Ibbetson Street 34 Reading The Center for Arts at the Armory Dec 17 2013 7PM‏

• Ibbetson 34 Reading The Center for Arts at the Armory Dec 17 2013 7PM‏

The Center for Arts at the Armory  191 Highland Ave, Somerville, MA 02143

  Ibbetson Street, a Somerville-based literary magazine founded in 1998 by Doug Holder, Dianne Robitaille, and Richard Wilhelm, will be having a celebratory reading for Issue 34 at The Center for Arts at the Armory  Dec 17, at 7PM.
 

    The event is part of the Armory- First and Last Word Poetry Series, curated by Harris Gardner and Gloria Mindock. Contributors from Issue 33 and 34 are invited to read. Issue 34 has such poets as Richard Hoffman, Kathleen Aguero, Martha Collins, Dan Sklar, William Harney, Fred Marchant, Margaret Young, Meghan Perkins, Marge Piercy and many others...

....Ibbetson Street is formally affiliated with Endicott College of Beverly, Mass.  http://endicott.edu

The Shutting Door Poems by Timothy Gager

The Shutting Door
Poems by Timothy Gager
Ibbetson Street Press
Somerville, MA
53 Pages
$11.00

Review by Dennis Daly

The art of creation needs a steady sober hand and a plethora of malleable materials readily available. Poets, who are naturals at breathing life into words, rarely have a problem with the latter of these two necessities. In fact most of their available materials must be isolated, contained, and, yes, even suppressed in order for these wordsmiths to perceive the shape and direction of what comes next.

Poet Timothy Gager knows how to construct his poems, compartment after compartment, stanza after stanza. He becomes the portal of existence between past and future. He personifies the solid but windowed barrier on the cover of his newest collection of poetry entitled The Shutting Door.

Early on Gager sets the optimistic but slightly ambiguous tone with the poem In My Hip High Waders. The protagonist tries something new—fly fishing. He’s looking towards a future that the sun gives him a glimpse of, but only a glimpse. The poet concludes his hopeful moments flashing through bright daylight this way,

No different today

than tomorrow but I need
a perfect cast; never fished
before; saw a picture of you

holding catch from hooked finger,
Hell, I’ve never thrown fly before,
attempted a roll cast, yet

knee high in the water
the sun to show me trout.
They disappear into shadows.

Note that before the shadows reassert their claim on reality the poet mines the past for his selective image of triumph, the fish on the hooked finger, and goes with it.

In the poem There’s Sunshine when You need It Gager’s persona reenters a past of addiction and wilted joys through different doors to offer someone or everyone a key to the future. The scene, both cool and detached, is not without pathos. Open doors, even intimate ones, do not always attract happiness. Here are some of the more gritty lines,

Wet cats and sick dogs,
sit on benches under newspapers,
their muscles clenched
in weak electrical currents
inducing dull pains in junkies.

I’ve offered a key to unlock
the lives jammed up.
I recall her door opened
to a bedroom with dead flowers
tipped on their sides…

Time’s door shuts on occasion, but never permanently. Looking past a door ajar the reader infers the history of love and lives lived from a rumpled bed and a familiar aroma. In the poem I have mostly Nightmares the poet explains,

…I wake to

your calf, it left a wrinkle
in my comforter;

a note; a funnel cloud,
destroyed everything,

you left the foundation,
the coffee maker brewing.

Not only does the title poem, The Shutting Door, encapsulate Gager’s methodology, it also juxtaposes some interesting moments of lightness and darkness. In this poet’s world, mankind both absorbs light and, when needed, emits light. Consider these lines at the heart of the piece,

we walked towards woods, the moss
cold under our toes, as we were,
caught in the light for a moment;
a glimpse of half full. We are dim

lights on dark nights, sending out calls
to the wolves howling at the sun
because the moon hanging there,
yet never seems to hear them.

