THE SUNDAY POET: Dianne Robitaille

 

Dianne Robitaille (Center)

Dianne Robitaille is an editor for the Ibbetson Street Press. Her work has appeared in Pegasus, The New Laurel Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Christian Science Monitor, and many others. She was the former secretary for the New England Poetry Club.

 Photo

black-white 

a fractional

moment -

gift of the

eternal speaks

through

round corners,

razor lines, angled

edge.

Hues of misty gray-

illusion of earth's time

Caught - fleeting, running

itself to death - Halted - 

in a breath

Of Bugs and Love and no spiders were harmed: poems by Steve Tomasko

Steve Tomasko

 


Of Bugs and Love: Review

and no spiders were harmed
poems by Steve Tomasko
© 2015. 48 pages/ $12
Red Bird Chapbooks
1055 Agate St.
St. Paul, MN  55117
www.redbirdchapbooks.com

Review by  Karla Huston


“You said I should write more love poems/and I said, I’m sorry, but I’ve been thinking about/sloths.” This is the opening gambit for Steve Tomasko’s debut chapbook of poems.

Some may think there are enough love poems; some may think there is need for more. Certainly, there is a need for more poems about sloths, ants, spiders, cicadas, “sparrows, crows and moles.”

With the ears and heart of a poet, the eyes and sensibilities of a scientist, Tomasko leads readers on a wonder-filled journey of what it’s like to be human, animal, human. Though filled with critters, these poems won’t give readers the heebie jeebies unless you’re creeped out by spiders, which, the poet himself admits: 

Sister Therese writes in a letter that she
has a spider on her pile of books,
wants to know if I ever wrote about them.
How to confess that I, who people call
bug man, get the willies around them.

There are a lot of spiders in this small book.

He tells about spider silk collected to make wartime bomb-sight cross hairs and a golden, brocaded cape. In another poem, a bodhisattva spider shows up trying to teach the poet (readers?) about being hooked in the lip like a caught fish.

Yet, these poems are more about love than they are about spiders and bugs. These poems are accessible without being predictable. In one, the poet removes a toad, hibernating in a pot, which will surely die if left “well above the frost line.” In another, the poet kills and flushes a spider found in the corner of the bedroom ceiling, but the next night, he carries another in a Mason jar to the garden.

I did mention there are lots of spiders.

There is humor—“Females who have mostly dispensed/with men” or the female praying mantis who eats the head of the male while he’s mating with her. “And it’s not that he moves faster/without his head.//Well, actually,/that is the horrible thing.”

Tomasko uses the trope of non-human creatures to lead readers through the very human subject of grief, how verb tenses can be tricky. Is one day is was the next. He says, “The body hungers on despite the question of tense.”

Intimate without being sentimental—maybe that’s what love should be, not cloying expressions of sentiment—hearts and flowers or initials carved into a tree trunk or beachy, sunset proposals. In Tomasko’s world, a marriage proposal is a description of a hatch of dragonfly larvae.

Still, his wife wishes he’d write more love poems.

The algae-covered sloth fur is the only home
the sloth moths know. The only place they live.
I know it’s a Darwinian thing, but fidelity
comes to mind. Commitment. Patience.
The world writes love poems all the time.

**********

Karla Huston is the author of A Theory of Lipstick (Main Street Rag: 2013) as well as seven chapbooks, most recently, Outside of a Dog: 2013 (dancinggirlpress.com). Her poems, reviews and interviews have been published widely, including the 2012 Pushcart Best of the Small Presses anthology. 

THE SUNDAY POET: Krikor Der Hohannesian

Krikor Der Hohannesian

Krikor Der Hohannesian lives in Medford, MA. His poems have been thrice-nominated for a Pushcart prize and have appeared in many literary journals including The Evansville Review, The South Carolina Review, Atlanta Review, Louisiana Literature, Connecticut Review, Natural Bridge and Comstock Review. He is the author of two chapbooks,“Ghosts and Whispers” (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and “Refuge in the Shadows” (Cervena Barva Press, 2013). “Ghosts and Whispers” was a finalist for the Mass Book awards poetry category in 2011.

