one girl said. And now,

worry has arrived in this, the poem.

In the poem Some Kingdoms Zegers takes a shot at politicians and their seemingly endless attempts at public education reform. He says,

…politicians, squirt guns filled

with money, axes swung from high offices,

smash things they do not understand.

The poet of Schools marks his territory,

And waits.

Later in the same poem he has a lovely subtle section on both the commonality of students and their ultimate individuality. Here are the lines,

                                       Behind the dunes of Jersey, a field

of swallows. Thousands upon thousands

bend branches, thicken bushes, and

some few rise, ready to start south.

It is not time; they settle, wait.

That these have thought it over

is not why they’ve arrived. That all

will survive is not why they take flight.

Each lives the species whole. Back

for a second look, he finds a field,

its empty air still pulsing.

The third and final section of the book Zegers entitles The Kenny Poems. The protagonist, Kenny, goes to a parochial school, circa 1960, 1970 or thereabout. The culture encompasses good helpings of cruelty, sadism, effective rote teaching, with an overlay of religious confrontations. That was my experience. A priest-brute arrives to confront the barbarian children in the second poem of the series. The sermon given describes a geographical hell with some memorable images. The priest elaborates,

…”Sin ends in hell,

and you boys, you think you know?

Imagine soft skin on a grill, your white

skin burning but you can’t move, you boys

all know what a single match feels like,

but in hell, when you scream, Satan laughs,

puts his fork in you and turns you over. Mmm?

I definitely remember that sermon.

Throughout the collection Zegers’ sense of wonder strikes you as the perfect counterpoint to a student’s grappling with language and searching for his own voice. I’ve heard many of these same themes in prose, but without the intensity. The Poet of the Schools deserves to be read and read widely.

Eating Grief at 3 AM by Doug Holder

Eating Grief at 3 A.M.
By Doug Holder
Muddy River Books
Brookline, MA
27 Pages

To order online: http://www.lulu.com/shop/search.ep?contributorId=1225982  

Review by Dennis Daly

What can you say about a poet who hates tulips, morning birdsong, and the seasonal promise of spring? Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But we would be wrong. Doug Holder, the author of this amazing little chapbook, Eating Grief at 3 A.M., lives his poetry. On the one hand he exudes the feverous, edgy images of an insomniac; on the other hand he channels Henny Youngman in a manic comedy- by- the- numbers shtick. The combination saddens, disturbs, and ultimately enlightens with its unflinching insights into the forgotten and discarded denizens populating Holder’s eclectic landscapes.

The title poem, Eating Grief at Bickford’s, opens this collection. It is a paean to night people, to men and women who wander into Bickford’s seeking warmth, food, comfort, or company. Everything appears flawed here. The table cloths are threadbare. The plates cradle only crumbs. The porcelain cups reveal cracks. And, of course, the unwashed night walkers who stroll in, seeking what is missing from their broken lives.  This piece oozes nostalgia for the mildly repulsive details of this haven, which are virtually inseparable from the arms-length companionship offered there. The poet describes the scene this way,

The boiling water
Ketchup soup
The mustard sandwich
They used to relish
All that so lean
Cuisine.

Oh, Hunchback
In the corner
Your lonely reflection
In the glass of water—

And Tennessee Williams’ Blanche
Eyes me through her grilled cheese
“Pass the sugar, sugar”
She teases.

My favorite poem in the book, Abandoned Warehouses, says little but suggests a lot. Empty spaces promote excitement and sometimes danger. Trysts happen there. So do meetings between enemy sides. Holder’s gone-to-seed warehouses provide sanctuaries for the poet/artist. Even as they surrender to nature’s encroachments, the warehouses still dispense something unique to the truth seekers among us. They seem to shut out the world. It is in places such as these that Holder finds his voice. He concludes,

Sometimes you must follow
The rat’s path
The vagrant,
The scrawled invective of the graffiti
The flow of some muddy, godforsaken creek
Before you can truly
Speak.