If I should need to step back to see
how you glow in this light,
illumination, I can be at one with that…

Missteps, an odd claustrophobic poem set in its own compartment—an AA meeting, jumps off the page and demands an audience. The protagonist begins with honesty and ends in a church basement seeking a heaven of sorts. In between, his door to the past swings open to addiction and its metaphors. You get the feeling that too much honesty at one time can devolve into euphoria and doped-up degradation. Not exactly the desired outcome in the meeting or in the poem. I like this poem a lot. Gager opens with these lines of tragic comedy,

When I raised my hand
told a gray room the reasons
I started drinking, I wanted
to start again immediately.
Told people, whose faces looked like
The End of the World, the truth.

Then I told them I would pour a girl
I’d lusted after, down like whiskey…

With one repeated word the poet conveys a brave new world out of the blackest melancholy in the poem Seasonal Affective Disorder. The word is “instead.” Gager begins his piece by damning routine in a darkening season and portrays his persona as self-medicating.  That said, a door has been shut on dire overreactions such as suicidal thoughts. The poet says,

instead I don’t wake
with a thought of placing a gun
against my temple how cool
it would feel—the air heavy

hanging from a rafter,
instead, I read the paper
‘bout a man on a highway,
who opened his car door
walked out, straight into
an 18 wheeler, it’s what he wanted…

Perhaps so! But I’d take the vicarious route and, instead, read about it in the newspaper, wondering how big the straw was that finally broke this unfortunate camel’s back.

The poem What Do Men Want (in response to Kim A.) easily stands on its own merit. It’s a terrific poem stripped of manners and coyness and caution. It is three parts libido, two parts caricature with a serious and surprising undertone. The protagonist seeks to erase himself and his blues in sex and cigarettes and scotch. He succeeds and another door closes. The poem ends in perfect pitch,

… my dark clouds don’t matter
by the time her thighs start pumping
all the sunshine out of me
so hot the world burns, hotter than hell.

If you like your poetry accessible and genuine going in and gothic and damn gritty getting out, you’ll like Gager. 

Eating Grief at 3 A.M. by Doug Holder

     Eating Grief at 3 A.M.
     by Doug Holder
     Muddy River Books

       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

      ~ "Abandoned Warehouses"

Review by Robin Stratton-- Boston Literary Magazine

When you open a volume of poetry and the first one is dedicated to Allen Ginsberg, man, you know you've stumbled onto something great. That's why it should come as no surprise that Eating Grief at 3 A.M. by Doug Holder is one of those rare collections with every poem as delicious as the stack of syrup-saturated pancakes you used to tuck into at Bickford's in the wee hours of the morning. (You were just a kid—in your twenties—and didn't get indigestion, and the coffee didn't keep you awake all night or make you get up ten times to pee.) On the menu are poems that nail the groove of those days, from admitting to ourselves that we wanted just a little to kill the brutally well-meaning father in Father Knows Best, and the cat who abruptly interrupts a languid existence to venture out to the street (and gets run over) to a bloody mugging in Times Square, a final showing of Rocky Horror, and the lament of a stockbroker chained to his office in a high rise. I had to laugh at Holder's frank chagrin at the "cloying cheap chirp" of an early morning songbird (secretly, I share his helpless rage.) The writing, of course, is breathtaking; stylish and elegant, like the cook himself, but with the unexpected bite of an otherwise polite terrier. But poets beware! You will be jealous! Possibly suicidal! Remember how Beach Boy Brian Wilson was partway through what he envisioned would be the greatest rock album of all time when he heard Sgt. Pepper? He ditched Smile and went into seclusion for about a decade. Reading Eating Grief at 3 A.M. is kind of like that. So yeah, Mr. Holder, we sort of want to kill you just a little, too.

Review ARTS EMERSON Sleeping Beauty Carlo Colla & Sons Marionette Company

 
Review
ARTS EMERSON
Sleeping Beauty
Carlo Colla & Sons Marionette Company
Milan, Italy
The Paramount Theatre
559 Washington Street
Boston, MA
November 13-17
Tickets: 617-824-8400
ARTSEMERSON.ORG (for trailer go to this website)


Reviewer: Amy R. Tighe

Sometimes, I doubt myself.  Sometimes what I can cherish and what I long for commingle and I end up holding on to something I cannot ever attain.  In those moments, I am misplaced. It happens more now as I slow down, slightly giving in to my aging, in a time where my globe is speedier and its own acceleration is speeding up as well.


