The Sunday Poet: Michael C. Keith

Poet Michael C. Keith

Here is some prose poetry--from the Michael C. Keith universe.  Keith is a professor of Communications at Boston College. He is widely published in a number of genres.

Wound Dresser

Whitman brings them candy, books, and solace as their injuries from the uncivil war fester and resist healing. He loves their youth and listens to their battlefield accounts as intently as any minister or parent would. The great army of the sick relentlessly fills hospitals with its maimed and distressed as the bard of democracy holds vigils for the countless dying. Later at his makeshift desk in the embalming station he sets to paper the tears that have accumulated in his quill.

Photo Noir

A body slumps in the Chevy convertible sedan. Its bloodied head hangs from the window. Cops are standing around waiting for the coroner to arrive. Already on the scene is Weegee, the ubiquitous press photographer. This is the second killing he’s shot since midnight. He hopes he’ll get in a couple more black-and-whites of low-life before the night is over. It’s been a slow one, he thinks. 

Podcast interview with Ifeanyi Menkiti: From Malcolm X, James Laughlin, Ezra Pound, Grolier Poetry Book Shop

( Left Ifeanyi Menkiti--Right Doug Holder)

Podcast: Interview with poet Ifeanyi Menkiti https://archive.org/details/Z0000058 Doug Holder interviews Ifeanyi Menkiti, the owner of the famed Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square. The interview touches on Menkiti's interview with Malcolm X at a Harlem storefront shortly before X was assassinated in the Audubon Ballroom. Also included are his experiences with James Laughlin, the founder of the " New Directions Press," Ezra Pound, his history with the Grolier, his years teaching moral philosophy at Wellesley and a lot more. Menkiti appeared on Holder's Poet to Poet: Writer Show on Somerville Community Access Tv

Fashion Designer Sandhya Garg Lifts A Middle Finger in the Fashion World

Fashion Designer Sandhya Garg Lifts A Middle Finger in the Fashion World

By Doug Holder

Somerville fashion designer Sandhya Garg does not lift a middle finger to offend the mandarins of the fashion world. But she uses it as part of her design concept of provocative, beautiful and engaging clothing.

I met Garg at my usual seat at the Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square, Somerville. Garg was dressed simply, and looked more like a bookish graduate student than a fashion designer. Although Garg lives in Boston with her husband ( A doctor who is on a fellowship at a major hospital), she has a space at the Joy Street Studios in Somerville. Garg told me, “ I love the artistic vibe of the city.” She revealed that Joy Street has space for sixty artists, and it proves to be a stimulating environment for her.

Garg, who teaches at MASS ART in Boston and is a graduate of the London College of Fashion, told me that her attire has bold colors combined graphically to create bold prints. The clothing is influenced by world travel, regional folklore, superstition, etc... And Garg keeps in mind that she has hopes that the garments will provoke conversation, perhaps something more than, “ Hey girl...nice rags.”

Garg who hails from India is influenced by the artwork of the native Gond tribe, as evidenced by her graphics. Many of the prints she uses in her clothing are strong reflections of the work of these creative people.

Garg said her creations are wearable and avant-garde. She explained, “ My designs which are unique, bold and conversational are also wearable. They are not just their to make a statement or illustrate a concept, but to be worn and worn comfortably."

Garg worked at the Gucci factory in Italy, and honed her skills with hand embroidery craft, and vintage lace-making. She even created her own dress during her tenure there.

Garg tod me she has been influenced by the late, innovative fashion designer Alexander McQueen. She polished her skills at the McQueen design studio, as well as the Alice Temperley and Izmaylova studios.

McQueen was known to use “shock tactics” in his work. Garg follows a similar path with  her series called “Abusive Prints,” in which she uses the motif of a raised middle finger on some of her dresses to protest the indignities, sexism, and abuse many Indian women suffer in her country.

Her label, “Sandhya Garg” now has international standing thanks to a successful stint on the TV smash show “ Project Runway.” Her work was lauded by such fashion icons as Heidi Klein, Nina Garcia, and Zac Posen.