In the poem Father Knows Best—Mother Does the Rest Holder unveils his tongue-in-cheek (or maybe not) homicidal side.  The poem is based on long running TV show starring Robert Young and Jane Wyatt. The show purports to show the typical American family with all its well-mannered accoutrements. Holder will have none of it. Strangely, his poetic technique is not sarcasm. The poet confronts his subjects with a humor infused with savagery. The father’s sweater emits “tyranny,” while his smile, according to Holder, seems “brutal.” Consider how the poem ends,

“Princess!”
and she arrives
dancing with the dog
with an anxious, scripted
girlish giggle.
And don’t
you think
they would like to
kill him
just a little?

Holder remembers his elementary school art teacher in the poem entitled Mrs. Plant. The particular piece of art that he recalls from that teacher’s class is her own face. Like many people Mrs. Plant’s face was sculpted by her life’s experiences. Here’s how the poet puts it,

Her face,
A painting
That she worked on
For a long time.
An angry mask
Of red lips—
And rouge.
Disappointment
Sinking her cheeks…

But Mrs. Plant, like all of us, has a history, some sort of life that could have been. Holder ends the poem alluding to that life,

Walking back to
Her cold water flat
Sketches,
A love note
Stuffed in a pocket
Of her winter coat…?

Sometimes poetic lines do strange things. They weigh down what seems obvious—the literal-- with additional meanings and emotions. Holder’s poem You Know It Is Tough Being a Writer does this. The poet takes Henny Youngman type comedy one-liners and breaks them up into shorter lines comprising mostly of one, two, or three words. The effect is eerie and the words that make up these little self-deprecating jokes seem to acquire surprisingly sharp edges. Here’s one of those slowed down one-liners,

The run-down flats
The impoverished street
No one asked you the time
Just stole
Your fake
Rolex

Pathos intermixed with what was stock comedy. Weird! Even during the poem’s denouement this effect takes place. The sharp elbows are still up targeting academia with a sneer (or, perhaps, wink) back at himself. Listen,

The dead silence
Of the mandarins
After translating
The works of Eliot
Into English.

And take my creative partner…
Please.

Holder-the-contrarian rants his irritable feelings out in a poem entitled Spring, This Ain’t a Love Poem. By the tenor of his words he seems to yearn for a madman’s weather, the kind that assaulted Gloucester in King Lear. Remember Gloucester, recalling the previous night’s storm and his toxic relationship with his son, remarks: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. They kill us for their sport.” Certainly Holder seeks, at the very least, “the cold insular comforts.” The poem begins with a huff of frustration,

Oh for crying out loud
It is here again.
The tulips sprout
 Like maddening clichés…
Those
Blooming idiots!
And the chirp
Of those morning birds,
What are we left with?
Their pellets, their
Turds.

The final poem in the collection, Disappearing From the Block, deals with human disintegration and tumultuous change. Whatever one’s moments in the sun may have been, no one gets out alive. We’ve come full circle: these are the frequenters of Bickford’s at 3 in the morning. The poet describes one such catastrophic change,

That couple
joined at the hip
the smiles always in unison.
Just yesterday
I saw him
in a distant
part of town
a vacant stare
with the early
morning addicts
his wife clipping weeds
and the bare and brittle
branches
in their garden.

As each poem exceeded another foolish expectation I found myself exulting in the grandeur of down-and-out human experiences and the curious memories of humble moments. Holder’s pieces delivered and gilded that grandeur and those moments. Together these poems are a wonder of offbeat artistry.

Wicked Hard David R. Surette

 
Wicked Hard
David R. Surette
Koenisha Publications
ISBN: 987-0-9800098-8-0
2013


“armed with the light
fixture suspended from its wire,
I tried to burn my brother with the bulb
as he swung by standing on the doorknobs
it burst into blue flame, a pop,..”

