The Sunday Poet: Marc Livanos

"My poems have appeared in Straylight Magazine, Poet’s Espresso Review, Stray Branch Magazine, Old Red Kimono, Ship of Fools, Song of the San Joaquin Quarterly, Emerald Coast Review, WestWard Quarterly, PKA's Advocate, The Ultimate Writer Quarterly, The Pink Chameleon, JerryJazzMusician.com, and others. My chapbooks “Panhandle Poet - Solitude” and “Panhandle Poet - Second Helpings” are available online at barnesandnoble.com."

 

The Reasons

Rajith

saw my Buddha

and came over.

Smiling, he recounted

the basic beliefs

of Buddhism.

The mind exists to the extent 

necessary for thought

and to cling to naught.

The body exists to experience

feelings like lust or non-lust

and to learn how to abandon them.

Life’s journey shows how

material fetters the mind

and the way to see clearly.

The truth is revealed,   

when opinions are dropped

and other ways tolerated.

Such wisdom comes

from the Buddhist text

“Discourse on Mindfulness.”

I asked why Buddha,            

being non-materialistic,

is portrayed beautifully robed?

He explained how Alexander’s troops 

came upon the Ganges and

saw a priest without clothes.

“Why are you without clothes?”

The priest responded,

“Why are you with clothes?”

Alexander stayed and listened,

enthralled that so many cared

about a man who died centuries earlier.

Commissioning a statue,

his sculptor robed the Buddha

in a fine Greek tunic.

All told, Rajith’s eyes lit up,

hearing I was Greek and

my son’s name is Alexander.

Lyric Stage Offers Loneliness and Togetherness with Irony

Lyric Stage Offers Loneliness and Togetherness with Irony

By Rosie Rosenzweig, Resident Scholar,

Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Center

The 1970 dark comedy Company (music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and book by George Furth), which won the 2007 Best Musical Tony award, was updated by Director Spiro Veloudos at the Lyric Stage with irony and relevance.   This production kept theatre-goers smiling with the occasional “huh?” moment to enliven the evening.

Individual relationships are presented through ironic vignettes, tinged with many annoying flaws of togetherness; this underline the tongue-in-cheek cynicism of the main character’s views of long term relationships. Robert (a.k.a.  the protagonist Bobby) feels that his friends, all in more-or-less committed relationships, adore him to excess.  The work is a brilliant song and dance set at that time in New York when the upper middle class was indulging the psychoanalysis and talking about it ad nauseum. The score, with its almost comical indulgences in muted brass phrases, caused many a guffaw in the audience.  There were shades of Cabaret and the ghost of Berthold Brecht haunting the evening, just in case the audience might even for a second take the digs at relationships seriously. It’s Bobby’s birthday party and the use of the birthday cake causes us to do a double take and question the reality of the vignettes that follow, which caricature “perfect relationships: Neighbors you annoy together/Children you destroy together/ That keep marriage intact.” The various couples have one scene to present themselves, beginning with a judo-fighting couple, and include the number “You Could Drive a Person Crazy.”  The variety of relationships from his diverse and comical friends grab the audience’s attention throughout.  “Company, the recurrent song and dance that rises up at important times in the action of the drama, is presented with different moods by the ensemble, begins with an opening sappy “Happy Birthday” theme and progresses to an almost stifling quality.

What does Bobby do when he realizes that, in truth, all his committed friends are really happy.  And that none of the female partners really want to sleep with him?  That answer arrives with a startling turnabout that awakened us to the truth about the darkness of Bobby’s ironic take on commitment. Can we really take his conclusion seriously in the final number, “Being Alive?”  That will be up to those in attendance and will receive no spoilers here, other than that the themes of this questionably dated work is relevant today among Gen X kids and millennials loathe to commit to marriage and children.

Matching a New York high kicking number was the Act II ensemble show-stopper called, “Side by Side by Side/What Would We Do Without You?” It magnifies the narcissism of Bobby, a 35-year-old bachelor unable to sustain a lasting relationship, surrounded by five couples, who, through his eyes, seem to adore him.  Here, John Abrosino playing and singing Bobby, leads the ensemble with the movements and subtle flair reminiscent of a Fred Astaire; he lights up with body language that, hopefully, will spread to the rest of the play as the production continues through October. Even though he can sing, act, and dance quite professionally, all too often his upper body enacts that uptight quality, which his Puerto Rican girlfriend ridicules.