So I wasn’t sure I should see puppets.  Gasland is playing at several local churches, carbon pricing talk at Babson next week, mass incarceration discussion on meet-up.

And besides, I know how the story ends.  And being single and vulnerable, I sometimes  over -identify with characters and well, I could just see myself justifying curling up for another 100 years while I wait for my next date!

But I went.  A deal’s a deal, and I went.  And so should you.
Sleeping Beauty is performed by 10 humans using hand-made marionettes, and their team of actors who deftly serve to awaken our connective dream.  The Carlo Colla & Sons Marionette Company, from Milan, Italy, is an inter-generational company that was formed in the 1830s.  An aristocratic family, who fell on hard times due to political and civil unrest, founded three separate puppet troupes and toured successfully throughout Europe for generations.  The troupe playing at the Paramount is the last of the line and is one of the preeminent puppeteer companies in the world. 

According to a note from Colla Marionette, puppet theatre was meant for adults, and not children, because the plays could provide insight and expression through make believe characters as a safe way to challenge existing leadership.  And fairy tales are a land “inside each of us where time and space no longer exist, where good and evil are clearly defined not fluctuating and indiscernible as they are in reality.”

But here’s the thing—in reality, there are puppets! And fairy tales! It’s not the other way around—in fairy tales, is there reality? No. What is real is that on a chilly Boston November eve, in the changing heart of a strong city, with concrete construction everywhere, an open portal to human magnificence thrives through this marionetted performance of Sleeping Beauty. Go see it.

The set is a luscious stage within an opulent stage, set on the usual splendiferous stage of the Paramount.  Whew! When the smaller curtain opens, because the larger one is already open, an Italian palace from the middle ages is revealed.  Marble pillars, tiled floors, and an extensive banquet table, tapestries and blue skies invite us in.  The marionettes enter as actors and I resist the temptation to be picky —their feet don’t touch, do their mouths open?  And why are they using their hands so much? Oh wait, they are using their hands?  Did that puppet just smile at me?  And subtly I have somehow completely come into this story.


The pacing and the detail are haunting.   Every detail of the costumes, characters, props and set has been scrutinized.  I guess when you create a miniature world you have the capacity to see every detail and to craft every moment.  Unlike my world, I cannot control the details.  But here, the seven sets of cutlery encrusted with rubies for the christening are completely identical, the seven visiting Fairies all have distinct features and perfect outfits which you can identify as they fly across the sky in winged chariots (how do they get the wings on so many horses?) to arrive in the exact same costumes, only larger, in the exact same palace you saw when you toured Italy years ago.


Detail and craft. When the deep green anaconda (I think it is an anaconda and I am not telling you when it comes!) tries to eat the Prince, and is killed, his eyes close in death.  How does a puppet close its eyes? When the Fairy Harmony takes her place to guard the sleeping kingdom, one of her sylphs cozies up next to her, like a kid watching TV and twitches his feet…. Like kids everywhere do…
I feel enveloped in the craft.  And mysterious, to me, is that a profound slow pace I’ve been exposed to all night long has infiltrated my body, bones and mind. During set changes, and underscoring certain scenes, Tchaikovsky plays.  There is time to reflect, to wonder and to remember –“wait- that is a puppet—he couldn’t have smiled at me!  How’d they do that?”  I have become completely relaxed, joined into generations of fairy tale listeners and puppet watchers—this is what humans have always done, can always do and my cells know it. And now, I am knowing it too.


There are a few kids splattered in the audience and because we have been invited to cheer and groan as an audience, they do.  So their reactions become a part of the play as well and we chuckle at their cries.


I ask Rosie who is 9 but looks eleven “because I am tall” what she thinks and she says she loves theatre because she doesn’t have to fight over the remote like at home.  I wonder if she wonders about the strings we see, the billows of smoke that announce  the Fairy Misery, the impeccable timing of Puff the Dog’s tail.  I wonder if she wonders about seeing a whole world, from the perspective of our fractured world, and seeing the craft we all can have.  Seeing what we can attain and what we cannot. Knowing that what we cherish we might lose because we cannot craft the righted scale of our human life.