Garg told me that I could wear her clothing and perhaps start a conversation that is inspired by them. And indeed, perhaps I should. Although I might shy away from the raised middle finger motif—I have enough problems!

For more information go to  http://www.sandhygarg.com

For a related article go to:     http://www.stlabel.com/how-to-become-a-fashion-designer/

The Sunday Poet: Susan Red

Poet Susan Red

Susan Red is a writer, photographer, and artist currently living in the NYC area. While living in the Somerville area, she read at many open mics and self published her first chapbook containing poems and a short story.  Some of her writings and photographs can be found at www.instagram.com/caitandthemoon

My Criteria For A Lover

Call me darling

often and say it 

sincerely 

Touch my lips with

your fingertip until

you can not 

Wait...

another moment 

to kiss me

When I tremble 

from nervousness,

wrap me in 

my favorite blanket 

and tell me all good 

things about myself 

When I tremble 

from pleasure,

hold my body close,

get lost in the sound

of my breathing 

Instead of fancy cars,

let's take a hippie van

to the mountains and

watch the stars

When one of us is sad,

let's simply say "I Care."

Let's watch each other's 

favorite movies, listen 

to our favorite songs

then discuss the meanings

in depth all night long

And when we're tired,

too tired to do anything, 

let's simply be 

with each other,

until we fall asleep 

whispering Goodnight.

 

Interview with poet Jennifer Martelli: A poet who looks at her life as an 'Uncanny Valley'

Interview with poet Jennifer Martelli: A poet who looks at her life as an 'Uncanny Valley'

With Doug Holder

Poet Jennifer Martelli sees her life as an "Uncanny Valley"- a term she told me that is used to describe the fact that what seems right doesn't always feel right.-- thus the title of her new poetry collection “ The Uncanny Value” ( Big Table Books).

 Jennifer Martelli is the recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry, and has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net Awards. She’s taught high school English and women’s literature at Emerson College. She’s an associate editor for The Compassion Project: An Anthology, and lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts with her family.

I had the privilege to speak to her on my Somerville Community Access TV program  " Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."

Doug Holder: You have said in an interview that you write in the plainest language possible. So you have no problem with accessible poetry?

Jennifer Martelli: No—not at all. Early on this was a problem. So many professors would say that my writing is so beautiful, but they didn't understand what it is about. There was a part of me that felt-- for poetry to be deep or important it had to be inaccessible in a way. So half the time I didn't understand what I was trying to say. Eventually I went the other way. I tried to just tell a story. I learned that from Marie Howe. Now I am coming back to the middle, a little. I am trying to balance heightened language that is beautiful—with some artifice. But first I want to communicate with people. It is a razor's edge sometimes.

DH: You also mentioned in the interview that Elizabeth Bishop, Marie Howe, and,Sylvia Plath have influenced you. What is the common thread among these poets that attracts you?

JM: First off they are strong female poets. There is a strong female voice. Over the past six months if I bought a poetry book it was written by a woman. I didn't start this consciously. I love male poets too, of course. I love Robert Haas, Thomas Lux-- with his brilliant short lines, and Tony Hoagland—he was a teacher of mine—probably the smartest man I know. The women poets I mentioned are all different—but again I am attracted to them. What I love about Bishop—Bishop is talking to you in her poems. Like in “ One Art” she is making discoveries in the poem, and she is surprised in the poem.

DH: You studied at Boston University as an undergraduate, and you got your MFA from Warren Wilson. Who were some of the folks of note you studied with?

JM: You know—when I lived in Cambridge, Mass.-- you could more or less create your own MFA without entering a program. Major poets were living in Cambridge and for as little as a 100 dollars you could opt in. I remember folks like Steven Cramer and Robert Haas had workshops that folks could attend. When I was at Warren Wilson a big influence on me was Ellen Bryant Voight—she is a brilliant woman. Her notes were wonderful. Before the Internet took hold we wrote each other letters. tThe letters I have from her are like a textbook.

DH: You are the associate editor for the Compassion Anthology. Tell us about this and your role there.