Another show stopper was the classic “Ladies Who Lunch” by Leigh Barrett, who made this her own, despite original performance by Elaine Stritch and Patti LuPone. This sardonic toast, with the biting irony of a Cabaret number about women is out of Betty Freidan’s Feminine Mystique. This has the historic undertones of the popular sonnet by e.e. cummings about “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls” with no individuality and “comfortable minds.”  Company features, not only good drama, but some biting social commentary as well. Following this is the contrasting “Being Alive” conclusion of Bobby’s search,

The entire cast embodies what the Director Spiro Veloudos describes as “act the book and act the story” for all the other important numbers in the show.  Veloudos has directed almost 20 Sondheim musicals in the course of his tenure at Lyric Stage.

Presenting big stage choreography on a postage stamp size stage is the remarkable result of Choreographer Rachel Betone. 

Even though Company’s 1970 pre-Broadway Boston run received mixed reviews saying that this show “is for misogynists and homos,” the themes are relevant today for 21str century theatre goers.

Lyric Stage certainly lives up to its mission with this first production of the season to bring to Boston audiences “challenging and entertaining theatre.”

Sentinel: Poetry by Dennis Daly

Sentinel

Poetry by Dennis Daly

© 2016 Dennis Daly

Red Dashboard LLC Publishing

Princeton, NJ

ISBN- 13: 978-1535004541

Sofbound, No Price Given, 107 pages

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Previously I did a review of a Dennis Daly book of poetry in which I stated that he “has been there, done that…” In Custom House Daly takes readers to ancient foreign lands, places of the heart and love-hate relationship with the work place.

In his latest poetic offering, Sentinel, Daly out does himself with mysterious poems that convince you he has an insider's knowledge of the espionage game as played by the likes of the CIA and NSA, maybe even the FBI and any other three letter abbreviations you can think of. He does all this in the style of Wallace Stevens, itself not an easy accomplishment.

The poem “Secrets” sets the stage of the dark and dangerous with an opening line that reminds me of the old radio program “The Shadow,” which began with the oft quoted

“Who knows what evil lurks in the minds of men…”

Channels that lead nowhere, nondescript

Dead ends that greet you like vacant smiles,

Yet there are caches of grim jewels

Hidden somewhere. A caution wire tripped

Sets off the venal security

Alerting them to tell-all voices.

Silence the inevitable key

To cults that form the veiled basis

Of earthly power. The living runes

Chiseled onto this fantastic world

Redolent of summer afternoons,

The ammunition spent, flag unfurled.

This is how some reach their bitter end.

They sieve out quiet confidences

To spidery contenders, misspend

The rest on red win and circuses.

Is this a childhood action movie, perhaps a serial? Could it be 007 in action? Jason Bourne on the loose? What it is not is a dream, and Daly lets you know that not all spies can keep their secrets, and often spending on drinks and pleasures leads to their demise.

In “Patterns” Daly deals another dark and mysterious poem for the reader to try and interpret:

The wave and the trough, the unmade man

Takes his turn in the froth-fingered air,

The usual briskness of elsewhere.

Then back again, at least that’s the plan

Of sensible pretense, not reckless.

Not at all. Closing the hatch on sturm

And drang, he nods to all, reaffirms

Solidity and anxiousness

And doubt that public certainty births.

He rehearses the routine. Danger,

So predicable, looms. He’ll wager

Life and limb. His stubborn will unearths.

Fangs and feral claws. The wait not long

As he prepared for the frantic day

When fractal stress and those patterns may,

Seen from afar, go wrong, very wrong.

The man of duty performs his task, he is, perhaps, too close to see the impending results while his superiors, his handlers can see the coming end, the losses he will suffer, maybe even his life.

If you are not convinced of the darkness or the espionage, sink into “Agents of Influence” which incorporates some of the best thriller writing into Daly’s bag of poetics. All of pure noir.

One by one the rocks are chiseled out,

Disassembled, a quick erasure

Of foundation. The shake of structure

Noticeable. As mildews of doubt

Climb tapestries, traitors praise new gods,

The future guards of our guided wills.

Frescoes peel, plaster crumbles, fulfills

years of prediction, multiple frauds.

Steeples, dwarfed now, but still extend up

Toward the unresistant stratosphere.

Demagogues assign fault. The frontier

Forts abandoned, rabble envelope

Our cities, poison our sweetest wells.

Men escape through the mountain passes

Or freeze where they fall. The blown bridges

Mapped months ago. Devolution sells.

You may not find this the easiest book of poetry to read. Perhaps you will read a number of these poems two or three times and possibly reach a different conclusion each time. But one thing is for sure, Sentinel is well worth the effort because your mind will compare it to thriller novels, movies, television shows. In the end you will simply marvel at Dennis Daly’s ability to incorporate espionage into a poetic form-- leaving you wanting more dark shadows and mysterious meanings. You will be pondering long after you have finished reading a poem or the book. Highly recommended.

