Waiting At The Dead End Diner by Rebecca Schumejda

Waiting At The Dead End Diner
Rebecca Schumejda
Bottom Dog Press

Review by  Thomas Benfield


As dusk settles into night and streetlights begin to glow onto vacant sidewalks, through Rebecca Schumejda’s writing, we shuffle out of the cold and into the Dead End Diner. The poetry collection Waiting At The Dead End Diner is as much about Rebecca Schumejda’s time waiting tables, as it is a confession, about waiting for a transitory period in her life to end. There is palpable urgency, nostalgic dialogue, and conflict in her voice as a writer. Whether filling ketchup bottles or saltshakers, occupational activities become her platform to tackle deeper topics like love, friendship, and humanity. These poems should sit beside a bottomless cup of coffee, toast, and a dimly lit red leather stool, bolted into the ground at the counter. With blunt imagery, detailed dialogue, and well-hidden optimism, Waiting At The Dead End Diner is a working-class anthem.

A selection from the poem," Scheduling", reads, “Oil and vinegar are housed in separate bottles,/ but George schedules Jolene and Carrie/ to work the same shifts almost every week.” Throughout Waiting At The Dead End Diner, Rebecca Schumejda makes comparisons between people, relationships, or feelings, with common objects found in multiples on every table of every booth. These comparisons are often left unexplained. However, they all share the same theme.  Sooner or later, every job or hobby will reveal a greater lesson. Waiting At The Dead End Diner is a collection of lessons taught by burns and spills to an audience of very few. But to those who can hear the message in each poem, we will be spared the monotony of 12-hour shifts usually needed for such epiphanies.

Rebecca Schumejda, much like a modern Hemingway, has mastered the use of short succinct sentences. Her poems read as easily as a grocery list. But as always, deeper contemplation is left to the reader,

The Décor

Since children never happened,
George’s wife adopts Chihuahuas,
dresses them in costumes
she designs herself.
She photographs them,
and hangs them framed
on the wall behind the register.

The Décor is just one of many uses of prose. Because Schumejda only reports factual action, the entire feeling of each piece is up for interpretation by the reader. This is an interesting tactic. It draws the reader immediately into analysis, sometimes before even completing the poem. The poem opens simply, “Since children never happened.” This vague statement with no further explanation begs the reader to ask, how does that make her feel? Or, why couldn’t she have children? This technique is interesting because there is no correct answer. The readers choose whether the poem is happy or sad, based on their own sensitivity towards each topic.

The crippling monotony of each shift grows on the reader throughout the book, “I start taking orders,/ prioritize- get drinks-/ refill coffees- bring out soups- place orders/ take another order- salads- place orders-/ extra dressing- bring out food- check on tables-/ find the rhythm of routine- drop checks.” (The Exterminator). Even the language used suggests an endless string of blue-collar days. Rebecca Schumejda writes accurately about her topic. The lack of rhyme schemes and meter makes these poems emulate the feeling of their action. Similarly, her use of heavy enjambment and figurative language provides a sense of urgency, which accurately grows and grows while working a dead end job.

Above all, these poems make me appreciative. As a student feeling the pressure of the future, we all like to think that we’ll become some kind of big shot. Throughout my life teachers and adults have threatened me, if I ever began to slack off. They would say that all I’d ever become is a waiter or a gas station attendant. The reinforcement of these jokes wore me down into thinking negatively about those professions. After reading Waiting At The Dead End Diner, I realized that every kind of work can either be done well or poorly. The profession only matters to the individual. Confidence only comes from your own perception of a job well done.

Thomas Benfield

Thomas Benfield is a 19-year-old writer from Mystic Connecticut. He is an English major at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. He is currently a freshman at Endicott College, pursuing a Creative writing major. Thomas attended Berkshire school, a four-year private boarding school in Sheffield Mass, where his love for writing was initiated. When Thomas is not writing he plays his original music that he has written for voice and guitar, surfs, and flies single engine airplanes.

The Low Pouring Stars George J. Farrah

The Low Pouring Stars 
Farrah, Geroge J.

