Lainie Senechal appointed the first Poet Laureate of Amesbury, Mass.

Lainie Senechal--New Poet Laureate of Amesbury, Mass.

After the Fall

I want to fall,
let go of everything;
like last lazy leaf of laurel,
drift aimlessly; no desire
to soar with eagles,
rather a feather from
wingtip relinquished
to zig, zag through space
on slightest zephyr.

I want to fall
through layers of light,
sunrise to sunset,
steadily deepening into dark.
A languid meteor
sparkling slowly to earth,
holding on to nothing;
never heeding where I land:
on softest snow of season,
among spring’s cheery crocus,
with summer’s daily dandelions,
along autumn’s silent stream.

For I am all of this
and from all
I have been released.


Lainie Senechal


http://www.lainiesenechal.com/index.php/about-me/
For more about Lainie Senechal go to   

Swimming The Hellespont Selected Poems: 1971-2001 Jesse Mavro Diamond

Swimming The Hellespont

Selected Poems: 1971-2001

Jesse Mavro Diamond

© 2015 Jesse Mavro Diamond

Wilderness House Press

Littleton, MA

ISBN  978-1-329-31315-6

Sofbound, $15.95, 71pages

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

On the back cover of Jesse Mavro Diamond’s book Judson Evans writes, “Mavro Diamond forges a voice from crucial elements of Jewish, lesbian, and feminist identity.”

Indeed all these elements are in Ms. Mavro Diamond’s illuminating collection of poetry which is personal and intimate, presenting poetry which is not often covered in mainstream poetics and brings to mind the work of Marilyn Hacker.

Here is a poem which presents a feminist perspective of body:

The Beautiful Mystery

may be a disappointment to bra gents

who look or perfection in balanced flesh

and corset men who search for symmetry.

Sisters know human hips were made to extend

for arms whose hands reach, trembling, for security

that comes from witnessing another’s chest

imperfect as her own.

Let’s leave disillusionment to the lingerie lads:

a woman’s body remains perfectly gorgeous

because it is.

Perfection does exist—

In imperfection move the beautiful mystery.

Now follow that with a poem that reflects with her Jewish heritage and a past in which being Jewish was always safe:

Ode to a Lute

         1

In April, at the bottom of the stairs, we found a stringless lute.

I saw it first, you claimed. Besides, you joke, you’re Sephardic,

a horse thief, whereas I, Russian, Ashkenazic, am no criminal.

Take the lute, I said, and take this story, too:

If a person steals a horse, she may be on the run

from worse thieves, they may be chasing her

out of her own country. Imagine she has no alternative

but to grab the first horse she sees, jump on it

and gallop hundreds of miles into a strange land,

changing her name s she rides, covering her face with a rag

even at night, so the moonlight will not reveal

her true identity.  Understand? I asked.

But you had fallen asleep in my lap, cradling the lute.

There are the missing strings, I whisper.

This is a riff on biblical Talmudic wisdom and teaching, yet it is in its way a beautiful mystery of its own, while Ode to a Lute 2 is a different tale with a moral of a different sadness.

Swimming the Hellespont is a 30 year odyssey for Jesse Mavro Diamond,  In it she packs 31 of her best poems, including the title poem, which travels from the past at the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau to a hopeful future which she sees on the horizon.

Whether the reader is female or male, Jewish or non-Jewish, LGBT or straight there is something for each reader to absorb and cherish. In other words it is a book to keep and reread when you want to remember the exigency of the weight of societal reality.

_________________________________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

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

Letting Go Of Who We Were: In the Pages of Cammy Thomas’s: Inscriptions

Cammy Thomas

Review by Emily Pineau

“Our ghosts are always with us, / their stinks, their bad habits, always / as much as we’re with them,” Cammy Thomas writes in her poem, “The Other You.” Thomas’s poetry collection Inscriptions is haunting, yet comforting, and is deeply rooted with sharp, vivid images. This collection, like people’s lives, is broken up into three sections : I. SWEET BROKE DOWN, II. POEMS IN MEMORY OF ELEANOR THOMAS ELLIOTT, and III. A WINDY KISS, for Elly. Our sections in life—past, present, and future—make up who we are. Thomas’s poem “The Other You” seems to be the heart of this collection, describing how our past selves live inside of us. Each poem in Inscriptions reads as if they are various versions of Thomas—only now, the poems also exist within us as she reveals the way she sees people, loss, and nature.