                                                               

THE FLOWER AND THE CANDLE

Sometimes in dreams, sometimes

in hazy reverie, in those feeling

adrift spaces they appear side by side

like offerings to appease the dark gods

of despair, as buffers against the siren call

of isolation, sentinels against the flight

of the spirit, the dread of mortality. The vase

of runnunculus, tight-lapped petals

pigmented yellow-orange, a medley of

all the sunrises and sunsets since earth-time

began. And the candle, pomegranate

red, its tenuous flame dancing in rhythms

at the whimsy of each puff of air, waxen

blood the melt of its own heat, the ebb

of its own life dripping, pausing, yet

inexorable. The flower always,

always bending toward the light,

the warmth, the promise of life. 

Sometimes, the candle flickers out,

a mean incubus haunts the air,

ghouls of the dark side fill the void.

      I reach out to relight it, the flame dances again.

Or the flower wilts, petals drop one

by one, a shedding of yellow tears,

a stalk sucked dry of life’s juices.

      I give it water and its thirst is quenched.

When the day comes that I move on,

it will pass to others. The candle will

be kept aflame, the flower will have water

until the day all our suns finally flare out,

a circle completed, perfectly round.

     

Carol – a movie Review by William Falcetano

Carol – a movie

 Review by William Falcetano

Carol is a film adaptation of a story by Patricia Highsmith (“The Talented Mr. Ripley”) about a love affair between two women in the 1950s.  One woman is a society wife, Carol Aird, played with her usual brilliance, by the inimitable Cate Blanchett.  The object of her affections is a young shop girl, Terez Belivet, played by Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), who bears an uncanny resemblance to Audrey Hepburn, with her bangs, wide eyes full of wonder, and a touch of innocence.  These two women meet in a department store as the mink clad society lady is shopping for a Christmas gift for her daughter Rindy.  Why not consider a train set? the shop girl suggests, and the unusual nature of the gift (a boy’s toy) charms Carol who is enchanted by the girl’s youthful beauty, self-possession, and wide-eyed allure.  So much of this courtship, so much of the feeling between these two women, remains unspoken.  Eyes do the talking as do smiles and the scent of perfume and cigarettes, the glint of bracelets and the suggestion that life holds more possibilities than society allows us to consider.  This is the 1950s after all, and this is the love that dare not speak its name.  Carol leaves her leather gloves on the countertop and Terez makes sure they are returned with the train set.  Freud, so popular in the 50s, long ago explained that such forgetfulness can express an unconscious wish to return to the mise en scène; and so Carol now has her socially acceptable excuse to take Terez out for lunch; and the mutual attraction grows between the older woman, so well-heeled and so sure of herself, and the ingénue, who’s “just a girl who cain’t say no”, as the song (from Oklahoma!) says.  Terez accepts every overture Carol makes; and Carol invites her to her mansion for Christmas eve.  It’s a bold gambit but it pulls Terez away from her cloying boyfriend, the handsome Richard Semco, played with square-jawed manliness by Jack Lacey.  Boyfriends and husbands are portrayed a bit unfairly in this film as so many obstacles or distractions.  Carol’s husband, Harge (Kyle Chandler), is even more handsome and much more well-to-do than Richard; yet he’s a basket case because he is losing his wife. He tries every trick in the book from imploring sweetness to abject pleading to threats and thuggery to keep Carol in her gilded cage; but Carol will have none of it: “how many more tomato aspic lunches must I endure?”  she asks her gal pal Abbey (Sarah Paulson), a square-jawed beauty who was Carol’s former lover.  Harge knows about this illicit tryst and when he discovers Carol home with Terez he sees the writing on the wall.  If it were today we would say “she’s just not into you”; but it’s the 1950s, and things were, or seemed, so much more elegant then.  In fact, this film is one long homage to the 1950s – the fashions and styles, the form flattering couture and ladies’ gloves, the ubiquitous cigarettes, the men’s hats, the big Packard Carol drives around town.  Through Carol we glimpse the high life of the elite with their colored servants, chauffeurs, mansions, and money; and through Terez we glimpse bohemian New York of the 1950s, the jazz singers, the crowded parties in small apartments, the newspapermen, the photojournalists.  Terez is an amateur photographer with a keen eye for beauty and starts snapping away at Carol in unguarded moments.  So much of this film is about looking and watching like a camera; and we are lured into watching their slowly evolving love blossom as they hit the road together to get away from it all.  Then, when that fateful moment does finally arrive, it comes with such a sense of inevitableness that we find ourselves cheering that they finally gave themselves permission to fall into bed together.  The eroticism is emotionally convincing and intense; one cannot help but see this as anything but love.
 