  Review byAlice Weiss

In Geroge J. Farrah’s Low Pouring Stars, the speaker is searching for an autobiography. This is the title of the last poem in the book, but it is also the underlying theme. What is fascinating about the poet’s process of search is that the speaker couples, not only surprising images or similes, but predicates, as for example in “Daybreak,”

something

grows heavy

& light

as beauty

needs

a

distance to survive

The book proceeds by undermining proposition with image, abstract with uncoupled concrete, thus in “Ash,” where the conceit of the poem leans on the drift of ash in the air to portray attachment, a lovely contradiction, the speaker begins,

Born to the baths

we need of course. . .

. . .I am omnipresent. . .

withholding humiliation

from community ears . . .

a smooth girl consumed with guilt

the behemoth of sand

the sweet corner of her lip

the volumes of night written again and again

in her

It should be obvious from the quoted sections that however philosophical the poet’s aim, he counters the heaviness of it by writing in forms that emphasizing space and stops. Lists of things in and out of sentences move across the page in a kind of lace. In a “Disregard for your False Anatomy” (certainly the best title in the book) “Crayons of eternity’s misses” the speaker identifies as his favorites and that coupling culminates in “tins of handwriting/ that accumulate daily/ rare clothing.” Or in “Eyelatch,” his “artificial right eye/ where the debris of infinity/ has lodged/. . .

we will not crumble

(forever) in the corner

without a room

a body . . .

breathing

in all

of your seasons

at once

as

we take in

so much of the world

through our hands

Another, longer poem, “Out of the Window,” seems like an elegy for the loss of self, “a palm of a voice sweats/’this is where I saw the day/ defeat our voices crying.’ In “The Edge of a Reservoir,” a woman speaks to him

I am a fire pet

she said. . .

. . .

a relentlessness like

the leaves

the grass is

now

the whole world. . .

. . .

I think maybe

you’re a contribution

of pouring stars

down my shirt

he says

but the year wanders, they wander.

The airiness, indeed the quality of being philosophical in the phrase, “but the year wanders”

even of cliché, is stabilized and an reinvigorated by the next and final, “they wander,” ambiguously pointing to years, and also to the couple, under the stars pouring down his shirt

like a spilled cup of coffee. I love the exactness of that image and the seductiveness of the

address to his ‘fire pet.’ And the way the poet seems to be able to couple delight and mourning.

The book is aptly titled The Low Pouring Stars for the flow of images, form and their play with statement and abstraction, distances and stops.

14th annual Boston National Poetry Month Festival : April 11th from 11:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.

 

The book table at the 2013 Festival

               

Well for the 14th year I have been on the board for Tapestry of Voices, ( An organization founded by Harris Gardner (Far Right) ), that every year brings to you the much lauded Boston National Poetry Festival to the greater metro area. Somerville poets are well represented including: Yours Truly, Lloyd Schwartz, Bert Stern, Kirk Etherton, Lucy Holstedt,  State Representative Denise Provost, Harris Gardner, and Gloria Mindock. Below is a peek into what the Festival offers...

The Boston National Poetry Month Festival
Boston Public Library, Copley Square

and Old South Church (Thursday)
April 10-13, 2014. FREE ADMISSION.
~ more than 75 established & emerging poets~​

      Now in its 14th year, this annual festival begins at 7:30 Thursday night (April 10) with a new feature:

an evening of poetry set to music and dance across the street from the Library, at Old South Church. 

Events at the Library start on Friday at 11am, when 15 Keynote poets will read in the Salon. All are widely

published and highly acclaimed. (One example: David Ferry won the 2012 National Book Award in

Poetry, and the 2011 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.) The Festival continues on Saturday and Sunday, with 

readings by local established and emerging poets in Rabb Hall, plus open mics. and a writing workshop.