I wonder if tonight she knows she entered a story about storytelling and is being shown how to create our world.  Puppets have historically been used to comment on our lives.  Tonight, they grace us with a trip to our possible future because of hands from the past who saved them for us them, so generously.

Katrin Schumann: Uncovers the Secret Power of the Middle Child Interview with Doug Holder

Interview with Doug Holder

 Katrin Schumann writes on her website:

I was born in Germany, but grew up in Brooklyn and London. As a child, I loved listening to my family’s stories—of war and death and love gone wrong—and later I would rewrite them in my head, filling in the details, the motives, and making up new endings. Soon I started writing my stories down and I’ve never stopped.

At some level, family and community is what all my work is about. Everywhere I look there are stories to tell. In my professional life as a writer, editor, and teacher, I work with stories across various genres. My most recent book, The Secret Power of Middle Children (Hudson St/Penguin), is the first nonfiction exploration of the benefits of being stuck in the middle. My current works-in-progress include a book on parenting strategies that can make or break children born into wealth, and a novel about forbidden love and a family torn apart by the division of Germany at the end of WWII. To read an excerpt, click here.

My work has been featured multiple times on the TODAY show and in Woman’s Day, The Times (UK) and on NPR, as well as other national and international media. Early in my career, I was granted the Kogan Media Award for my work at National Public Radio, and as a student, I received academic scholarships to Oxford and Stanford Universities. More recently I’ve been awarded writing residencies at the VCCA, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony and Vermont Studio Center. I live near Boston with my husband and three teenagers, and frequently return to Europe to gather more family stories.

I had the pleasure to interview Katrin on my Somerville Public TV show Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer: 

Doug Holder: You grew up in Germany, London and Brooklyn, N.Y. These are quite disparate places. How do you feel this affected you as a writer, and in general?

Katrin Schumann: I think about that quite frequently. Because when we were living in Brooklyn, (it was entirely accidental that we landed there), it wasn’t the kind of place that it is now. And in fact we lived in Brooklyn Heights which was still pretty gritty. The class I was in at PS8—well, it turned out I was one of the only two white kids in the class. From that experience—and the exclusive girl school I went to in London—I have an eclectic background. In London there was only one Jewish kid in the school I went to—it was quite a change from Brooklyn. So as a result I am interested in everyone’s story. People made a lot of assumptions about me, particularly in London. This could be tough. In London I was the rich, private school girl with an American accent. I had to deal with the dumb American stereotype, and since I am German—the Nazi references. I was a quiet, reader type of girl. I learned from all  this not to jump to conclusions about people.

DH: I read in an interview of you in a Grub Street newsletter that the strangest place you have ever worked was a prison. Can you expand on this?

KS: What I found strange about it was my own reaction to it. I had to look at my assumptions and question them. I ran a writing workshop with women inmates at the correction facility at Framingham, Mass. The women are really energized there, ready to tell their stories, and work with the PEN volunteers. Storytelling is a very good way to express themselves and gain respect. The inmates have stories—we talk about the way they tell their story, not what they did to get themselves into prison. We never talk about why they are where they are—the reading and writing is what we talk about.

DH: You are working on a project exploring the challenges very privileged kids have in today’s society.

KS: I started a book project—the focus is what messages you should give to these children of the very wealthy so that they grow up with purpose, balance and success. I find they are either under parented or over parented. I came to realize these problems are experienced by kids in general. It affects the middle class and poor families.  Even poor families can’t say no to their kids. All families don’t want their kids to fail or suffer. If you never fail you will never know if you can pick yourself up. Failure can be a gift.

DH: You have a new book out The Secret Power of Middle Children. When I was born in the 1950s, and as a young boy, I never heard of this birth order controversy.

KS: Birth order has become very popular. It is true that middle children exhibit a lot of angst about being the middle child. They complain that no one pays attention to them because they don’t have that coveted position of the firstborn. And they don’t realize the negatives that come with that coveted position. They are expected to deal with things on their own. The middle child is considered the least popular. The adjectives used to describe them are: spoiled, quiet, etc… Firstborns are seen as more ambitious. I find when I am developing characters in my own work birth order can help me flesh them out better.