            The last line in Thomas’s “The Other You” reads, “You can’t forgive the one who hurt you. / Only the-you-from-then can do that, / and she will never be ready,”(p.12). This powerful line makes me think about closure and forgiveness differently. Sometimes past relationships feel like they happened in another lifetime, yet the hurt remains. Though, if you understand that you are a different person now then you were before, you are separating yourself from this pain—The pain is no longer yours—It belongs to the old you. The old you will hold onto the memory and stay in the moment so that the new version of you can move on from it.

            In addition, in Thomas’s “On the Island of Staffa,” a woman is climbing a hill, gasping as though she is both exhausted and devastated.  When she surrenders her husband’s ashes to the wind on top of the hill, the reader can imagine the wall of grief that hits her. We are not left feeling empty, though. Thomas writes, “Yes, yes, it’s dust, /yes it is. /It could be anyone, / and could there be anyone/ who wouldn’t want this kind of love?” (p.31). This line reveals that the kind of love that’s most painful to lose is the best kind to have. Rather than the woman facing the absence of love, she is encompassed by the presence of it when the wind picks her husband up. The feeling of this poem reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, “Annabel Lee.” In English class, my classmates and I remarked about how sad and tragic Poe’s poem is, but my English teacher had a different take on it. She said, “Imagine being loved like that, though.  Who wouldn’t want that type of love?” This sentiment resonated with me, and now when I read Thomas’s poem I feel like the grieving woman’s love trumps her sadness.

            Also, Thomas’s poem “Without Talking” has an deeply impacting ending that not only makes the reader want to hear more, but also makes the reader want more out of life, relationships, and themselves. Each line is spaced out so that the poem reads like a conversation—It has the feeling of a pin-pong match. On page 13 Thomas writes:

He said don’t use

                                      what saves you,

your wall, the words

                                       (do it without talking),

the words defend

              and don’t open—

                                           again, again, again,

but they keep…

                                                   oh and without them

Instead of being in a straight line down, the poem itself is breaking out of its comfort zone and is letting the feeling of the words shape it, rather than letting the actual words shape it.  I feel like this poem is applicable to the process of writing especially, because in order to successfully write an effective, moving, and authentic piece you need to write “without talking.” If you reveal your scenes and feelings with urgency and passion your readers can understand you without you explaining yourself to them.

            Throughout Inscriptions it is not necessary for Thomas to explain herself for readers to understand her. In her poems about death or disappointment, she weaves in some hope, making us feel like it is possible to move on and find new things and people in life to focus on and to love.  Also, when writing about love, Thomas reveals the ugly, raw truth, but this makes the relationships feel more accessible, honest, and real. I hope to emulate Thomas’s authenticity in my own writing, as she has become a poet that I can identify with on both a human and creative level. 

Paradise Drive, Poems by Rebecca Foust

Paradise Drive, Poems by Rebecca Foust


There’s nothing braver or more startling than a poet having the guts to write a book of sonnets, and nothing more giddily delightful than reading one that works—Welcome to Paradise Drive, Rebecca Foust’s Petrarchan jewel-box. The turns these poems take and the narrative twists in the course they travel are high voltage volta.  You’ll be amazed at the speed with which you traverse this book’s course, and the degree to which you are torn between the desire to forge ahead and the insistent urge to pull to the side, breathe and examine with care the compositional masterwork that each poem represents.

Paradise Drive, a journey from grief and alcohol soaked origins in rust belt Pennsylvania to the painful perversities of life inside the headlands of Marin, follows the narrative arc of a sometimes actor, sometimes observer, Pilgrim, who tellingly decomposes progress as premise.  In notes to the volume, Foust tells us that Pilgrim is inspired by the life of Ann Dudley Bradstreet, part of the 1630 Winthrop fleet of Puritan emigrants, and “a seeker among seekers…in love with the world and struggling to maintain the piety demanded by her faith.”   Though Pilgrim may be Bradstreet, the Colonies’ first published female poet, transmuted into a contemporary witness to broken pieties, painfully questioning her own, Pilgrim echoes and silently inverts John Bunyan’s travels in Pilgrim’s Progress from the “City of Destruction” to the “Celestial City,” Mount Tamalpais a material substitute for Mount Zion; the surrounding towns, Belvedere, Tiburon, Mill Valley, Ross, capsules containing the empty promise of transcendence through comfort and affluent hedonistic bliss, leaving their inhabitants crushed and empty, dropping into the river of death in a “straddle” and step from the red ochre rise of the Golden Gate Bridge.