     

    Thursday, April 10, Old South Church (645 Boylston St.) 7:30 pm FREE

    16 perfomances of poetry set to music and dance (Guild Room, 4th floor. accessible)

 

    Friday, April 11, Commonwealth Avenue Salon Room at the BPL, 11:00 – 4:00pm FREE

    11:00-12:00   Lloyd Schwartz, Miriam Levine, Tino Villanueva

    12:00-1:00     Dan Tobin, Christine Casson, Jim Schley
      1:00-2:00     David Ferry, George Kalogeris, Martha Collins
      2:00-3:00     Diana DerHovanessian, X.J. Kennedy, Alfred Nicol
      3:00-4:00     Kathleen Spivack, Richard Hoffman, Fred Marchant

 

​    Saturday, April 12, Rabb Lecture Hall at the BPL, 10:00 am – 4:40 pm FREE  

    40 poets read for 10-minutes each. The day begins with five Boston-area high school students. Other

    poets include Regie O. Gibson, C.D. Collins, Charles Coe and State  Rep. Denise Provost. 

 

   Sunday, April 13, Rabb Lecture Hall at the BPL, 1:10 – 4:40 pm FREE 

   21 poets read for 10-minutes each. They include Ifeanyi Menkiti, Lainie Senechel, Doug Holder,

   Lo Galluccio,  and January O'Neil. (concurrent with open mic. and workshop)

 

   OPEN MIC. Sat & Sun 1:30 - 3:00 (Room 5-6). FREE WORKSHOP with Tom Daley Sun 3:15 - 4:30

 

Festival co-sponsored by Tapestry of Voices & Kaji Aso Studio, in partnership with the Boston Public Library.      

FOR INFORMATION: Tapestry of Voices: 617-306-9484. Library: 617-536-5400.

Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men On The Words That Move Them. Edited by Anthony and Ben Holden.

Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men On The Words That Move Them. Edited by Anthony and Ben Holden. ( Simon and Schuster) $25.

Review by Doug Holder

Ben Holden, who along with his father Anthony Holden ( Both accomplished writers in their own right) are editors of the  new poetry anthology Poems that Make Grown Men Cry… Ben Holder points out in the introduction to the book that Charles Darwin was at a loss to explain “crying,” describing it as that “special expression” attributed to humans. And this raw, mostly involuntary mode of expression is something we often try to hide—at least in public. But there is something blatantly honest about it in a world of artifice that makes us uncomfortable. We have all been at the oh-so polite poetry readings where people posture in poses of forced ecstasy and drone the perfunctory ah and um. Here, in this anthology, the readers of these poems unabashedly cry. And these aren’t just any readers. This collection is a survey of one hundred men of letters and the arts—poets, critics, authors, directors, artists, etc… who don’t cry at the first blush of cheap sentiment thrown at them. Their emotions cannot be bought for the price of salted peanuts and a cocktail. Such noted men as John Le Carre, Harold Bloom, Chris Cooper, Clive James, Jonathan Franzen, Billy Collins and many others shed a well-considered tear here.

As for me I didn’t cry. But I did have a wistful sigh; I experienced a haunting shudder; I noticed my hands trembling clandestinely under the table—perhaps a transient burst of indigestion coming from the depths of my throat.

After browsing through this volume I found much to recommend to the reader. Terry George, a Belfast-born screenwriter cites the lamenting poem by Seamus Heaney “Requiem for the Croppies.” The poem deals with the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Here the population revolted against British rule. As George writes:  “…tramp priest and peasant…they fought with farm tools against cannons.” The men were heroic; the results were tragic:

    Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

    The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

    They buried us without shroud or coffin

     And in August... the barley grew up out of our grave.

The novelist Nicholson Baker writes about Stanley Kunitz’s poem “End of Summer.” It deals with that poignant moment when you realize things have changed—you can’t go back—the die is cast. Here Kunitz gets a signal from nature:

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was over.

And as we all know there is always comedy peppered in tragedy. The poet Jack Mapanje cites “The Book Burnings” a beautiful piece by Bertolt Brecht with a delicious dollop of gallows humor. Here the poet in the poem rages at the despotic powers that did not burn his book with the others:

 To his horror, that his books

Had been forgotten. He hurried to his desk

On wings of rage and wrote a letter to the powers that be.

Burn me! He wrote, his pen flying, burn me!