    Yet, society has other ideas about this sort of thing (considered a crime in that era), as does Harge, who has hired a private eye to follow his wife around and get the goods on her (he too is watching them as we are).  Harge is playing hard ball and threatens Carol with a breach of morals that can deprive her of shared custody of Rindy.  “I see”, she says, “if he can’t have me; I can’t have my daughter”.  Checkmate.  These two star-crossed lovers live in a man’s world and must play by men’s rules.  Although they are hemmed-in by a bullying and arrogant patriarchy they somehow find a way to be true to themselves and to each other.  “How can I be any good to her (Rindy) if I live my life against the grain?”  Carol asks at a lawyer’s conference in which she throws caution to the wind and embraces her truth, come what may.  It’s a powerful scene in which a woman stands up for herself and accepts the consequences a cruel and bigoted society will throw at her. 

    It is interesting to compare this move to La Vie d’Adèle, a French film released in America in 2013 under the title “Blue is the Warmest Color”.  This film is another story of lesbian lovers with an age differential in which beauty and innocent youth is matched with worldliness and savoir-faire.  But the French version does not end on the happy note obligatory for American cinema and deemed necessary by American audiences.  It is perhaps strange that in that vaunted land of love Adèle and Emma break up; but in America of the 1950s love triumphs.  C’est l’amour.  And we leave both movies thinking just that – this is love by whatever name you give it. 

Laurette Folk: Through Compassion and Her Own Life Journey, She Finds Portals for Her Writing.

Laurette Folk: Through Compassion and Her Own Life Journey, She Finds Portals for Her Writing.

By Doug Holder

Laurette Folk is a poet and novelist who founded the “The Compassion Project: An Anthology,” an online collection of poetry and art that promotes compassionate thought and action through the arts. Through this project , her struggles with depression, the demands of being a wife, mother, teacher, and author, she has found portals for her creative work.

 Folk received a semifinalist nomination and “Noted Writer” award from the Boston Fiction Festival and has been published in upstreet, The Boston Globe Magazine, Literary Mama, Narrative Northeast, Italian Americana, Talking Writing, among others. Ms. Folk is a graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing program and teaches at North Shore Community College.

I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV show Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer

http://poettopoetwritertowriter.blogspot.com

Doug Holder: You are the founder of the “Compassion Anthology.” Do you think the arts today give enough play to compassion?

Laurette Folk: I think it is there. But I don't think it is shown enough. Compassion is ajewel to be displayed. And you realize that when you are suffering. It brings people together. I think it is something we take too lightly in society.

DH: You say you practice mindfulness. Explain.

LF: Well, mindfulness is just being in the present. We are always looking to the future. We feel we have to do this or that. There is compassion in mindfulness. There is compassion in mindfulness. It is a hard thing to stay in the moment.

DH: You suffered from depression. Did depression motivate you to look inward? In a way did it give you inspiration to write?

LF: In a way it did inspire me. It was a portal. My depression was clinical. There is a history of depression in my family. I had an intense experience with it. After college I chose a career that I wasn't suited for, engineering. I was bored. I was alone a lot. I lived in New York City—which can be very lonely. I was overstimulated, and I arrived at a dark place. I would write at night in my small studio in Forest Hills in Queens. I guess that was my portal into writing. I realized that there was an internal world that could be tapped into. I had yet to learn the craft of writing. So, yes, depression was a way in. Hey—when you are a writer you live an inward life. And when you are creative it ain't all daises and roses.

