The Road To Emmaus by Spencer Reece

 

Spence Reece

The Road To Emmaus

by Spencer Reece

© 2014 Spencer Reece

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux

New York, New York

Hardbound, $24 (tentative),124 page

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

There are some poets a reader discovers and is determined to read the rest of that poet’s work.  This happened with The Road to Emmaus, Spencer Reece’s second offering to the poetic world.  The first book, A Clerk’s Tale, of which the title poem was given a full page review in The New Yorker proved to be an enthralling poem, in fact the whole book proved more than interesting.  However, the current volume, due out in April 2014 from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux is one to be recommended without hesitation.

As interesting as his poems are, Reece himself is fascinating character. He was a salesman for Brooks Brothers, clothing men in high priced apparel. A gay man, he later became an Episcopalian priest. He teaches in Central America now. His poems are reality based often depicting what he sees or experiences.  Let’s look at “ICU”

Those mornings I traveled north on I-91,

passing below the basalt cliff of East Rock

where elms discussed their genealogies,

I was a chaplain at Hartford Hospital,

took the Myers-Briggs with Sister Margaret,

learned I was an I drawn to Es.

In small group I said, “I do not like it,

the way young black men die in the ER,

shot, unrecognized, their gurneys stripped,

their belongings catalogued and unclaimed.”

In the neonatal ICU, newborns, breathed,

blue, spider-delicate in nests of tubes.

A Sunday of themselves, their tissue purpled,

their eyelids the film on old water in a well,

their faces resigned in plastic attics,

their skin mottled mildewed wallpaper.

It is correct to love even at the wrong time.

On rounds, the newborns eyed me, each one

like Orpheus in his dark hallway, saying:

I knew I would find, I knew I would lose you.

Perhaps his teaching experiences in central America resulted in the poem “Among Schoolchildren” in which the following appears:

I had come to work in the orphanage of Villa Florencia.

Inside the ten-foot wall with barbed wire, behind the mental

            gate,

guards fingered

their pistols like Bibles,

and seventy orphaned girls politely greeted strident Christians.

One girl had been found on a coconut truck.

She had lived on coconut juice since birth,

had trouble speaking, preferred not to be held.

Two sisters had been left a street corner on a sheet of

            cardboard;

their mother told them to wait, then never came back.

Reece’s descriptions leave little to the imagination. No surrealist, he realistic verbiage brings it all to the immediate, the real. Yes, his sexual orientation crops up. More importantly is his religious orientation which buttresses his faith and his ability to see and deal with the difficulties of the lives of others.  

In his final poem, “Hymn,” the last three lines may best sum up Reece’s poetry:

We each went our separate ways

following where we were being led.

Marie said: “Writ it down, just as it happened.”

Reece has done that in definitive fashion much to our good fortune.

_____________________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

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

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Publisher, Muddy River Books, Brookline, MA

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 8

Kate Chadboune: An Irish Gal for All Seasons

Kate Chadbourne with her constant companion

Kate Chadboune:   An Irish Gal for All Seasons

Interview with Doug Holder

 Kate Chadbourne is about all things Irish. She radiates warmth and a passion for Irish folklore, music, literature, poetry, food…in short everything the Emerald Isle has to offer.

 

 Chadbourne is a singer, storyteller, and poet whose performances combine traditional tales with music for voice, harp, flutes, and piano. She holds a PhD in Celtic Languages and Literature from Harvard where she teaches courses in Irish language and folklore – but the heart of her understanding of Irish folk tradition comes from encounters with singers, storytellers, and great talkers in Ireland. She has been a “tradition bearer” in the Revels Salon series and in the Gaelic Roots Concert Series at Boston College. Her music was featured recently on NPR’s programs, “Cartalk” and “All Songs Considered,” and songs from her latest CD, The Irishy Girl, are played on Irish radio programs throughout the country. The Harp-Boat, a collection of poems about her father, a Maine lobster man, won the Kulupi Press 2007 Sense of Place Chapbook Contest and was published in 2008. Whether she is singing, telling stories, teaching, or sharing a poem, she aims to leave her audiences moved, enlivened, and eager for their own adventures.


I had the pleasure to speak to her on my Somerville Public TV show  Poet to Poet Writer to Writer.

Doug Holder: Kate you have a PhD in Celtic Studies, you have taught at Harvard--- you are a scholar. But in fact you said you learned more from your informal education—talking to regular folks in Ireland than in your scholarly pursuits.