The stakes could not be higher, nor the wire more tightly strung, yet Foust gives us to understand that these tragic emptyings of lives are unnatural, creations of the self-destructive and very human desire to reach beyond what is given, as if in that we will find love and safety, satisfaction and perhaps fulfillment.  And so, as preface, she places us in nature, “Purple against orange, maple and sage…Trout lilies and wild Iris. Mount Tam mantled/ each dawn in fog. Then naked and lit…” before delivering us, through Pilgrim into the abyss.

    “Her dreams/ —Macy’s-parade-balloon-sized dreams—/now lie,
         a tangle of downed silk and line.” (from Meet Pilgrim)


Pilgrim, seeker, visitor and possibly introvert, has mastered the art of inclusion. She has found her way into money and into the rolling party to which those of us born with noses against the glass on a Winter’s night dreamily aspire, and yet internally she remains an outsider, knowing that the passed hors d’oeuvres can feed, but not fill her. 

    “Cowed by all those straight-white teeth,
     Pilgrim ran for the bathroom, not for coke
    as others supposed, but for something
     more covert and rare: a book… (from Cocktail Party)

She is party to this life, complicit, but not fully in it, and it is this ambivalent complicité that opens the tale to the quality—torn empathy—that lends it gravity and makes successive sonnets appropriate vehicles of transmission. 

To work, a sonnet must embody acute, original, and sensitive observation that extends beyond the features, primitive motives and behaviors of its subject to that individual’s psyche and spirit.  To rise to grace a sonnet must do more though, it must implicate the observer in the agon and in the outcome, and it must make readers feel the blood, pulsing or spilt. 

Through Pilgrim, Foust complicates the empathic connection and the possibility of bond that the best sonnets trouble and provoke.  Her character mediates between the poet and the anxious characters (“Marin man,” wives left bereft by divorce and those who ultimately take to the bridge) for whom the poems invoke empathy.  But where does this empathy lie, is it with Pilgrim, or the poet, both? Foust doesn’t give us simple answers, she doesn’t fully disclose, leaving us instead with the beating pulse, the feel of the blood, one-step, perhaps, removed.

In this mediation, Foust expands the possibilities of the form and elevates Paradise Drive above the level of an Ice Storm in verse; she and Pilgrim are working deeper channels, and their effort to bring something (someone) new to the party extends to the making of the poems themselves.   Foust’s sonnets embrace, honor, violate and expand on Petrarchan form, unfolding with a turn over fourteen metered lines, ending in a couplet, but dispensing with strict iambic meter and formulaic end-rhyme over each poem’s body.  Her sonnets offer us instead powerful, telling, urgent and contemporary internal rhyme and varied meter, the meter of poems pulsing with life, palpitating at the edge of death and never forced to form. 

It is through her undoing of that expected by the form that Foust, via Pilgrim’s search for truth, gives us the sonnet as something new, as a once more viable container for yearning inchoate, conduit to loss and instrument of grace in beat and rhyme varied by necessity rather than clever calculation.  And so, the lives, the suicides, the guilty participation and the being other that she knits together through Pilgrim’s character in the land of excess tears through the surface, puncturing the familiar, revealing the price of Paradise less than celestial.

I admire the quiet bravery Rebecca Foust expresses through this channeled flood of sonnets.  As I read, I had the sensation of water, unexpected, pouring through an arroyo, and then gone, leaving me in dazed awe.  This is not a book for children, and thank god!

Marc Zegans is a poet.  His most recent collection, The Underwater Typewriter, was published by Pelekinesis Press in September of this year.