DH: You are an editor, and help folks with their manuscripts. You said in an interview that is hard to tell your clients that their characters are not “rich” enough. How do you make a stick figure into a fully realized creation?

KS: You have to create the full picture of the human being. Get the mannerisms, intonation, and dialogue down. You have the power of a writer to pick the right detail.

Review of Kyle Flax’s “What Hank said on the Bus”

Review of Kyle Flax’s “What Hank said on the Bus” ( Publishing Genius)

Review by Alice Weiss

These poems deliver what the title promises, poetry in standing-on- the- corner diction.  Surprise.  Song often breaks through his leaning-back-into it lines

           

and then suddenly, someone can mention a purple suit and a green wig

            without even knowing that they are mentioning such an astounding

thing!

Flak parlays anaphora (every line beginning with ‘from’) into a rollicking  play on the wind from Vermont in “Oh a Mighty.”  “[N]onpersons and sons of bitches” move him; all the usual things he experiences turn into fairy tales, or numbers or ogres asking for lettuce.  Love makes him optimistic.  Running scared he tries to find some way to balance the fear.

            These poems are downright fun to read.  The voice is quirky but assured.  “I am a humongous mommy underneath my cloths,” is where an indictment of capitalism takes him,

and finishes, “I am scared about how I will feed all the babies I have growing inside me all the time.” The lines are almost always end stopped, and spaced and the book builds an unceasing I persona that takes both the pain of ordinary living, its details, its defeats, and uneasiness, and transforms it into simple and playful sentence forms.

            The long poem that centers the book, “The Young Filmmakers of Kansas,” records the making of a surrealist film on the Midwestern plains.  In seven short verses ranging from seven to eleven lines each, Flax traces the scenario. Reversing Jaws is the impulse.  The filmmakers want to eat. The shark is the hero and blood is the theme but the secret is that they are afraid of girls. The scenes include corpses in the mother’s brackish swimming pool, mannequins floating across a cornfield, zombies inside the basement waiting for brains to eat, after all they are business men. The movie is fun and scare and the poetry contemplates the nature of evil and blood and young men, even boys, and what they do with fear.

            Characteristically the speaker experiences sweetness and then skitters into some other place.  But in the title poem “What Hank said on the Bus” which I like best of all of them the speaker settles into desire and lets it be small and sturdy.

                        she smells like a pine forest

She is a tiny secret room hidden inside the pacific ocean

all I do is sweat and sweat and sweat

at the local coal mine

waiting for her to sit

inside my automobile

Here it is as if the ambitious imagery of the pacific ocean is contained in his that tiny room

and the shorter lines give the speaker a control of language that moves past the amusing bombast of the other poems to a delicacy of feeling, often implied in the other poems, but here come fully to life.

ARTS EMERSON Waiting For Godot

 

ARTS EMERSON

Waiting For Godot

Gare St Lazare Players ( Ireland)

Co-produced by the Dublin Theatre Festival

The Paramount Theatre

559 Washington Street

Boston, MA

October 31 –November 10

Tickets: 617-824-8400

ARTSEMERSON.ORG

Reviewer: Amy R. Tighe

Indeed, I too have been waiting.  Since my 80 year old mother died last year, I have been waiting to hear her voice again, even as upsetting as it had been to hear it for the past thirty years.  I am deeply impatient, waiting for her to tell me if she finally found out about God for herself, instead of making me take all those pilgrimages.  Just because she is dead does not mean it is over between us.  Somedays,  quite the contrary.  I only need  from her the sign  I can believe.

There are very few phrases in the English speaking word that have this much power.  “I have a dream,” “Houston, we have the technology, “ once upon a time,” and  “Waiting for Godot.”  I am hard, pressed to find new things to say about a phrase that imprints so many of us at the very moment we learn to speak.

I am surprised to see that I myself, who always tries to maintain an inner clarity in order to be able to  inhale new imprints,  I feel the trance of Beckett as well.  I am waiting. For my mother’s empathic caress, for my deceased brother who told me about the play he read in 11^th grade  45 years ago. “Get it kid? God- ot—its GOD, stupid.”  I am waiting for the government to collapse, for my country to arise, and to hear his voice again at my table.