JM: This is really Laurette Folk's baby. Laurette is a jack of many trades. She is a writer, novelist, and visual artist. She created this anthology online. What she wants to do is to bring compassion through action.-- like creating art and poetry. I am a poetry reader for the project. I give my input. We are starting to see amazing poets and poetry being contributed to the anthology.

DH: Your new collection is “ The Uncanny Valley” ( Big Table Books). Tell us about the germ of the idea for this poetry book.

JM: It is essentially biographical. It is about growing up in Revere, Mass.to my life now-- in middle-age. It covers marriage, love, and writing. It deals with how one navigates one's way in the world. I find it inevitably hard. Robin Stratton, my publisher and editor, steered me to discover a great title. An “Uncanny Valley” is a term in aesthetics that describes things that look right but don't feel right. That describes my 54 years on this earth.

DH: In the collection you have a great poem titled: “Devil Tide.” You describe this group of nefarious  unforgiving rocks, the laments of seagulls, as a metaphor for how we cut ourselves off from people.

JM: That poem—is a prose poem. It is a conglomerate of the many beaches I visited and lived near. I have always lived near a beach. I have lived in Marblehead, Gloucester, and Lynn. The poem has to do to with how to say goodbye to people who might be dead or not in your life anymore. All these images came together for me and the poem was birthed.

DH: Was there a literary community in Revere where you grew up? I know poet Kevin Carey was born there and the novelist Roland Merullo.

JM: There was no real literary community. It truly was a working-class city. My parents grew up during the Depression and they felt poetry was frivolous. There were really not many places to go with my interest, aside from English class. If you look at Carey's work and Merullo's you'll see what I mean.


 

The Devil Tides

There are rocks off the coast shaped like eggs. There are rocks shaped like misery and one like a skull. Bodies have washed up on the slippery barnacles at low tide. There is a brown island I can walk to from the crushed shell beach. If you are born up here, you know sadness and you know gulls. You know how a good clamshell makes a good ashtray. You know the land is as flat as any place where men change into wolves under the mutton moon. You know that. Resent everything, for it’s the only way you don’t forget. Resent everything you love, it keeps you anchored to the beach. Fishing boats bring in cargo from pink and white tulip fields in the Orient. The heroin is cheap and it is hot. Just past King’s Beach the seaweed is red clogged with pennies or fingers. It smells even in the cold. Too many villages are connected by thin causeways pinched on either side by the Atlantic. Devil tides cut them off from the world. Folks go out and never come back. There are empty graves engraved in marble in big churches. Folks go out hot and turn blue. No one ever forgets, except how to measure. If you knew this, you’d never ask anything more of me.

Review of Works on Paper by Jennifer Barber

 

review of Works on Paper

by Jennifer Barber

published by Word Works

Winner of the 2015 Tenth Gate Prize

Review by Alice Weiss

Spare and lovely, the poems in Jennifer Barber’s Works on Paper resonate with answerings. Not just call and response, mind you, although that is there too, her poems seek out the moment when there are mysterious answerings even though the call is inaudible. In “Source” the opening poem, the leaves, hearing the rain before it sounds, lean “toward the place where the rain is about to begin. . .widening the surface of their urgency, their need/to register each shifting of air.” In “Almanac,” a graceful and gracious compression of one of Virgil’s Georgics, where beehives are ruled by a king, she wonders “Who first discovered/ it was a queen.” Always she is in conversation.

In “Assembling a Psalm,” phrases propose a psalm, without being one, and at the same time, being one: the sun, the cedars, grass like flesh, and where is she? She doesn’t know and not knowing still, and we find an answering:

there is always a turn

a way to open the lips

At one point in the collection she asks, “Is bereft some kind of command,” making the language have a conversation with itself. And indeed, the conversation she would most like to have, that with a father who has died of cancer, she cannot. So she preserves what must be the utterly inadequate question of dying, in On Morphine, his last words

Are these my eyes

under my hand.

And in the poem “After a year,”

What if he had dreamed

death as light on a windowsill,

shorebirds running at a wave?