Don’t do this to me. Don’t pass over me! Have I not always told you

The truth in my books? And now

I am treated as a liar!

    I order you:

Burn me!

I wonder why this anthology only had weeping men. Maybe it is because men are perceived as less emotionally accessible. However I am sure many women will do a discrete dab with their hankies, when they read these evocative selections.

Highly Recommended.

“I Will Never Forget” A Daughter’s Story of Her Mother’s Arduous and Humorous Journey Through Dementia By Elane C. Pereira

“I Will Never Forget”
A Daughter’s Story of Her Mother’s Arduous and Humorous Journey Through Dementia
By Elane C. Pereira
iUniverse, Bloomington IN

Reviewed 3/7/14 by Paul Steven Stone

A poignant journey through a life ending cruelly yet surrounded by love, “I Will Never Forget” is the author’s reminiscences, meticulously recorded, of her mother’s gradual diminution through the unstoppable ravages of Alzheimer’s. Well written and copiously recorded, the memoir is particularly powerful in the way the author jumps back and forth in time telling hers and her family’s story, so that by the time we are deep into her mom’s diminishment by Alzheimer’s we have witnessed many of the shared memories that her mom, Bette, will gradually relinquish to the disease.

    In recounting her childhood memories, from small victories, like rescuing a baby bunny, to lessons learned when her mom cleverly broke her of the habit of pre-inspecting her Christmas presents, Mrs. Pereira shares with us the threads that make up the tapestry of a normal middle class life, interspersed as it was with the tragedy of death and loss.

    As someone whose own mother is currently at the end game of Alzheimer’s I couldn’t help but compare Mrs. Pereira’s efforts to be a thoughtful, consoling caretaker of a struggling parent with those of my own. Frankly, I too often found the comparison uncomfortable. For Mrs. Pereira was a caring daughter, gifted with patience and understanding that ran far deeper than my modest portion.

    Patience and understanding are ingredients greatly called upon when dealing with a parent suffering from Alzheimer’s. Especially in the early days when one can’t really be sure what’s going on; whether your mother is just being forgetful or is starting to need extra care and vigilance. Nor are the dangers so easily seen or navigated, as was proven when Bette stumbled out from a ‘secure’ facility into 25 degree weather for hours wearing only her pajamas.

    I strongly recommend “I Will Never Forget” for anyone who finds him or herself on the threshold of a situation similar to the author’s. For revealing the stages of decline, the mood swings and roller coaster behavior of someone with Alzheimer’s, and the many challenges and pitfalls for those who are forced to take on a parental role for their parent, “I Will Never Forget” is like a guidebook to a foreign country.     It is a story that you, like the author, will never forget.

Poet Alan Feldman: A psychologist of the mystery of love.

 

Poet Alan Feldman

 

Poet Alan Feldman: A psychologist of the mystery of love.

Ah! Ain't love grand!  Yes grand, tragic, maddening, evolving... in all its infinite variety. Feldman in his collection Immortality explores love and its many manifestations, as well as other themes. I had the privilege to interview Feldman on my Somerville Community Access TV show Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer recently.

Alan Feldman's A Sail to Great Island (2004) won the Pollak Prize for Poetry from the University of Wisconsin. The Happy Genius (1978) won the annual George Elliston Book Award for the best collection published by a small, U.S. non-profit press. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and Kenyon Review, among many other magazines, and included in The Best American Poetry 2001 (edited by Robert Hass) and BAP 2011 (edited by Kevin Young). Feldman's recent work appears in Hanging Loose, Cimarron Review, upstreet, Southern Review, Yale Review, Salamander, Southwest Review, Cincinnati Review, Catamaran, Worcester Review, and online in Boston Poetry Magazine and Cortland Review. His poem "A Man and A Woman" was featured in Tony Hoagland's 2013 article for Harper's, "Twenty Little Poems That Could Save America."

Feldman was a professor and chair of English at Framingham State University, and for 22 years taught the advanced creative writing class at Harvard University's Radcliffe Seminars. He offers free, drop-in poetry workshops at the Framingham (MA) public library near his home.