Kate Chadbourne: I think you need to learn from both. You need to do your book learning, but then you have to get out and around. I was walking in the hills of eastern Ireland and I meet this cheerful, little man. I was fresh out of doing folklore research at the Folklore Archive in Dublin. I asked him: “What do you do for fun in the evening?” He replied, “Oh, we talk, play cards or fight.”  And it so happens I was looking at things like ritualized conflict and there it was. So this was the payoff from the scholarly work. So I listened to what people were saying about their lives. And this is when it all comes together. I am mad about the music, poetry and the storytelling of the Irish. I want to hear it in life. Like when you are in a pub, and the fiddler is playing slowly, and you observe the etiquette of the moment—and it comes together.

DH:  You have an award-winning collection of poetry “The Harp Boat” that is about your late lobster man father in Maine. The sea, I am sure you will agree is a good source for poetry- we are often transfixed by it. Did your father instill in you a love of poetry?

KC: My father would have said he was the farthest thing from a poet and yet there were rhythms in his speech and his swearing that were poetic. Or just the way he could complain. I really got a sense of season and time. My father was with nature. Hey—you reach a certain point in life, and this all comes together.

DH : You play the harp—quite impressively—how did this come about?

KC: I have worked with harpers for 10 or 11 years now. When I was doing research in 2003, a friend looked at me and said: “ You look like a harper.” So when I was back in the states, my ex-husband bought a harp, because it was his dream to play one. So I kept my hands off it. He never played it, but eventually I did. I was going to play music in an assisted living home and I asked him to borrow his harp to make some chords. And that was the beginning of my affair with the harp. I lost my husband, but I gained a harp. (Laugh)

DH: How do you integrate your music and poetry?

KC: I integrate it all the time. When I tell a traditional Irish story, I bring up some poetry. I am crazy for putting poems to music. Not so much mine but others’. I do it with poems that speak to me. I get seized with the desire, and then I hear it in my head. I just love the process. Song writing is like poetry writing. You are trying to access this bedrock of truth and feeling.

DH: You started this online website the Bardic Academy  http://www.bardicacademy.org   Tell us about this.

KC: I view it as a resource for writers and musicians. It is a website for my school where I give lessons in voice, harping, poetry, piano playing—singing in the Irish language. I also compose well-wishing poems, to make my music useful. People send me letters—about a sick loved one, their wife, etc...—I hold it my mind—then I let it rip on the piano—I send a recording to the person.

DH: Reading your poems I get the sense that you do not manipulate nature, but you sit back and learn.

KC: I love that. I have a great deal of trust in nature—human nature too. I love the integrity and holiness of the world.

How are Sea and Ocean Different?

Ocean is the realer thing-

brine with real salt that dries the lips

and sun off the wave knits a web in the eye.

Men spend a life drenched through their waders,

hauling up empty pots, eyeing the chickens.

Good ones hanging offshore; the hull needs work.

Sea is the wind between two planets,

the silver place on ancient maps,

spuming with narwhals and dolphins,

collared with green lace and hung with pearls.

Ships there go with quiet sails,

and the wind is kind to travelers.

I have sailed a life at sea

while my father works the ocean. 

--Kate Chadbourne

Macbeth By William Shakespeare

Macbeth

By William Shakespeare

Directed by Joey DeMita

Black Box Theatre at Arsenal Center for the Arts

November 22-30, 2013

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

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Staging a Shakespeare play can be quite difficult even for the most professional theater companies and FUDGE proves itself up to the task.  Joey DeMita’s direction brings out some fine acting from Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to the three witches, who are particularly frightening with their hissing and murderous intent.  Dave Rich making his FUDGE debut with a number of others in the play is an energetic and convincingly mad Macbeth, his ability to retain and recite the many lines is admirable. Linda Goetz (Lady Macbeth) is excellent in her slightly understated role.  This is the third time I have seen Ms. Goetz and she never fails to succeed, no matter the role.

Among the supporting actors there are no failures; each plays his role well. There are no obvious flubs or missteps by the FUDGE debut actors which includes Timothy McGuire (Dunjcan/Doctor/Siward), Benjamin Medeiros (Banquo/Menteith), Tim Kimani (Ross), Grant Jacoby (Malcolm).  In particular, Mr. McGuire is interesting in that this is his stage debut having previously appeared on television and in movies. 

And a note about Sam Greene (Apparitions/Macduff’s son), seventh grader at Brookline’s Runkle School. He appeared more than adequately in last season’s Assassins and his growth can be seen in his acting ability.

DeMita’s directing is always sharp—lines are rarely missed, positions and movements always timely. James Petty’s set design while sparse is used well for location changes,

witches’ cauldron and ghostly apparitions. Steve Bergman’s music is eerie and well integrated into theme of the play.

Most important is that Shakespeare was well ahead of his time as a psychologist depicting things already known: tyranny, treachery, violence and murder while mixing it into a bowl of ambition, guilt, madness and revenge to cook up a delicious tragedy that some four hundred years later FUDGE can enthrall audiences.

_____________________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer, Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

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

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Publisher, Muddy River Books

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthologies 7 & 8

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.