She does not so much struggle with her grief as let it make images of itself. It doesn’t feel effortless so much as full of grace.

he was growing wings,

and would leave us when the wings grew in.

The valet that holds his clothes, “with its limited/knowledge of the body of a man.”

In “Benign” after the death begins to recede, conversation begins again with the world and other voices. She reads The Death of Ivan Ilych, and of his last three days, but putting the book aside, hears that

The wind

roughs up the highest branches of the oak.

The ear opens like an eye

—Unable to fit in the sack

or work free of it, he howls and howls.

There are conversations, as here, with Tolstoy, Goya (a delicious poem about an etching of four bulls where I suspect her father peers out at us), Chekov, the Bible and Near Eastern Creation myths. This last contains my favorite of all the lines in the collection,

After the great battle

when the leader of the gods

split with his arrow

the Mother of All.

he stretched half of her out as heaven,

he fattened the rest of her as land.

The other singular quality of an underlying call and response pulse is music. Barber’s lines are like measures, often couplets, always short, but her language is flowing so the tension between the stops and the flows is like, well, I flounder for a metaphor of my own, but it’s simple. It’s like song. These are the notes that struck my ear reading this time through.

The moon

naked as a slate

impossible to write on or ignore.

A gazelle is wearing

antelope pants.

By pear I mean pear,

not a riddled heart.

At least I think I do.

The flesh of it laid bare

The Sunday Poet: Heather Nelson

 

Heather Nelson

  Heather Nelson is a poet, teacher, mother, and recovering attorney based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She studied writing under the poet C.D. Wright as an undergraduate at Brown University. Most recently she has studied poetry with Tom Daley and Barbara Helfgott Hyett. Heather’s work has appeared in Constellations, The Somerville Times , Ekphrastic Review and will appear in the Compassion Anthology in August of 2016.



 

Two Sisters Heather Nelson

Kate and Eliza were two sisters well-met, arch and iconic, late 80’s vintage-a typical Richard acquisition.

Richard kept shop when the Square was still real, al fresco at Au Bon Pain. Shoulder-to-shoulder with the Chess Master, he sat mixing colors- a splash of kelly green on a wide swath of ball-park mustard.

Kate’s tresses are luxuriant, her expression skeptical- one plump purple brow permanently raised. Eliza smirks at my feminine conceits, thrusts forward in the frame –you want some of this?

Two sisters stepped down from their pedestal, bid farewell to the Silent Bride. Her gig was stationary, theirs dynamic, choosing to watch over us.

These Iron Maidens are our minders, unavoidable but solicitous. We are remarkably successful squatters, they our unswerving guardians, the lady golems of our block.

Poems {New And Selected} by Ron Rash

Poet Ron Rash

Poems {New And Selected}

by Ron Rash

Ecco

An Imprint of Harper Collins

New York, NY

Copyright © 2016 by Ron Rash

171 pages, hardcover, $24.99

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

An argument often persists as to where the best poets live: East Coast, West Coast, or Midwest. Forget the rest of the world. Ah, but we forgot the south. Fortunately Ecco, a Harper Collins imprint did not, and so we have a fine collection from Ron Rash.

It is down south that one finds in Deep Water “The night smooths out its black tarp,/tacks it to the sky with stars.” Or reading the poem In Dismal Gorge we learn

“The lost can stay lost down here,/in laurel slicks, false-pathed caves. Too much too soon disappears.” While in Black-Eyed Susans “The hay was belt-buckle high/when rain lets up, three days’ sun/baked stalks dry, and by midday/all but the far pasture mowed…”

Reading Rash we come to learn many things about his environment and Southern myths. In Whippoorwill when a man dies, “neighbors at his bedside heard/a dirge rising from high limbs/in the nearby woods, and thought/come dawn the whippoorwill’s song would end…”

In Shelton Laurel is it a Hatfield-McCoy feud, the Civil War or just a battle among the folks in a town? Rash tells a tale that has no answers except mystery of the course of life.