 

 

Doug Holder: We were both born in New York City, and moved out to the suburbs of Long Island. I always found the suburbs stifling--how did you find it?

Alan Feldman: I was desperate to get out of the suburbs. But I will tell you something about Woodmere, L.I where I grew up. My mother and Louise Gluck's mother were best friends. Louise grew up in Hewlett and I grew up in Woodmere and so apparently it was a fertile ground for poets. And Louise  had an exhibit of her paintings at the Hewlett library when I was in high school. Her paintings were striking. Later -I met her on a bus when I was attending Columbia University. She told me she was taking a very good poetry course with Leoine Adams.And Louise was very beautiful, and so I thought I would sign up for the workshop, and maybe get to know her. But the workshop was not for me so I stopped going. But I forgot to drop the course. So my transcript will show the only course that I took in poetry writing, I failed.

My parents were both teachers and they took me and my sister to Europe for three months in 1952. I remember vividly when we were in Rome, I saw the Protestant Cemetery where Keats and Shelley are buried. It was an experience I will never forget. Here we were visiting the graves of folks long dead and we didn't know personally. I was all of seven years old. Shelley's grave was very well-tended--he came from a well- to- do background. It was covered with ivory. and Keats' grave was essentially bare. And then I remember my mother crying at Keats' grave. I thought:"How could something like this affect a living person?" This planted the idea in my soul that there is a transmission from the dead to the living via poetry. This ... I believe... was a big influence for me becoming an artist and poet. So Woodmere was my home--but it was my particular home and family. 

DH:  You taught in the South Bronx in the late 60s. That must of been--to say the least--challenging..

AF:  It was incredibly difficult. I had a choice to teach or ship out to Vietnam. I think I chose the wrong thing ( Laugh) I was placed in a special services school. This was where the average sixth grader was reading at a third grade level. A third of the staff were brand new-and had never been a teacher in the classroom. I was terrible at it. After the first half year they took me out of the classroom and made me a specialist in Language Arts and Science. I got to teach the same lessons all day long--so I got to learn how to teach. The second year they gave me class 5-1.This class had kids who scored the highest in the math test. They were like little geniuses. Some of them were were reading way above grade-level. And we put on plays and I had them painting. I think I succeeded here. But the idea that you can drop a bright and educated person in the classroom and they can automatically teach is wrong. There is so much technique in classroom management. I wasn't ready to teach kids whose main issue was to stay in their seat.

DH: You sent me some poems from your collection Immortality. Many of the poems deal with the psychology of love. One of the poems is titled " The Rowboat, The Girl, The Light" This poem took place when you were very young. You were out on a rural lake and a young girl swam to your boat.  Everything smelled of pine, desire, things were elemental. Now you have gotten older things have changed in this realm. Things are more urgent--there is a deeper appreciation of the world.

AF: As you get older-and I will be 70 soon--your desire becomes generalized. You desire the world and everything in it--as a child you take that for granted.

DH: Your wife Nan Hass is an accomplished artist. Do you guys collaborate?

AF: We understand each others' obsessiveness. We are both infected with this need to make art. Nan works all the time and has an incredible drive. She understands me. If something you are working on gets a hold of you--you are going to be immersed in it. We both give each other space. We are hilariously bad at collaboration. We worked on a book of poems, my poems and her illustrations. We got into such a fight about the binding that it almost destroyed our marriage. (Laugh) So our collaboration are limited and with parameters.

DH: You were a professor at Framingham State University for many years. In your opinion what makes for a good teacher?

AF A really good knowledge of the subject. A love for the subject. A strong desire to be helpful. A sense of organization. I have observed so many shapeless classes. The essential purpose is too vague.

The Rowboat, The Girl, The Light

Today the pool is pierced

by sunlight, and there’s a girl

in my lane, her flesh lit

by reflected light from below

to a subaqueous brightness

the way the water in our boathouse

(demolished long ago)

shone in our faces. 

We would lean over to see the striped

shadowy fish, their sides

glinting like belt buckles

or dimes, and the wood

smelled ancient and dry,

and probably the dock

creaked, as my row boat

thumped against it,

the boat’s floor resounding

like a drum when we stamped.