______________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer for Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

Author, Fire Tongue (Cervena Barva, 2016)

Across Stones of Bad Dreams (Cervena Barva, 2011)

King of the Jungle (Ibbetson Press, 2010)

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Publisher, Muddy River Books

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthologies 7& 8

The Sunday Poet: Judith Katz-levine

Judy Katz-levine is the author of three poetry collections: "When The 
Arms Of Our Dreams Embrace" (SARU 1991), "Ocarina" (SARU/Tarsier 2006), 
and "When Performers Swim, The Dice Are Cast" (Ahadada 2009).  Her 
recent poems have appeared in "Salamander", "Ygdrasil", "Gravel", "Muddy 
River Poetry Review", "Ibbetson Street", "Poem Of The Moment" 
(Massachusetts Poetry Festival Newsletter), and "Blue Unicorn".
 
Stark Light
 
the lilac leaves
a young man insists
on justice, grieves
the homeless ones
he meets at
the train station
stark light
I listen   impossible
to move on it
we hear about wars
starting up
pray for an end
to the violence
stark light   at noon
cars shine in the heat
I grieve for the world
and getting older
listen to the young
their laments
for future decades
 
  - Judy Katz-levine

The Hastings Room Series’ Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading with feature reader Meg Tyler and Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Death of a Naturalist

Meg Tyler

The Hastings Room Series’ Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading with feature reader Meg Tyler and Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Death of a Naturalist

Wednesday September 14th at First Church Congregationalist

11 Garden Street near Harvard Square, at 7pm

by Michael Steffen

The book Death of a Naturalist, with its well-known title poem, was published in 1966, fifty years ago this year. Seamus Heaney’s first major published collection, it won the Cholmondeley Award, the Gregory Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award—an auspicious welcome in publishing for the Irish poet who would go on to receive the Nobel Prize twenty-nine years and many collections later in 1995.

Death of a Naturalist consists of 34 poems based on childhood experiences and the coming to age of adult recognitions, family relations and life on the farm and in rural Ireland.

Helen Vendler has written about the identity groups Heaney confronted in forming his early poetic character, his family name “Heaney,” his national conversation with Ireland and the Irish, as a Catholic, as an English speaker, a European, a member of rural rather than urban background. Vendler writes, “If Heaney is to write about any of these several groups, he vows not to be intimidated by what those groups think of him and of his work… This vow is one all poets must take, and one which is always very difficult to keep; but it becomes particularly hard when the claims of affection and solidarity attempt to establish confines around what can be said or written.”

Vendler also speaks of the anonymity the child’s persona takes on in the poems of Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark, of the “outsideness” of the perception. In one of his books of essays on poetry, Preoccupations, Heaney writes with admiration for the childhood poems of Theodore Roethke. Like Roethke’s greenhouse poems, Heaney’s early pieces, especially the poem “Death of a Naturalist,” make a broad, nearly immediate appeal to readers. In these lines which begin—“All year the flax-dam festered in the heart Of the townland; green and heavy headed Flax had rotted there…” —the poet is acknowledging and confronting perhaps his most encompassing identity mirror, nature/sexuality, in the image of the frogspawn which fascinates the young Heaney, then of the frogs themselves, who with their coarse croaking voices take on a transcendent, demonic aspect which frightens and turns the child away.

On Wednesday evening, the poem “Death of a Naturalist” will be read, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Heaney’s marvelous international debut, in the introduction to our readers,

George Kalogeris, David Blair and Meg Tyler. We’re putting Meg on the spot this year as the “feature” guest. All three readers are equally wonderful.

Tyler is the 2016 Fulbright Professor of Anglophone Irish Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen's University in Belfast. She's the author of a monograph on Seamus Heaney, A Singing Contest (Routledge 2005), and is now working on a book of essays about the Irish poet Michael Longley. Her first book of poems, Poor Earth, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2014.

It’s a pleasure and so interesting how Tyler talks and writes about poetry. She takes less-traveled paths to look at Heaney’s poetry. Edna Longley and Ciaran Carson have caged the power of Heaney’s pieces on history as “dangerously mythologizing” and mystifying. But Tyler’s opening, almost thesis-like view of the poet’s “impulse” as one “towards unity and regeneration” both is unexpected and makes great sense in the overall estimation of Heaney’s poetic character, which time and again attests to wariness for the superficial arguments and identifications that give rise to enmity and conflict.