Reading Rash can be frightening – death, sometimes violence – visits often. He also hop scotches time; one poem takes place in the 1967, while another takes place in 1974, another in 1959 and a couple in the 1990s. In many others the time period is not identified and the timelessness of these poems give them a sense of mystery. The reader wants to know where and when. These questions remain unanswered.

The Vanquished is a spot-on memorial to who came before the white man:

Even two centuries gone

their absence lingered—black hair

dazzling down a woman’s back

like rain, man’s high cheekbones,

a few last names, no field plowed

without bringing to surface

pottery and arrowheads,

bone-shards that spilled across rows

like kindling, a once-presence

keep as the light of dead stars.

In The Day the Gates Closed Rash writes a nostalgic paean to simple life lost:

We lose so much in this life.

Shouldn’t some things stay, she said,

but it was already gone,

no human sound, the poplars

and oaks cut down so even

the wind had nothing to rub

a whisper from, just silence

rising over a valley

deep and wide as a glacier.

Whether describing his view of history, his personal experience, a true tale or a Southern myth, Rash’s poems are accessible, enjoyable and worthy of being recognized and appreciated beyond his regional fame.

__________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer for Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

Author, Fire Tongue (Cervena Barva Press, 2016)

Author, Across Stones of Bad Dreams (Cervena Barva Press, 2011)

Author, King of the Jungle (Ibbetson Press, 2010)

Publisher, Muddy River Books

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

The Sunday Poet: Eileen R. Tabios

Eileen R. Tabios loves books and has released about 40 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in nine countries and cyberspace. Her most recent is THE CONNOISSEUR OF ALLEYS (Marsh Hawk Press, 2016).

From “The Gilded Age of Kickstarters”

There Were Peace-Loving Zombies

42 backers

$940

pledged of $6,000 goal

20 days to go

haven't been undead for long

still getting used to it

so please forgive my clumsy typing

let me introduce myself:

an "office zombie" rather than

the marauding variety

member of the Zombie-Living Alliance (ZLA)

the  peaceful arm of the undead rights movement

which compiled this book of the best

stories on attitudes towards zombies—

a means for the world, living and undead,

covering all gender identities, racial and class backgrounds

to discuss relations and hopefully bring

a peaceful end to the present conflict

together we can produce a better world

than the living alone are able to muster

each of the 13 short pieces illuminates

a different aspect of The Situation

the Undead Liberation Front is growing stronger

as more and more are bitten

while the living become increasingly militant

please support this project to raise funds

and goodwill for continuing efforts towards

restorative justice and peace in our time

Alex Ivy: A Poet Who Is Looking for Trouble.

Alexis Ivy is an educator of high-risk populations in her hometown, Boston.  Her most recent poems have appeared in Main Street Rag, Off The Coast, Spare Change News, Tar River Poetry, The Santa Fe Literary Review, Eclipse, Yellow Medicine Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, J Journal and upcoming in The Worcester Review.  Her first poetry collection, Romance with Small-Time Crooks was published in 2013 by BlazeVOX [books].  She is  finding a home for her next collection, Taking the Homeless Census which has been a runner-up for University of Wisconsin's Brittingham & Felix Pollack Prize. I had the privilege to interview her on my Somerville Community Access TV show, " Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."

Doug Holder: From the poems you sent me I get the idea you lived rather a hardscrabble existence when you were younger.

Alexis Ivy: Yeah. I have given myself a hard time. I feel that poetry is truth and beauty together. My work is not strictly autobiographical; but there is a definite truth to it.

Doug Holder: So what was your life like?

AI: Well, today I am living a much better life. I had a drug problem at one point, and I am in recovery right now. I was on the road awhile—just looking for trouble. I got it. That was my interest—getting into trouble.

Doug Holder: What was the philosophy behind that?

Alexis Ivy: I thought it would be an interesting life. I was attracted to it.

Doug Holder: You worked as a copywriter. Like a poet, when you write ad copy every word counts, and you try to get to the essence of things. In-fact, my late father who was in advertising in the 1950s, and beyond, told me it was not unusual for Madison Ave. to have poets as copywriters. After all Ginsberg worked in advertising.