Paradise Drive, winner of the Press 53, poetry award, is available through Press 53, here http://www.press53.com/Bio_Rebecca_Foust.html

The Encantadas: Evolution and Emotion Poems by Karen Alkalay-Gut and Ezra Gut

Karen Alkalay-Gut

The Encantadas: Evolution and Emotion

Poems by Karen Alkalay-Gut and Ezra Gut

Simple Conundrum Press; Tel Aviv, Israel, 2014

ISBN: 978-965-7600-023; 69 pages; $25.00

Review by Joanne DeSimone Reynolds

In a mortar and brick bookstore, this volume would be an island among the aisles.

Part poetry, part pictorial. A travelogue, yes, but, with splashes of diary. A natural science text, Darwinian, a dose of Bible. And a parallel to Melville’s novella of the same name. The accompanying photographs, stunning in both color and range.

Imagine one of a nubby-skinned, spike-crowned, citron colored iguana, up close. Or another, of a Blue-footed Booby. Some of the earth’s oddest creatures staring out at you.

And the many images taken from greater distances, showing a netherworld natured Galapagos of “immense deluges of black naked lava” (from an epigraph courtesy of Charles Darwin). In a Shel Silverstein kind of way, the photographs, presumably taken by Ezra Gut, enhance the poems and entrance the reader.

But, the poems, floating aside the color-burst photos as they do, have an insistence all their own, much like the tourist-tame creatures they evoke. Included here, are two of the poems in their entirety. One from the lighter side of the collection that elicited a chuckle from this reader, followed by the introductory poem, a forthright look into the speaker’s mind:

          The Booby

          You wish it would be wiser than it is.

          You wish the eyes to be hiding a deep truth.

          But sometimes the status of “ancient”

          does not accompany the actions we admire.

          The amazing feet of the blue boobies

          are not even important enough to be moved aside

          when the bird shits. And a chick looks as smart

          as the mother who just hatched him.

          A Thought

  

          I wouldn’t want a paradise.

          Even in the Holy Book they knew

          it’s too simple just to be

          good, without judgments

          to make each moment

          a new encounter to encourage

          revision and insight.  Living

          as I do, equidistant from

          Armageddon and Gehenna,

          and not all that far from where

          the Bible places Eden

          my dreams teeter

          like a dinghy in high tide

          but with no shore in sight.

          But dream I do

How many Boobies have we met in our lives? How often have we wished one to be wiser? For “eyes to be hiding a deep truth”?  Chuckle or no, we have seen the Booby and He is us! in Pogo parlance, unable to get out of the messes of our own making. And as for the paradise the poet conjures, it is wholly rejected as a place of stasis in favor of the world as we know it. A place of choice. Of duality and ambiguity. Tensions out of which dreams arise and art is made and we become more fully conscious and human.

Many of the poems in this collection rely heavily on anthropomorphism. Dolphins “smile” from afar in the poem White Bellied Dolphin. Iguanas “clearly [listen] attentively” in Idle Gossip. Sinkers at best. But, to skip them would be like dismissing a child for less than stellar behavior. And it would be a shame to mistake something wondrous for a stone. In the poem Shells, for instance, the enormity of an animal’s armor evokes primal feelings, sending chills up the spine, “How the weird reptilian fear overtakes me.” And even in poems of lesser note, the reading experience opens up like a crevice under pressure when considered in relation to well chosen images. A Myriad of Constellations offers such a moment. The first lines “Behold:/a myriad of stars/appear in the equatorial sky” sound magisterial, even biblical in tone, but, deliver little in the way of the new, and the poem bobs somewhat in the doldrums. However, when our attention turns to the facing page, a photograph, Escher-like in its play of interlocking iguanas, spiny backs tipped in Van Gogh yellow as if electrified, sends us sailing.

Karen Alkalay-Gut is an award winning poet, a professor, and an editor. Born in London and raised in New York State, she now lives in Israel where this book was published, first in Hebrew and now in English. Having been involved in collaborations of a far flung nature, for instance, with the fashion enterprise Comme Il Faut, and one with the avant-rock musicians Roy Yarkoni and Ishay Sommer which produced an album entitled Thin Lips, this project, tethering the cross currents, the outcroppings, and the strange inhabitants of the Galapagos into a collection of poems as taught as nautical knots, makes perfect sense. I hope you consider it for its navigation of the formidable, fragile, frank, and fanciful. But, do not feel guilty if you find yourself lost in the glossies. And for heaven’s sake, don’t hide it from the kids! The book is meant to be shared, with its eye-popping photographs and thoughtful poems, as enchanting as the archipelago it describes.  