Unsinkable because of

compartments under the seat

like little ovens, so I could

go out alone, provided

I stayed in the cove, our point

in the star-shaped lake,

and hewed close to the shore

I wouldn't have wanted to leave

anyway, because she lived there––

an unfathomably pretty girl,

like the Queen of Heaven.

On the best days she would hail me

from her landing, but once

she jumped in, and swam to me, 

her white body dripping

as she clambered aboard.

Then everything smelled of pine.

I think that's how desire felt then––

like an odor, the pines

that covered the hillside

above her house.

Desire these days feels like desire

for everything.  The air

I strain to breathe, the white

clouds rumbling across

the blue outside the pool’s 

picture windows, and the little

pinpricks of light

on people’s fenders

while the traffic passes.

Alive!  Alive!  each stroke

like the clenching of the heart

Partner, Orchard, Day Moon By Michael Todd Steffen

Partner, Orchard, Day Moon

By Michael Todd Steffen

Cervena Barva Press

www.cervenabarvapress.com

Somerville, MA

ISBN: 978-0-9883713-2-3

Cover Art: Irene Koronas

61 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Poetry needs concentration. Reading Michael Todd Steffen’s first collection of poems, Partner, Orchard, Day Moon, demands both presence of mind and a steady emotional containment. I kept putting the book down and looking behind me. Footfalls I thought. Perhaps murmurings. Or a pulse in the back of my neck.

Many of Steffens pieces conjure up small town and rural Americana: holidays, hunting, board games, table talk, hand-me-downs, views through kitchen windows, summer adventures, and, of course, baseball. Strangely, the atmospherics that saturate this collection suggest Igmar Bergman rather than Norman Rockwell. In the midst of measured well-wrought lines and enticing music, something wicked this way comes.

Right from the book’s first poem Steffens has a way of disorientating. In Christmas in August the poet sets up a juxtaposition of seasonal discomfort. The piece’s second person protagonist ascends a department store’s escalator in summer garb into a thinner, much colder mannequin world. To drive his image home the poet places a mirror beyond the escalator’s railing. The contrast tests reality. The poem opens this way,

Wandering lost through the department stores

You catch a glimpse of yourself in an odd

Mirror gliding over the escalator’s

Handrest—when the metal step slips forward

And you stumble, up walking around the mannequins

Clad for autumn in pullovers and cords.

Summer hasn’t ended.

The understated rhyme and metrics seem to effectively push a chilling definition of the ambiguous, later-mentioned ”bag people” front and center.

Moody silence pervades the intelligible, but demonic, chess game of life in one of the title poems (there are three) called The Partner. Curiously, Steffen drops the names of two iconic chess grandmasters into this context: Tigran Petrosian, noted for his remarkable, if interminable draws, and Gedeon Barcza, who played offense using a defensive strategy. The poem ends in Bergman- like fashion,

Thickening in the waking winter dark

And the checker’d go watery beneath the pieces—

Your knight in stirrups at the toe of his pawn.

You’d catch yourself up from a nod and swear

He had left the room. But he kept murmuring at you.

All the while he sat right there

Across the table, not saying a word.

Steffen’s sonnet Thanksgiving becomes a secular or possibly a quasi- religious rite of guilt and sacrifice in a hushed ceremony of food and family. Words such as “accused,” “wince,” “pain,” and “hushed” shadow the meal and, perhaps, foreshadow other troubles. The poem ends ambiguously. The poet says,

One creature went silent. He went on to live

And join the toast at the table with its ornaments

For the holiday, the straw weft cornucopia

Basket with squash and gourds and native corn,

Auburn of oat sheaf in the candle’s aura

Hushed for the dishes my aunt told us to pass

With sneaky dribs of red wine for my glass.

Another title poem, The Orchard, Steffen molds into a beautifully compressed piece that mulls over the phenomena of appearance and promise. His braille metaphor really hits the mark. Here are the first eight lines,

Trees stood all winter like cattle in the field

Naked of their leaves in wind and snow,

Their extremities advanced like blind men reading

Braille from the lines of wind that made them tremble.