Alexis Ivy: I wrote descriptions of wallpaper for Lowe's and Home Depot. My descriptions of wall paper were very flowery. In my regular poetry work I never used adjectives much. It was interesting. Actually...I really did get a real good poem from working in the field. The work helped me with developing my language to a certain degree. But I wasn't interested in an office job....so I moved on...I am not afraid of change.

Doug Holder: You study with the renowned poetry workshop leader Barbara Helfgott-Hyett. What has that experience been like?

Alexis Ivy: By attending her workshops I have learned to write. I think the first time I went there was during my senior year of high school. I had written much before. I wasn't a poet. I read the Beat Generation poets and that type of thing. I was familiar with Ginsberg and Snyder—but not much else. I learned how to write—a sestina –among other things. I learned how to give criticism. I met some great folks there. I have been going there for over a decade. Barbara is a great teacher.

Doug Holder: I read in an interview that you gave where you said,  “Poetry saved my life.” Explain.

Alexis Ivy: I feel like poetry and writing in general—when everything is just inside of you and you need to get it out—the page is where you can release it. Writing has always been therapeutic for me. It lets me let go of things. It makes an ugly experience...perhaps—beautiful. Without this outlet who knows where I would be now. With my collection “ Romance with Small Time Crooks,” I had to get over everything that happened in order to write the poems. I needed not to have it in me anymore. Once I published the book I was able to get over it—I had freedom once again.

Doug Holder: Are you over the bad times? Do you see open pastures?

Alexis Ivy: I am getting there. What I am writing about and how I am living is way better. My goal is happiness.

Doug Holder: When you were on the road did you have the idea that you would write about it?

Alexis Ivy: In the back of mind I thought I would write about it. I wasn't writing when I was on the road. Now when I go on a trip I write all the time.

Doug Holder: How long where you on the road?

Alexis Ivy: Two years. I was all around the country. I got stuck in a number of places. Once I worked for a gem and mineral show, and lived in the desert with other folks. I traveled with musicians . I made money from our gigs. I was 18 when I went on the road and 20 when I was finished with it. It was really intense not knowing what was going to happen next.

Doug Holder: I have always liked writing on trains and buses. How about you?

Alexis Ivy: I took an Amtrak to Chicago. It was a great experience. I too love traveling by train or bus. It is about the experience of getting there. There is a lot to see out the window of a Greyhound.

HEROIN OFFERS ME A CIGARETTE
I light one of my own.
I like my own.
Since I’ve read Bukowski,
nothing’s beautiful anymore,
it’s always somebody
to save, and somebody
save me: a sure-sign,
ever-refined, adamant.
If only I could hurt
his feelings instead
of mine. If only
I could quit things cold.
–THE DIFFERENCE
Flushed my stash down
the toilet. Eighty-three
capsules. And maybe
the green was good-night’s-
sleep. The blue, revelation.
Pink made me popular
in the parks downtown.
And every white I kept
a fist on, that was the best one,
it prescribed me.
I had no friends to send
greeting cards, no happy
this, happy that.
How far I’d go
in my self-defense—
I’m not that bad, not bad
like them, never sold,
robbed, been in debt.
No arrests. Never used
a needle, just slid
into the direction of sliding.
I never died. Thank God
for that. If I believed in God.
Thank God.

--Alexis Ivy

Noted critic pans James Franco's latest poetry collection Straight James/Gay James

Poet James Franco

Many people agree that James Franco is a fine actor... but poet? Critic Dennis has strong reservations...

Straight James/ Gay James

Poems by James Franco

Hansen Publishing Group, LLC

East Brunswick, NJ

http://hansenpublishing.com

ISBN: 978-1-60182-262-8

58 Pages

$12.00

Review by Dennis Daly

Some purist reviewers of poetry posit the importance of their responsibility as gatekeepers. I don’t see it that way. My critiques tend toward books that I like either in whole or in part. But … but there are limits. My button gets pushed by elitist practitioners of award winning drivel or wannabe celebrities showcasing their narcissism by caricaturing the artistic tradition they pretend to comprehend. The subject of this review is an example of the latter.