Surette's poetry is crisp, terse and humorous, with great respect, the poet uses experience to inform the poems. His childhood and growing years explain our own roots within that same self absorbed world. “She walked out of the bathhouse, we turned to see.”  As the reader turns the pages, each poem finely crafted, sparks our imagination and curiosity:

“...first gig drive from Malden to Boston seems endless.
I hit the curb turning West to Medford Street,
change the tire in pit stop time.
No Exit, boys Life, Unnatural Axe & Lapeste,
The bass player's mother said he couldn't go.
He snuck out.
It would be his only show.
The set's over in a blink.
The ride home takes seconds...”

His poems are just like that, the unspeakable, last chance to play, song. We encounter all the emotions of maturing; lust, greed, recognition and death. And more than that all the poems are about love:

“...Except those who stayed
behind, gravely wounded by
failure and doubt,
the curse of being
different and not
different enough,
having no meds
or not the right dose,
or dosing themselves,
broken-hearted and
sadder than they should be,
hair's horn or a
curtain across the eyes,
their deaths called sudden,
their wakes swollen
as only a teenager's can be.”

Wicked Hard blankets our age and our cool realities. The poems do not resist reality, instead, they encounter situations that maybe familiar and veiled with unfamiliar. The reader is warmed by their directness. Each word contains its own full meaning and manages to reach us. We realize we are privy to the poets' experiences but also we realize it is the humanness of the poems that help us relate:

“...I knew I'd never see him again.
I should have asked
why we never were friends.”


Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor:
Wilderness House Literary Review
Reviewer:
Boston small Press & Poetry Scene

Nothing by Design By Mary Jo Salter

Nothing by Design
By Mary Jo Salter
Alfred A. Knopf
Borzoi Books
New York
www.aaknopf.com
108 Pages (Hardcover)
$26.95

Review by Dennis Daly

Our universe provides little architecture for the internal paths of our lives. We routinely sculpt old expectations, and make things new by redesigning our days with charged up meaning and personal significance. Poets also follow this pattern, but even more so. They struggle to string together a mode of existence, often doling out praise and blame as they go. Most become demi-gods in their own minds—but not all.

In her new collection of poems, Nothing by Design, Mary Jo Salter creates her singular poetic world with a rare combination of vintage forms, wondrous music, and a very contemporary sensitivity. By her metrically adept pieces she belies her book’s title (at least as it relates to artistic creation) and she plumbs the layered, ironic depths of her subjects. Salter’s poems are wide ranging covering the lives of fellow poets who touched her, a section with some pretty funny light verse, warfare’s logical absurdity, adulterous behavior of a spouse, divorce, and a contextually astounding version of an Anglo-Saxon poem.

The introductory poem entitled Morning Mirror sets the philosophical stage. At an academic retreat of some sort, having her six o’clock morning coffee, the poet espies a bow tied man, a likely lecturer at the same conference, out for a walk by the lake’s edge. As she watches him she notices that at the same time she is being watched by a deer, which gazes at her in an unsettling but neutral manner. The poet describes her reaction to the experience this way,

I’m trying to unthink the expectations
of my given kind, to adopt another mode, a
curious but disinterested sense
of otherness. (Why is it for a week
all the deer have been either does or fawns?
Somebody knows the answer.) She wants more
from me, or maybe nothing; sniffs the grass,
nibbles a bit, then twitches: her profile high,
she bounds to the shore with leisurely, sure leaps

Salter’s irony conveys us through society’s expectations for humanity in a poem called The Gods. The poet often sits in an upper balcony of the concert hall she frequents. The patrons who sit in these seats are referred to as “the Gods” because they peer down on everyone else. But the truth is that these seats are the worst in the house. Railings impede vision. The performers devolve into ants. Even more unfortunately, the ceiling above these seats is decorated with eminent names of philosophers and artists, as well as the virtues they promoted. The poet comments,