Meg speaks of Heaney’s “working model of inclusive consciousness” for poetry, including

“an engagement with the past.” This opens an inexhaustible door to the influences and conversations with other poets that have sparked Heaney’s interest and imagination. Tyler reiterates that Heaney did not make giants of his predecessors, but equals of them. And like

a faring poet, Heaney conversed with so many poets, from the speaking yesterday of Virgil, Dante or Kavanaugh, Lowell and Larkin to his contemporaries at home, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and abroad, Joseph Brodsky and Czeslaw Milosz.

While Tyler’s scope is broad and far-reaching, she can be wonderfully forensic in her prosodic analyses. In one, of many instances throughout A Singing Contest, Meg compares Heaney’s translation of passages from Virgil’s Eclogues with those of David Ferry. “Ferry’s puzzles are subtle,” Tyler writes—

as he relies less on dialect, which heightens the line’s rhythmic movement in Heaney. Ferry adheres to a pentameter line. However, the line that reads, “Heartbroken and beaten, since fortune will have it so,” displays metrical ingenuity with a spondee in the first foot followed by other anapestic substitutions. The variations…express the strain and stress of circumstance, a weight too great to carry… (A Singing Contest, Routledge, 2005, p. 63)

Drawing our attention to the line and its meter, she appreciates the subtly signifying and illustrative dance of the language’s rhythm composed in its metrical difference. It is as fine an observation as that rare diner’s who tastes a sauce and then proceeds to analyze the wine, vegetables, herbs and saltiness of the butter used to prepare it.

So, looking forward to Wednesday evening: Because “Death of a Naturalist” will be among the poems read for the audience, I’ve chosen a poem of a very different inspiration to leave our readers with this week, in a far different situation and meditation from the child’s instinctual attractions and dreads.

St Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing's imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in love's deep river,
'To labour and not to seek reward,' he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river's name.

Marc Zegans The Book of Clouds

Marc Zegans

The Book of Clouds

Kite-string Press

Copyright 2016

Review by Lo Galluccio

In Italo Calvino’s ‘Invisible Cities” Marco Polo is a messenger to Kublai Khan and his reports to the Emperor are dream-like and baroque descriptions of cities to which he’s traveled.  In the middle of the book, Polo admits that all of these cities are tropes on Venice, so even though they are all unique in design, style, purpose, essence, they have a Venice-like template.  In short, all the cities are the same city.  

In Marc Zegans latest collection, “The Book of Clouds” he relates an offering made to a loved one-- a friend or lover-- of a flange of clouds.   In this assortment, there are many different kinds of clouds, yet one wonders if they are all variations on the very first cloud in the book, given to the loved one as pleasure, diversion, protection and whim.  

In the first poem, the beloved asks for a “cloud tonight/a cloud hanging over the Pacific/high above the sunset, glowing with dusk.”  At the poem’s end we understand that the author and object of the cloud will be tethered together –“you sit on the beach in a small chair/your stringed toe rocking me on my cloud gently.” It is a beautiful image of a cloud, like a balloon tied to a toe that is rocking, while the lover sits on the beach.  We can picture dusk, perhaps the most lovely time to be on any beach as the sun starts to set.  The second poem is quite simple – “Would you like a cloud tonight?/ I think so./What sort of cloud?/ A simple cloud that you will pull with you as you walk the beach.”  This is a compacted version of the first poem story.  It echoes the first one, like a bell’s resonance.

There are all wonder of clouds in this collection: clouds heavy with night rain, clouds of magnificent colors, clouds of wakefulness and sleep.  Each cloud intended as a lullaby, a cushion, a spectacle for the beloved.  In number 7, denoted by a roman letter, the poet writes:

“As though dropping from a wall/you fall into tonight’s spun grey-cloud/softer than lambs wool, stronger than silk. It stretches around your sides, cradling your leap into dreamless sleep.”

Thus cloud as cradle or hammock leading to a sleep without dreams.  Sometimes we just want to sleep and not be beset with dreams, good or bad.  This is one condition that this poem grants the beloved with a magical grey cloud.  There is also this cloud’s opposite coming right after, “Free and festive, rested now for many days/you ask me for a cloud of vivid dreams/and I give you this cloud of radiant white/from which you can draw a million colors/strand upon strand/on which to weave your dreams.”  