DH: You went to Vermont College. You described yourself as a misfit in a land of misfits. Explain.

LF: When I started my first residency I said to myself,” Wow, people like me really exist.” People really had an intense inner life and cared about writing about fictitious people. Kindred souls. I was very inspired—it was a rich experience. It was great to be put in a rich environment , with all these people who had rich inner lives. The teachers there led me to writing by wonderful writers. I don't know if I would have found them on my own. One writer that comes to mind that influenced me was Margaret Atwood.

DH: There is a lot of spirituality in your poems. What is your source of this?

LF: I am a fan of the poet Mary Oliver. And like her, I see spirituality in nature. When I go into the woods with my dog—that is when the poems come to to me.

DH: What is it about walking that often helps the writing process?

LF: I think it calms the mind. You are doing something with that restless energy. It gives you space.

DH: You worked closely with publisher Robin Stratton of Big Table Books on your novel“ A Portal of Vibrancy.” How was that experience?

LF: She is terrific. She is a generously kind person. I learned a lot. When you run a small press you have to wear a lot of hats. I learned a lot about—there was a whole process of publishing that I was unaware of. I worked closely with her.

The Sunday Poet: Michael Todd Steffen

Michael Todd Steffen curates the Hastings Room Reading Series in Cambridge. His poetry and articles have appeared in The Boston Globe, Connecticut Review, Poem (HLA), ACM (Another Chicago Magazine), Ibbetson Street, Taos Journal and in the window of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop. His first book Partner, Orchard, Day Moon was published in April of 2014 by Cervena Barva Press edited by Gloria Mindock. He will be reading at the Cambridge Public Library on Wednesday January 27th with Mary Buchinger and Jennifer Tseng, at 6:30 pm in the library main lecture hall.

Provolone

Less than ham and man’s endless

Cures and smokes to make the perishable

Last, elusively savory little smile

Of cheese, couched between the crust’s

Formal al dente and the meat

The stomach craves, like the nobles

In an overrun nation, you mean

With texture and stealth resistance

To the devouring, supper time,

Temperance, signed with singularity

That stood, and with a final silence,

That errant vowel on which won’t pounce

My English, which Italians pronounce.

The Gospel According to Judas By Keith Holyoak

The Gospel According to Judas
By Keith Holyoak
Dos Madres Press
www.dosmadres.com
Loveland, Ohio
ISBN: 978-1-939929-30-3
62 Pages
Hardcover

Review by Dennis Daly

Taking for his subject the man who made it happen for Christianity and western civilization, Keith Holyoak delves into the anti-heroic betrayer of Jesus Christ in a sublime meditation on flawed humanity. Holyoak entitles his poetic collection The Gospel According to Judas and it lives up to its name. In fact the spell of divinity he weaves so suspends one’s disbelief that the reader begins to budget his or her well-earned share of thirty pieces of communal silver in an effort to make good on humanity’s unaccountable, yet clearly irrefutable, trespasses. 

Holyoke’s persona positions himself as an honest broker, an intermediary between the resurrected Judas and his public. The poet sets his collection up as 27 chapters abounding with contrasting angles of approach and multiple voices. The first chapter, Double Cross, opens with a jolt. Judas imagines himself as a last-minute-hero and for his pains he is crucified with his messiah on the left of a shared cross (Here is as good a place as any to consider the pun embedded in Holyoak, the poet’s last name). As Jesus turns to his right to grant salvation to the also-crucified good thief, Judas confronts his existential destiny,

… “Rabbi, why have you forsaken me?
Though I have sinned (as all men must), have I
Not testified for you?”
                                         “On Calvary,”
The thief broke in, “We all must hang forsaken.”
“Join me today in paradise,” said He,
Still facing right. Bereaved, the earth was shaken
As wind-blown dust smothered the afternoon.
“Water….” I was alone—He had been taken.
“And me?” Soldiers trudged to their garrison.
“And me?” Whispered the voice, “It has begun.”