It’s more the well-fed gods
of philanthropy who seem
enshrined in all their funny,
decent, noble, wrong

postulates, and who haunt
these pillared concert halls,
the tinkling foyers strung
with chandeliered ideals,
having selected which
dated virtues—COURAGE
HONOR BROTHERHOOD—rated

Chiseling into stone;
having been quite sure
that virtue was a thing
all men sought…

Our Friends the Enemy, a poem set in No Man’s Land between the trenches during World War I on Christmas Day 1914, tells the story of an unofficial truce and a football game between the British and the German soldiers. The story is true and, of course, completely absurd: it changed nothing. But that’s not the point. The game like an artwork or a poem became a miniature universe for a time and mere mortals created the values (read BROTHERHOOD and GLORY) in that universe. Salter refers to the madness of Ajax during the Greek/Trojan war in a pretty cool opening section. Here are a few of the lines,

Were they mad?
They kicked the severed head
of the football across the frozen mud
like Ajax running wild in the field:
it was the sheep he killed
when he’d thought he’d been slaughtering
Odysseus and Agamemnon…

Reading Salter’s poem Drinking Song will drive you to drink both metaphorically and literally. It is the poet’s master work in this book. Not only does its music work as a joyous drinking song, but it also compels as a dirge of profound sadness and solemnity. Its purpose is to tell a story. The tight meter and rhyme scheme control the lines and help the poet inject her cathartic irony and outright sarcasm. Even the syntactical aberrations are wonderful and detract nothing from the literal meaning. Consider these well-wrought stanzas,

Coffee tea and morning toast,
none loved more and love was most.
Up we dressed for dinner out,
Prozac and Prosecco, doubt.

Peace in time and time to seethe,
Open wine and let it breathe.
Mix up our imperfect match:
dry martini, olive branch.

Jesus, who agreed the whore
he shall have with him always more?
Econo lodge and Scottish Inn,
vodka, orange, scotch, and gin…  

Another marriage-gone-wrong poem entitled Complaint for Absolute Divorce drips its sarcastic acid onto the page, diluted only with the author’s affecting and heart-rending big-picture irony. This well done villanelle also gives the book its spot-on title. Salter seems to have chosen her form, the villanelle, for absolute control of her deep and volatile emotions. It works! She cuts her real betrayer, the as-is universe, and at the same time conveys a deep, almost inconsolable, sadness. Salter ends her poem,

…who could feel remorse?
That “Absolute” was rather fine.
A little something to endorse

the universe as is: for worse,
for better. Nothing by design.
Complaint for Absolute Divorce,

let me salute you, sole recourse!
I put my birth name on the line—
a little something—and endorse
the final word, then, in “Divorce.”

Notice also that the poem’s title in the penultimate stanza is fittingly self-referential.

Salter’s eloquent version of the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer strangely complements her contemporary poems. Or perhaps not so strangely. Faced with an uncaring, neutral world the poet makes sense of her life through art. She creates the molds and the metrics of her life: the tighter and more formal the poetry, the more control she has over her emotional material. Now she has a choice. Either she becomes the God of her own creations or she looks elsewhere for the origin of the order and understanding she brings to life. Remember the deer in her first poem, which leaps away with Kierkegaard-like surety. I’m betting the Seafarer tips us off to her decision. Listen to these lines,

The joys of the Lord can kindle
more in me than dead
and fleeting life on land.
I do not believe the riches
of this world will last forever.
Always, without fail,
of three things one will turn
uncertain for a man
before his fatal hour:
sickness, age, or the sword
will rip the life right out
of the doomed and done for.
The best praise will come after

From people who outlive him…

Salter’s artistry and technical beauty amaze each time you reread her poems. They will endure beyond this generation. This book belongs among her best. The word timeless comes to mind.