Cloud 14 is a simple play on words: [c]loud/thunder/clap! The loud noise of the thunder is derived from the thunder cloud that claps to herald a storm.  There are thin clouds, and shy clouds that cleanse the day from weary eyes.  The most obvious benefit of these story-book clouds is that they promote sleep.  In cloud 19 the cloud’s colors transmute “From byzantine to aubergine/amethyst through mauve into orchid/eggplant entwined with English violet/the varied purples of your cloud/remove the robes of public office/leaving you only, ready for sleep./

In number 22, we find another cloud offering by the poet: “Your cloud glows Venetian Red/it has the scent of history/and the lushness of ripened fruit./  And in number 24, “Your cloud tonight is a delicious/confection of oranges and lemons/with enough cream to make a Pavlova.”

So the author explores the cloud as being a confection, like cotton candy, or full of cream like the Pavlova cake mentioned.  These poems are delightful offerings to the loved one’s hunger and add a dimension of taste to the clouds.  There is also an overall quality of parfait to these poems.  They are easy to take in, like a light dessert, something that cleanses the palate after a heavy meal or nourishes the dreamer with beauty and devotion.   

In number 25, “this cloud floats over horses/grazing on the salt-breeze grass by Muir Beach./ and it travels “by jet stream to meet you/the scents of eucalyptus and sea sliding you into enchanted sleep. We are keenly aware of the fresh and minty perfume emitted by this cloud and how it provokes a wondrous night’s sleep.

I should mention that this book was set up so that there is only one poem for every page and nothing but space adjoining that page.  The author wants the reader to be able to envision his clouds without any confusing juxtapositions.  So the poem, like a cloud, inhabits its own piece of the sky.  Each page tells a story about a cloud enchanting the beloved’s existence and mainly his/her’s sleep.  There are many delightful stories in this collection, dedicated to those ephemeral yet clearly manifest phenomena, clouds.  In the final poem, number 31, the poet concludes:” Tonight’s cloud is the cloud you have made/the cloud in need of no other/the cloud drawn from the light you have bestowed.”

Marc Zegans is the author of “The Underwater Typewriter,” “Boys in the Woods” and “The Book of Clouds.”  He is also a spoken word artist and an artist’s consultant.  

marc zegans: creative development advisor | Helping Artists, Writers, and Creative People Thrive and Shine

The book is presently available only at Lulu.  It will go into broader distribution in a few weeks.  Here’s the link to the book page on Lulu.

The Book of Clouds by Marc Zegans (Hardcover) - Lulu

The Launch of the “New Saturday Club” A Literary History Celebration and Re-Creation at The Omni Parker House Hotel Kennedy Room

 
 

The Launch of the “New Saturday Club” A Literary History Celebration and Re-Creation 
at The Omni Parker House Hotel Kennedy Room followed by Parker’s Bar Saturday, September 17, 2016, 3:30 p.m.


Program    • Brief Introduction of the New Saturday Club    • Presentation by Susan Wilson, Official House Historian for the Omni Parker House, on the original Saturday Club and its literary members

  • Group discussion of literary conversation then and now at Parker’s Bar  Advisory Committee: William F. Bagley (Director Of Development, St. Mark’s School); Joe Bergin (Poet); Sam Cornish (Boston Poet Laureate Emeritus); Danielle Legros Georges (Boston Poet Laureate); Tom Johnston (Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture); Susan Wilson (House Historian, Omni Parker House). 
The Original Saturday Club: “Founded by Harvey D. Parker in 1855, the Omni Parker House is the oldest of Boston’s elegant inns and the longest continuously operating hotel in the United States. It was here where the brightest lights of America’s Golden Age of Literature—writers like Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Longfellow—regularly met for conversation and conviviality in the legendary nineteenth-century Saturday Club.” —Excerpted from Heaven, By Hotel Standards: The History of the Omni Parker House by House Historian Susan Wilson
          
SUSAN WILSON, the official House Historian of the Omni Parker House, is an award-winning photographer, writer, educator, and lecturer whose stories and images about the arts, entertainment, history, and culture regularly appeared in the Boston Globe from 1978 to 1996. In 1994, she began writing and photographing books on Boston history, including Boston Sites and Insights, The Literary Trail of Greater Boston, Garden of Memories: A Guide to Historic Forest Hills, and Heaven, By Hotel Standards: The History of the Omni Parker House. Susan has long been a consultant to and member of a variety of historic organizations in Boston, including The Boston Women’s Heritage Trail, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Old South Association, The National Park Service, Boston By Foot, Forest Hills Educational Trust, The Dimock Center, and the City of Boston. She was project director for both Harborwalk signage and the Maritime Museum at Battery Wharf.



  Free Donations welcome for future honoraria. Food and drink at Parker’s Bar not included. RSVP and more information, Joe Bergin: jdbergin@gmail.com or 617-834-7631.  60 School Street, Boston, 02108 Paid Parking available • Near State Street and Government Center Stations