The current production of Waiting for Godot , a world premiere from the Gare St Lazare Payers, (from Ireland) and playing at the Paramount this week is that rare and delicate ritual  you cherish and don’t allow yourself to perform enough.  Sitting in a full house, in the transcendent renovation of the Paramount, it seemed as if each and every person was  quietly quoting their favorite line in sync with the actors, if not repeating the entire play as if in common prayer.   Excited exhales are heard all night long. 

And yet, there are several deep moments when the actors stop, face us as audience, and wait.  Then,  the historical hall becomes a timeless meditation room, completely still for a minor eternity. I stopped breathing once or twice during the night, I am sure.

Even the set is waiting.  In the background, the enormous full moon faints and revives throughout the play.  The stage itself is a mirror of the moon, but it’s also not—it’s off-kilter, has a barren tree, and one small crater that Gogo (Estragon)  uses as  his personal throne.  The set is uncomfortable and tranquilizing.  The moons do not wane or crescent.  They are unhappy reflections, either  stark or dark, yet always whole.

The over-60 couple in front of me are retired, and now are writers, and “have seen Becket for decades and Godot  10 times.” In all their years of going to theatre, this is their favorite play. The young Hong Kong Chinese woman next to me has never heard of Becket and is bored, and I tell her that is the point of the play.  She ignores me for the rest of the evening.

The actors have lost their edge because the audience knows these characters so well that there is little the players can do except—well—play.  And so they do.  Simple and startling performances glitter brilliantly on stage.  I still feel Lucky’s rope and carry the sound of his chronic shuffling. Estragon’s  foot still annoys me.  Against an ageless and endless overly intelligent discussion of meaning, interpretation and inquiry, these players show us that what is real stays real:  Cruelty to each other, pain in the body, a profound desire to comfort and encourage.  In the experienced shadows of the Gare St Lazare troupe’s moon, we can lilt.

During intermission, a group of students from Concord Academy are chittering away, and I ask “What do you think of God-oh versus Goe doe?” What is sweetest is that they don’t question a random stranger asking questions, and they instantly respond, “Oh do we even have to know? I mean, isn’t the not knowing a way of knowing?”

This is what I wait for, and here I am finally found.  In this brick and mortar building, the conversation about our theatre of every day life is available with any other person.  Hosted by the eternal Muse Beckett, played out by finely tuned performers, and held in place by Arts Emerson, we have come, and every one of us is asking. 

As Estragon says “There is nothing to be done.”  And so, here, at ARTS  Emerson,  we do just that,  all of us,  together.

INTO YOUR LIGHT, A chapbook about raising teens, by Julianne Palumbo

Review of INTO YOUR LIGHT, A chapbook about raising teens, by Julianne Palumbo, Flutter Press, http://FlutterPress2009.blogspot.com, 41 pages, 2013

By Barbara Bialick

In this perfect-bound chapbook, a mother relates how she has to step back and let her teens have their own personal light and identity. It’s as if she has to start a whole new chapter in the raising of these people formerly known as children.

A very good poem in the book is called “Stuffing Bears”—where the author, working in a toy store, sells a stuffed bear and a giraffe to a man she fears is a predator. Then while driving down the highway past the store, she spots these same toys in a memorial to a dead child along the road:

I stare at the bear,
that big, blue bear.
I’d know that ugly thing anywhere,
even
on the side of the road
next to a giraffe,
next to a cross,
next to a sign
that says,
“We Miss You”

In “Skim Boarding”, she is learning when to speak to her teens and when to keep quiet:

The wave stalks.
Seagulls cry a warning.
Mother watches the water
Widen its mouth to swallow.
She wants to call out,
but…

Like the boarder
determined to master
the elusive ebb and flow,
she is learning to speak
and when to be silent.

And in “Suddenly Conscious”

Through their eyes
she sees herself,
more Van Gogh than Mona Lisa…

Before turning to poetry, says the author in her biography, Juianne practiced employee benefits law.
She has had poems published in Ibbetson Street Press, YARN, The MacGuffin, The Listening Eye, and others. She also writes young adult novels and novels in verse. A resident of Rhode Island, she is raising three teenagers and coaching teens in writing.

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