God’s Naked Will & other sacrilege

 


God’s Naked Will & other sacrilege

By C.D. Mitchell

BurntBridge Press

159 pages
 


Review by Thomas Gagnon 

            First-time author C. D. Mitchell excels at making scenes.  He often opens with sensational information, which evolves into a drama both compelling and realistic—no contrived plot twists here.  But also often, something is missing.  Most of these stories are all about their scenes, while the characters—if not missing in action—stay two-dimensional.

            First, the positive, and there is plenty of positive to accentuate.  Mitchell does create utterly memorable scenes.  Near the end of the first story, “Clovis Clementine,” the already horrible life of Clovis takes an especially ghoulish and ghastly turn.  During a flood, he imagines that dead bodies rise up and talk to him—at first, a high school classmate that he had attacked and killed, and later, at three-pages’ length, “the Colonel” who urges him to join the devil’s ranks.  A scene like that has lasting impact, and there are many such scenes throughout this short story collection.

            One other scene—a favorite of mine—occurs in the title story, “God’s Naked Will.”  It is a dialogue over the phone between a Pentecostal preacher, Mooney, and a receptionist at an escort service, absurdly named God’s Own Escort Service: A Touch From Above With Every Date.  The absurdity continues with the line “God’s Own Escort Service.  How can we touch you today?,” but the ensuing conversation takes unexpectedly dark turns:

            “I want someone who knows how to keep her mouth shut.  But I also want someone

            who knows what she’s doing.  And she must be white.”

            “What are you, a bigot?”

            “No.  But my faith prohibits inter-racial marriages.”

            “Your faith probably prohibits premarital sex, too.”   (55)

Such unexpected darkness—or, at best, murkiness—is a strength in all Mitchell’s stories.

            Also positive, Mitchell boldly presents distasteful issues and situations.  The mere concept of the Lord’s army (introduced almost right away in “Clovis Clementine”) induces shivers.  And it gets more distasteful than that, in story after story: schizophrenia, suicide, adultery, horrific hypocrisy, capital punishment, voyeurism, verbal abuse, and sexual perversions.  Nor are these evils hurriedly set aside.  Rather, they stay front and center, throughout.  For instance, the sexual perversions in the story “Original Sin”—especially, lust masquerading as nudism—never quite disappear.  Although the bride, Lesley, knows ahead of time that she will be getting married nude in front of strangers (on p. 124), she cannot reconcile herself to the thought (on p. 139).  On the contrary, she suggests to the groom, Zach, that they leave as soon as possible.  They don’t.  Lesley cannot escape from human sin.  Consequently, neither can the reader.

            This is impressive.  What is not impressive is the lack of characterization in most of these stories.  Clovis is not so much a person as he is a misfortune incarnate; the same is true of another character with severe mental illness, Sally in “Job’s Comforter.”  Although Lani in “Stud Fee” has interesting moments, Mike, the stud, does not.  Elias in “Healing Waters” achieves an anti-climax rather than a climax.  And so on, with one exception: Reverend Mooney.  Mooney takes on dimension because he is both astoundingly hypocritical and apparently unaware of his hypocrisy.  He contains a world of contradictions, which are not amusing and yet are not wholly disgusting, either.  It is clear that the unrealistic tenets of Mooney’s own faith are partly to blame for his faults.

            Each story is a mix of the well-done and the problematic.  Since schizophrenic Clovis believes in the Fundamentalist Christian concept of the Rapture, it is apt that he fears the flood is a particularly ominous sign.  But, the many similes describing Clovis’ schizophrenia merely strain the brain.  The can of mace in “Job’s Comforter” is a Chekhov’s gun that never goes off—an excellent aspect of the story.  But, the metaphor of Job’s comforter is utterly perplexing.  Whereas Darleen does aim to comfort her schizophrenic daughter, Sally, Job’s comforters do not comfort Job.  Other stories are more (or less) out-of-balance than these two.

            For all its imperfections, however, some stories in the collection do linger in the mind.  Important questions about faith are framed by intensely dramatic (but plausible) situations.  Yes, it is a bumpy ride, but it is an enjoyably bumpy ride with resonance.