To look at them for long you would remember

How superficial winter’s hardest freeze

Compared to their roots deep as the cemetery’s

Shelter where uncles seasoned herring stew.

My favorite Steffen poem, The Miracle Worker in Work Clothes, pushes through the fertile clods of page prophesizing the brutish theology of a barnyard universe. The piece is mythic and absolutely unforgettable. The nitty-gritty of creation accusingly grabs civilized man by his white-collared throat, and demands that he collect his illusions and step aside. The poet says,

With the creases of leather boots clumped in clay

The miracle worker

Has raised the dead at Saint Galen’s

While the family wept and praised the lord their god.

Like earth stunning

Winter back into spring, the miracle worker

Tensed, a body of sweat and breath, breast borne open

To the holy spirit

With great concentration pushing, pushing

The dead back into this life while men

Looking on stood dumb…

Hand Me Downs, a sonnet, begins as a meditation of family closeness and work ethic, evolves into the nature of memory, and ends lightly, yet troublingly, considering mankind’s shared condition. Steffen explains,

I was straw for style. Others were remembered.

Beyond their season things withstood a year

Stretched to casual, wear tear, raggedy,

Nearly familiar, for me or anybody.

The longest poem in this collection Steffen entitles Ghost Man. Reminiscent of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Steffen’s persona gathers about him a ghost companion, a dead man pursuing him in his imagination. One of a bunch of summertime kids, the poet’s protagonist had come face to face with the dead man, formerly a hanged man. Sickened by what he saw he ran away with his friends in search of adults. Later, the unresolved death of this ghost (suicide or homicide?) gives him power over the poet’s imagination. This indefatigable and hostile spirit blocks pathways and bridges and pursues the poet, threatening violence. He becomes the sum of all fears. The paranoia builds in these lines,

Some days later, he’s be there again

Barring my passage to the pathway bridge.

For hours after I’d given up and turned

Away from that crossing with its graceful camber

Over the river, he followed me

In silence, appearing behind a large stone

Or from a hedge or through a row of trees—

The knotted hunch over to one shoulder

For his abandoned judgment, the missing teeth

Sure sign that he had no fear and would eat anything

Steffen’s collection of poetry does not have the feel of a first book with its expected missteps and questionable choices. On the contrary its unmistakable artistry and mysterious combination of maturity and controlled paranoia belies that trite canard. There is real power, both mythic and otherwise, in Steffen’s word images delivered here. The bright future of this ghost-haunted, highly talented poet seems beyond question.

Rabindranath Tagore: A Sage In The Dust By Sajed Kamal

 Rabindranath Tagore: A Sage In The Dust
By Sajed Kamal
Bangla Academy Press
$25
2012

By Myles Gordon

    When local writer Sajed Kamal decided to translate fifty poems of India’s most revered, admired writer into English, he wasn’t overwhelmed by the difficult task. Maybe that’s because the Bengali-born, now Boston resident, Kamal grew up in the shadow of literary genius.
    Kamal’s book, Rabindranath Tagore: A Sage In The Dust, is a heartfelt translation of India’s most acclaimed, beloved writer. Born in 1861, Tagore published thousands of poems, plays, novels, songs, and stories, founded and ran a progressive children’s school, and was an accomplished painter before his death at the age of eighty. One of his poems became Bangladesh’s national anthem, another, India’s, and in 1913, he became the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize for literature.    
    Kamal decided to attempt the translations a few years ago simply because he loved Tagore’s work and felt a new translation, into a more colloquial English than previous tries, was overdo. A hefty assignment? Certainly. But Kamal hails from high literary pedigree and accomplishment. His mother, Sufia Kamal was also a legendary poet in Bangladesh., of whom none other than the great Tagore said in 1938: Your poetic talent amazes me. You have a high place in Bengali literature, as constant and established as the North Star. Accept my blessings.
    Sajed Kanal, who has lived in the Boston area for decades, has written several books of poems himself and is a teacher and noted activist for renewable energy. Having grown up surrounded by the poetry of his mother, he began his translations of Tagore in his kitchen, after work, as a pleasant hobby. As the project took shape, he realized he was onto something with depth and substance that in 2012 was published as a book.
    To keep the work fresh, Kamal wrote in an email, about half the poems in the book have never been translated. The rest came out in older translations that he wanted to update unfettered by stifling rhyme and rhythmic schemes of the early twentieth century. The book is a bilingual edition – the poems written in the original Bengali language opposite the pages of their English translations. A Sage In The Dust captures Tagore’s great spirituality and romanticism, and humanist optimism in such poems as “To Civilization”