Almost from the beginning Holyoak imports concepts like reincarnation from the major eastern religions in an effort to explain Judas’s search for expiation. These long ago western heresies now seem to fit easily into the poet’s search for universal truths entangled with forgiveness.  It’s as if Holyoak clicks a light on, forever altering the surrounding modernist and mechanistic sensibility. The tree of knowledge roots itself solidly within the tightly versed piece, Samsara. Consider the center of this poem’s internally spreading space,

The tug of gravity
at ninety-six thousand feet
gives form to vap’rous dust,
figments agglomerate
to seed a memory
hurled back to earth and thrust

into the nascent brain.
Gliding beneath the clouds
familiar smells of earth
awaken genetic codes—
as desert stirs in a rain
the soul prepares for birth.

Chapter 9 delivers a remarkable poem Holyoak titles Genesis. This narrative piece flows effortlessly and deliciously in terza rima into a concluding feast of shared figs. It chronicles the first meeting between Christ and Judas and it is jaw dropping. The dichotomy between these two natures of light and shadow manifests itself in pinpoint conversation and piercing metaphor. Judas speaks in a moment of poetic exhilaration,

Stepping into my courtyard, I was blinded
By light that coalesced as form and flesh.

One step—his shadow fit me. We were kindred
Sharing a cloak. “Judas Iscariot”
(His voice bespoke a kiss, my name rang sacred),

“You are the son of David, are you not,
Versed in the teachings of Pythagoras?”
I hesitated, then replied, “God taught

Them both to hear the chords rippling across
The heavens; to the Greeks He also gave
Numbers to measure what’s harmonious

To ear and eye …

Notice how the form almost merges into the content: a perfect use of structured verse.

Another terza rima narrative called Climbing Mount Zion follows the uncertain band of Jewish insurgents in triumph, or is it delusion, through the east gate of Jerusalem. A brawl ensues. Christ and his followers dine with Mary Magdelene, who anoints Jesus with expensive oil. Judas is horrified by the money wasted, money that could have been distributed to the poor. Up to this point Holyoak has followed the New Testament plotline. Judas’ concern now internalizes and he acts. The poet imparts the betrayal lead-up with subtlety, but with little drama. In these lines Judas rationalizes,

… Hearing him, I was sure

My teacher, brother, friend was bound for woe,
Slipping away from us. Should I do nothing?
Just listen, watch, keep silent, let him go?

Sometimes a thoughtful man must act, trusting
In God, or instinct. Inquiries were passed
Along, a meeting set. They gave me something

To feed the poor—much less than what we lost
When Mariam despaired, but thirty pieces
Of silver surely helps. My dice were cast.

Toward the end of this collection, in Chapter 25, Holyoak sets the piece Angkor Thom, a truly strange poems that opens in the poet’s voice and switches over to the voice of Judas. Angkor Tom, a Khmer temple complex once lost in the jungles of Cambodia, now rises out of algae and decay and tree roots with images that suggest the state of Judas’ karma-driven soul. Here are the concluding two stanzas, stanzas that both soothe and connect with a prayerful gentleness,

The barren fruit rotted long ago—
Here, this strangler fig soars to the sky,
Spreading to soothe the sun, while down below
Its roots, exposed like holy serpents, try to meld with temple stone—see how the flow
Of life binds earth with heaven! Tell me, why
Have I crossed oceans seeking out this place?
Is this the tree of knowledge, or of grace?

O bodhisattvas, multi-facetted
As mountain peaks at dawn, gazing within
On silence rising from the fountainhead,
You who have helped the generations spin
Through birth and death, letting compassion spread
To every living being, every sin,
Smile yet on those of us who seek release,
Until our hungering and striving cease!

This poetically-generated Judas appears to have attained a timeless peace by opening his heart to mystical rhythms of musicality and artistic harmony, and that is what Holyoak offers his readers in his magnificent book.

Special Reading: Newton Free Library: Robin Stratton Presents: Big Table Publishing Poets: Feb 9, 2016

Robin Stratton will be our host. She is the founder of Big Table Books and the Newton Writing and Publishing Center. The poets reading this evening are ones that she has published recently.