Two for two. James Franco’s new collection of poetry, Straight James/ Gay James, follows on the heels of his debut disaster in the same genre entitled Directing Herbert White. Both books exercise a self-indulgent and presumptuous posture unrivaled by anything this writer has perused since the fourth grade assignments of Sister Therese Immaculata were corrected and passed back for peer review. Petulant children of whatever age crave attention.

However, Straight James / Gay James goes one step further than its predecessor book in promoting the apotheosis of the sputtering, unapologetic cliché. From the opening poem, Dumbo, Franco rehashes long-suffering dead metaphors, blathering on into moments of unintended irony. Franco’s Dumbo drips down the page in numbingly expected ways. The poet’s young persona suffers shyness and alienation (How devastating and singular that must have been!) and then proceeds to associate with metaphoric circus clowns. Did you know that clowns were malevolent persons under their painted merriment? Of course not. Consider these lines in the heart of the piece,

Isolation followed me

And the only recourse

Was to drink hard with the clowns

Pink elephants

Paraded and sloshed

Through my youth

Until I became a sinister clown,

With a smile painted

Walt Disney must be cringing in his grave. I’ll spare you the poet’s last few lines which are gag-inducing.

Franco gushes out a description of his sinister, but well-meaning, self in his poem Custom Hotel. He apparently stays at this hotel, conveniently located near the LAX airport, once a week as he travels to parts unknown in order to quench the demands of inquiring cameras. Accommodating the egotism of this actor/ writer cannot be easy. The hotel provides Franco the same room, numbered 1212 for each stay. Get the binary significance in sync with the collection’s title? I thought so. The piece goes on to chronicle Franco’s penchant for deflowering sweet little things, all the while instilling in them his own vast acting knowledge and sinister (yet oh so sensitive) overall wisdom. Here the poet cites his beneficence embedded in wickedness,

And then I step out of the screen

And take them in their petrified awe.

I take the wise ones too,

But they are of my coven.

I know my own Satanic strength,

And I check it with good will,

Giving back the charity of my experience,

Growing little actor gardens …

In the piece Twenty-Year Chip Franco details the drunken driving accident that caused his turn to temperance. Nothing much here. No drama. No lyrics. No images. No twists. No turns. The poet explains,

On Middlefield Road, and a car

Slammed into our front,

Spinning the Accord

I chose to drive away,

First a side street

—letting Beau out—

And then a roundabout way

Back home, where

The cops were waiting.

Okay, so what? Franco presses forward educating his readers on his bright future, that is, in comparison with his teenage drinking buddies—one of whom killed himself by jumping off a parking garage roof. The poet’s use of the phrase, “I chose” in the above selection seems odd. Franco’s acceptance of responsibility may ring true at a twelve step program but does nothing to portray the rebellious nature of his persona that he obviously seeks to establish. Quite the contrary. The writer comes across as compliant and smug.

Epic and uninteresting self-absorption poses and preens itself throughout Straight James/ Gay James, Franco’s title piece. This tedious production, pretending to be an insightful investigation into Franco’s selfhood and gender identification, goes on for nine pages. It’s structured as an interview with Franco’s straight alter-ego interviewing his gay alter-ego and vice versa. It also includes two embedded, very forgettable stanza-poems. Aside from a few sexually-worded quips (even these seem non-subversive and ho-hum), apparently interjected for their shock value, there seems to be no real focus to these dangling passages. One section did momentarily grab my attention because of its group-think generalizations and naiveté. Straight James puts it this way,

Sure. I teach to stop thinking about myself for a bit. But also

because I find the classroom to be a very pure place, largely un-

affected by the business world. I like people who still dream big,

who are consumed by their work. And that’s how most students

in MFA programs are.

I guess Franco would know. He has five MFAs.

The great critic Yvor Winters argued the importance of the complementary relationship between concept and feeling in poems. Franco borrows his own concepts by utilizing meaningless clichés. Additionally, his stock, off-the-shelf feelings summon only uncharged limp responses from befuddled readers. The sad truth is that Franco’s words do not rise to the level of poetry, nor even publishable prose.