The Hastings Room Reading Series presents David Ferry Wed Nov. 4th 7PM (First Church Congregationalist 11 Garden Street, near Harvard Square)

The Hastings Room Reading Series      

presents

D a v i d   F e r r y

The February 2000 issue of The New Criterion includes a poem by Rachel Hadas with the tile “Reading David Ferry’s poems.”  The tribute heralds a special year for Mr. Ferry, seeing the publication of his translation of Virgil’s Eclogues. That year he would also win the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize from the Library of Congress for his book Of No Country I Know published the previous year.

     The opening of Rachel Hadas’s poem evokes, very appropriately, the classical image for poetic speech, recalling Pindar, Horace and Virgil, of a fountain or spring, the excellence of water for is clarity and fluency. Hadas wries,

            The words run clear like water in these poems.

            The fluency feels generous and easy,

            naturally eloquent, carrying in its current

            grains of incident and meditation.

            Many tiny facets briefly flash

            before they are carried downstream…

W.S. Merwin has noted similar qualities for David’s poetry, the “assured quiet tone” that conveys “complexities of feeling with unfailing proportion and grace.”

     Lines, such as the opening to the poem “That Now Are Wild and Do Not Remember”—“Where did you go to, when you went away”; or, like these from “The Crippled Girl, The Rose”—

            It was as if a flower bloomed…         and

            The rose reserves the sweetness that it yields

strike us as blossoms themselves of the old poets Ferry as an educator and translator has much lived with. They are “poetic” lines, which locate Ferry with the likes of W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, James Merrill, Richard Wilbur and John Hollander, the 20^th and 21^st Century practitioners not just of the English line but of its sensibility and sense of mild ironies and enduring graces. So from the evidence of his original poetry, it is not difficult for readers to trace David back to the crime of his translations.

     In the July/August 2001 Poetry magazine, then editor Christian Wiman made revealing remarks about David’s poetry, in honor of presenting the poet with that year’s prestigious Ruth Lily Poetry Prize. Wiman noted, “David Ferry’s poetry has little in common with the current style.” “We live in a time,” says Wiman, “of obvious, even aggressive assertions of style… the eccentric is prized.” Yet, Wiman continues, “willed eccentricity is doomed from the start; it’s only the unconscious strangeness, the style formed and deformed by necessity, that’s compelling.” “Wise passivity” is another noted quality of David’s, much in line with Rachel Hadas’s perceptions of his poetry as “generous and easy,/naturally eloquent…”

     While David carries on the identity of a cultural inheritance, as though it were genetic, one of his recurring themes involves a recusant awareness of this fact, creating a strange sense of paradox, magnificently expressed in the opening lines of his poem “Ellery Street,” a direct critique of the “eloquence” of poetry (or “the songs we sing”), the lines themselves caught red-handed with eloquence:

            How much too eloquent are the songs we sing:

            nothing will tell how beautiful is the body…

In light of a tendency in the poetry to hold in on glimpses of the body that are not so beautiful—scarred legs, trembling hands—this line “nothing will tell how beautiful is the body” at once is a statement of potential irony about our perceptions of beauty, and also a sort of infrared beaming through the faculties of language itself. The signs are all potentially misleading; the appearance of things and our words for them are inadequate for the joy and love others bring us.

     In his introduction to Ferry’s most recent book, Ellery Street, published by the Grolier Established Poets Series, editor Ifeanyi Menkiti speaks beyond the technical and tonal expertise, to the poet’s psychological exploration of and “way of managing the breakdown of our powers and affections, so that all is not lost.” This is insightful. In his own passive and ever humble manner, Ferry bears a solemn courage in confronting certain breakdowns, as in his beautiful epigrammatic poem “In Eden” :

            You lie in our bed as if an orchard were over us.

            You are what’s fallen from the fatal boughs.

            Where will we go when they send us away from here?