    Give back that wilderness, take this city,
    take all the iron, bricks, lumber and stones,
    O new Civilization…
    I do not want the variety of royal feasts
    in the security of your stony cage.
    I want freedom. I want to spread my wings,
    I want to regain my power within my heart,
    I want to break out of my captivity
    to let the heartbeat of the universe touch my soul!

    The poem evokes Whitman’s scope and grandeur and the awakening of the grand individual in the expanding, modernized world. Tagore was also a political poet who took daring, unpopular stances on staid, Indian tradition. His poem, “Chores,” attacks the caste system, which he detested:

    My servant is nowhere to be seen in the morning.   
    My door’s open, my bath water isn’t ready,
    the worthless idiot didn’t come home hast night…
    he looks at my face—then says to me
    in a voice choked with emotion:
    “Last night around midnight my little girl died.”
    So saying, in a hurry, with his gamochha on his shoulder,
    he goes off alone to do his daily chores.

    In his early career, such public stances often brought Tagore rebuke from local government. As his fame and prestige grew, he became a voice of and for the people commenting and advising on matters ranging from politics to spirituality, as in the poem “Renunciation”:

    Said a man in the depth of night, renouncing the world,
    “I’ll leave home to search for God.
    Who is it that keeps me allured here?”
    I do, “ said God. But he didn’t hear it…
    The child cries out in his dream, clinging to his mother.
    God said, “Turn back.” But he didn’t hear the call.
    “Alas,” said God with a sigh,
    “where is my devotee going leaving me here?”

    Obviously these are poems written in another time and another culture, but thanks to Kamal’s tender and thoughtful translation, they are accessible, without being archaic. Some of the poems, like “Circling,” are timeless. It could have been written a hundred years ago. It could have been written yesterday.

    Incense longs to unite itself with fragrance,
        fragrance  longs to pervade in incense.
    Melody longs to be caught in rhythm,
        rhythm longs to run back to melody.
    Essence longs for a body in form,
        form longs for freedom in essence.
    Infinity longs for the intimate company of finite,
        finite logs to lose itself in infinity.
In creation and destruction—I don’t know whose logic this is:
    this endless back and forth between essence and form,
bond searching constantly for its freedom,
    freedom begging for a home in bondage.

    The book launch for A Sage In The Dust took place in January, at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, in Cambridge. The small room was packed with many of the audience members from India and Bangladesh. The poems were read, first in Bengali, than in Kamal’s English translation. Many in the audience murmured the poems out loud from memory, in Bengali, as Kamal, and others, read. The respect for Tagore as a major literary figure was palpable. Sajed Kamal has spent years making Tagore’s work accessible for an English speaking audience – a labor of love and a wonderful book.


        About The Author

Myles Gordon’s book-length book of poetry, Inside the Splintered Wood, was recently published by Tebot Bach (Huntington Beach, CA), as winner of the press’s “Patricia Bibby First Book Competition.” His chapbook, Recite Every Day, was published by Evening Street Press (Dublin, Ohio) in 2009, as winner of the press’s “Helen Kay Chapbook Competition.” He is a past winner of the Grolier Poetry Prize, and honorable mention for an AWP Intro Award – Poetry. He has published poetry in numerous journals including Slipstream and Rattle. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a Master of Education from the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst. He teaches school in Revere, Massachusetts and has previously worked as a television producer for WCVB TV, where he won four New England Emmy Awards for his writing and producing efforts.