Here again the paradox: the poetry of anti-poetry. Most commonly a poet of the first two lines of “In Eden” is going to try to reassure this gasp of astonishment at approaching sleep with some image to reassure us of our successful “translation,” perhaps as a constellation amid the stars. Yet it is the moment before such a poetic stroke, the feeling of sinking and sinking without knowing, that Ferry chooses to make vivid in the poem. It’s spoke plainly enough – “Where will we go…” – yet in its context is perhaps every bit as striking as the image of Achilles dragging Hector’s lifeless cadaver around the walls of Troy. The simple question of bewilderment and Homer’s image each ask: What do we do with this wonder of our humanity?

     A moment ago, we mentioned Christian Wiman’s comments about “unconscious strangeness” and the pressure of necessity on form. These harken back to the qualities of  Ferry’s breakthrough work to national recognition with his version of the Mesopotamian epic Gilgamesh in 1992. It is one of the oldest literary works in Western Literature, originally composed in cuneiform, at the same time as the oldest parts of the Bible. As William L. Moran wrote, Ferry’s epic “is not a translation of a Sumerian original. It is, rather, a highly selective and creative adaptation and transformation of what we find in the earlier works.” Those works included linear translations incapable of imaginative unity. While other freer adaptations made critical departures from the contextual probabilities of the original.

     Richard Poirier noted, “The poetic splendor and sublimity of David Ferry’s Gilgamesh is entirely of his own making… his great poem is no more indebted to earlier versions of its story than is anything of Shakespeare’s to North’s Plutarch.”

     A large part of this accomplishment lies in the establishing and sustaining of a large narrative voice capable of dramatic emotion, such as the fear of the people for their ruler, Gilgamesh, who is supposed to be their protector.

            There was no withstanding the aura or power of the Wild

            Ox Gilgamesh. Neither the father’s son

            nor the wife of the noble; neither the mother’s daughter

            nor the warrior’s bride was safe. The old men said:

            “Is this the shepherd of the people? Is this

            The wise shepherd, protector of the people?”

            The gods of heaven listened to their complaint.

            “Aruru is the maker of this king.

            Neither the father’s son nor the wife of the noble

            is safe in Uruk; neither the mother’s daughter

            nor the warrior’s bride is safe. The old men say:

            “Is this the shepherd of the people? Is this

            the wise shepherd, protector of the people?

            There is no withstanding the desire of the Wild Ox.”

Interrupted by neither textual fragmentation nor fanciful detours, Ferry’s version traces the problem of the hero-king’s unbearable rule—tyranny—to his humanization through friendship and grief with mysterious encounters in the spirit world. The visitations convincingly remind Gilgamesh of his humanity and its frailty, his need for compassion to deal with other humans. The way Ferry has worked out the theme, with great attention for a neutral yet compassionate voice, line for line over 90 pages, attests to the marvel of this poem. Its “unconscious strangeness” ranges dizzily in the mind with affirmation of our ever elusive, uncanny albeit wholly human experience with death. Its ability to speak to us in this way accounts for the story’s long preservation. It challenges the undeniable authority of everything “present,” like a photo of the earth from the moon.

Women Musicians Network 19th Concert Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 8:00 pm

Photo taken March, 2015. Photographer: Caroline Alden. Singer: Nadia Chechet

Women Musicians Network 19th Concert

Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 8:00 pm (doors 7:30)

Berklee Performance Center

By Kirk Etherton

        One great thing—or problem—about my living here in "Greater Somerville" (which includes Boston) is that there are always so many very good events, it's easy to miss something great.

        The W.M.N. concert, usually held in March, is truly a great thing. I've seen at least the past 12 shows, and I won't miss this one.

        What sets this event apart is always the exceptional level of diversity, plus very fine musicianship.

        Women Musicians Network is a student club at Berklee College of Music. Somerville resident Lucy Holstedt (also a Berklee professor and the club's co-founder and faculty advisor) directs and hosts the concert.

        Every time, the focus is on women students and their bands from around the world. There are plenty of guys performing, too, but the spotlight is on women—as composers, bandleaders, rock guitarists, you name it.

        I got to hear "audition tapes" from all of the 11 original acts chosen to perform on Nov. 10—from jazz and blues to gospel, folk, and fusion. Here is some of what impressed me the most.

        1. Olivia, a composer and pianist from Spain, doing a Spanish / Indian fusion piece along with an Indian singer and a sitar player.

        2. Shir, a woman from Israel who has an amazing vocal range, leading her "electro-pop" tune. (It would be difficult to describe, without losing most everything in translation.)

        3. Mariana, a pianist / guitarist / singer-songwriter from Portugal, doing a very beautiful, original song in her native language.

        4. Gretchen, guitarist and vocalist from Chile. She leads a mostly male band; her singing on the rock tune she composed brings to mind some of the most powerful and affecting female vocalists of the past 40 years.

        That's four of the 11 acts. I could go on and on, but space is limited. Besides, music doesn't come across very well in a newspaper.

        I should mention that most of these women arrive at Berklee with significant musical credits. Natalia has a great Andean folk-based tune that's doing very well on the radio charts in her native Columbia. Some of these "college students" have already taught in universities, and performed around the world.

        Special guests this year are three Berklee professors, also doing original material. Christiane Karam, concert co-director, will be leading her Pletenitsa Balkan Choir.

        The concert starts at 8:00 pm and ends at 9:30 pm, which I feel makes it an extremely efficient international music festival.

Women Musicians Network 19th Concert

Tickets: $8 in advance / $12 day of show

www.berklee.edu/BPC

Box office: 617.747.2261

Somerville's Jane Sherrill: An Artist Who Is All About Water

By Doug Holder

Somerville artist Jane Sherrill thrives around water. Most recently her sculpture and art has revolved around oceans, icicles and the shadows they produce. Sherrill has been producing art for many years now and she is a longtime resident of the Vernon St. Studios in Somerville. I talked with her amidst the din of the Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square.

Doug Holder: You have worked in many different forms: painting, sculpture, etc...You are self-taught. Are there any disadvantages to that?

Jane Sherrill: Yes. You don't have teachers to help you get grants and better shows. But it also pushes you to be more creative. It has been up to me to teach myself how to draw. So I found my own way of doing things.

DH: You had another life before painting.

JS: I had a few lives before painting. I taught emotionally disturbed and learning disabled children. I was a psychiatric social worker, and a graphic designer. I also did some performance art based on temp jobs I held.

DH: Recently I heard that you completed a series of pictures of the pre-Sandy New Jersey shore.

JS: Yes. I took some pictures in Point Pleasant. I completed some very large paintings using these photos. There are 5 in the series. Right before I finished them Hurricane Sandy plowed through.

DH: Why did you choose New Jersey beaches?

JS: Here is the thing. I started a series of paintings about the ocean. I did this because I love the ocean. I worked on the large sense of the ocean and the tiny details, like droplets. I was aware that beaches are very different. I mean the color of the water varies from Cape Cod to New Jersey. I visited different beaches. I wanted to document that in the face of climate change. But what really inspires me is my awe of all of this. Oceans are stunning. And from this I have gone into cloud and sky. And people are telling me after they look at my paintings they are looking up at the sky all the time. I want people to look at this gorgeousness.

DH: How long have you been at the Vernon St. Studios?

JS. Over thirty years. There are people who have been there longer. It is a wonderful place. The only problem is that everybody is so busy that we don't get together as much as we did years ago.

DH: Can you tell me about your icicle project?

JS: This past year I was accepted into the Vermont Studios. I went up to Johnson, VT. It was bitter cold. One morning it was 27 below. The studio was beautiful. I walked in and I noticed that windows were covered with icicles. I came up with no set idea of what I wanted to work on. Then I began to draw the icicles. I also started to trace the shadows they made. I also decided to paint the icicles. I also made sculptures from hot glue.

DH: You were in the poetry scene in New York City some years ago.

JS: Years ago. I read at St. Mark's Church—and in a theatre in Hell's Kitchen—among other venues. My poetry was very performance based. I was touted as the new Patti Smith. (Laugh) It was the late 70s. I still love to write. It is wonderful to work with words. Now that I am on Facebook I write poetic vignettes.

DH: Do you make your daily nut from your art?

JS: I do a number of things to get by. I sell may paintings; I do graphic design and in the past I have taught everything from the Torah in Hebrew School and substitute taught. It ain't easy.

Go to: http://wwww.janesherrill.com for more info.