The Hastings Room Series Friday Nov 18, 2016 Daniel Tobin/Marc Vincenz 7PM

Click on pic to enlarge

The Sunday Poet: Bert Stern

Bert Stern

Bert Stern writes of himself, "Bert Stern is an old man who keeps writing.poems and learning to love."

After the Election

Dear Du Fu asks, “Does anyone like the poems I write

after drinking the wine of the rich?” Now America

drinks the wine of the rich. How can poems

get written at all? I know, I know, the dharma

is still the dharma, love, though it must lie low,

is still the fire that warms us, the sky, though

gray, hasn’t been jostled loose nor the sun

and moon and stars and earth out of their orbits.

Maybe the soot that’s fallen over everything

will one day wash away.

--Bert Stern

A TRIBUTE TO GEOFFREY HILL at BU’S CASTLE ON THURSDAY EVENING Nov. 10, 2016

GEOFFREY HILL

A TRIBUTE TO GEOFFREY HILL at BU’S CASTLE ON THURSDAY EVENING

by Michael Todd Steffen

On Thursday November 10th at 7pm, at the Castle, 225 Bay State Road, Boston University, the second Fall BU Poetry Reading, directed by Meg Tyler, will pay tribute to Geoffrey Hill (18 June 1932 –

30 June 2016), an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Hill taught at BU from 1988 – 2006.

Like Herbert or Hopkins, Hill’s poetry is religious in its mindfulness of God. Yet, with open eyes to the age, his expression, rather than resorting to them as attitudes, intends remoteness and irony, often commenting on the contemporary world through history. In his much-anthologized poem “Ovid in the Third Reich,” Hill says that “God/Is distant.”

I have learned one thing: not to look down

So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,

Harmonize strangely with the divine

Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.

Seamus Heaney noted, “[Hill] has a strong sense of the importance of the maintenance of speech, a deep scholarly sense of the religious and political underpinning of everything in Britain.”

Wikipedia also tells us Hill defended the right of poets to difficulty as a form of resistance to the demeaning simplifications imposed by “maestros of the world.” He argued that to be difficult is to be democratic, equating the demand for simplicity with the demand of tyrants.

The tribute at BU on Thursday evening will include readings by Archie Burnett, Saskia Hamilton, Kenneth Haynes, Marcia Karp, George Kalogeris, Christopher Ricks and others. The series is sponsored by BUCH, the Arts Initiative and CIT at CGS.

Among his many awards, Geoffrey Hill received an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His Collected Critical Writings won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the largest annual cash prize in English-language literary criticism.

Considered to be among the most distinguished poets of his generation, Hill was called the “greatest living poet in the English language.” This is a wonderful opportunity to gain familiarity with and insight into a guarded albeit rich spirit of poetry.

The Sunday Poet: Karen Locascio

Karen Locascio is a graduate of the MFA program at UMass, Boston, where she won an Academy of American Poets prize. Her work has appeared in Paper Nautilus, Cider Press Review, and Window Cat Press, among others, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut collection, May All My Wounds Be Mortal, won the first Ron Schreiber Poetry Prize and will be published by Hanging Loose Press in early 2017. In her spare time, Karen enjoys genealogy research and fantasy football, and reads submissions for Spry Literary Journal. Originally from New Jersey, Karen currently lives in Dorchester.

The Fool

I dream you swoop in

on wings I can’t see. You burn

off like dust on a candle,

my skeleton radiating

hypnotic from my breastbone.

You’re better as visitation

or morning sickness,

and me as a padded room,

a concavity.

Flip the shell.

Pick a card, any card.

I’ll break a plate

then the sky. Rain, rain…

The sperm is rain,

the rain is sperm.

The ovum’s the only human cell

visible to the naked eye.

I’ve got cavities in my ovaries

and sperm in my mouth.

When you tell me to leave, you mean it

half the time. You slap me

on the ass, chain-smoking,

sink full of empties.

Search for a new Somerville Poet Laureate begins!

Nicole Terez Dutton-- First Somerville Poet Laureate

 ***** Harris Gardner and myself, along with the Director of the Somerville Arts Council, Greg Jenkins-- jump-started the first Poet Laureate position in Somerville, Mass. in 2014. Nicole Terez Dutton was the pick of the committee, and she has done a fine job. Now the search begins, yet again. Here is the application process...



Somerville Poet Laureate
Application and Overview
Statement of Purpose


The City of Somerville announces the creation of a Poet Laureate for Somerville. The City views the position as a means to further enhance the profile of poets and poetry in the city and beyond. The Poet Laureate is expected to bring poetry to segments of Somerville's community that have less access or exposure to poetry: senior citizens, youth, schools and communities. The Poet Laureate will be a person of vision with the ability to enact his/her vision.

Duration
The Poet Laureate will serve for a two-year term, 2017 & 2018, and will be provided an honorarium of $2,000 per year. A contract will be derived with expectations detailed as to the public benefit required of the position, which will be jointly determined with the final applicant and review committee. The expectation is that the position will support and expand poetry in the city. The Somerville Arts Council/City of Somerville will support the Laureate in networking within the community but actual work must be accomplished by the chosen candidate.

How to apply Deadline: Postmarked by November 29, 2016
Candidates for Somerville Poet Laureate must provide the following:
• One page contact info sheet with name, address, phone number, email, website (if applicable)
• Proof of residence demonstrated by sending a copy of a utility bill, lease, phone bill. (a jpg image of a current bill or statement is fine if emailing application, or a photocopy of statement if mailing application)

• Curriculum Vitae / Poetry-Related Bio
• Up to 20 pages of original poetry
• One to three-page vision statement with details as to how you will implement the public benefit component.

How to submit
1. Either email PDFs of the above items to Gregory Jenkins at gjenkins@somervillema.gov with Poet Laureate in the subject header:
2. Or mail the following documents to: Somerville Poet Laureate, Somerville Arts Council, 50 Evergreen Ave., Somerville, MA 02145

Podcast : Doug Holder interviews poet Joyce Peseroff

 

Doug Holder/Joyce Peseroff

https://archive.org/details/Z0000085 ( Click on)

Here is a podcast I conducted with noted poet Joyce Peseroff-- Peseroff was one of the original members of the Alice James Collective in Cambridge, the first director of the MFA program at U/Mass Boston, friend to Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, and many other things in her long and accomplished career. We also discussed her new collection "Know Thyself." —

From Nothing By Daniel Tobin

From Nothing

By Daniel Tobin

Four Way Books

www.fourwaybooks.com

New York, NY

ISBN: 978-1-935536-69-7

39 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Melding together physics, mysticism, and mathematics, Daniel Tobin, in his epic paean to Jesuit priest and scientist Georges Lemaitre entitled From Nothing, creates and choreographs a twentieth century re-conjured world of cosmological wonder and Dantean horror. He conveys his tale to us in extraordinary lines of narrative poetry.  Tobin’s writing explodes onto the page with white-hot intensity, its numinous words and birthing suns expanding and cooling first into elegance and then into a compassionate understanding of our human condition.

Tobin’s subject, Lemaitre, just for his acquaintances and geographic address, deserves substantial intrinsic interest.  A friend of Albert Einstein, Lemaitre visited with him often after Einstein had fled Germany for the temporary sanctuary of Belgium.

No stranger to savagery, Lemaitre fought in the trenches during the First World War and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Lemaitre remained in Belgium up until and through the 1940s and the Jewish holocaust. He witnessed the horrors first-hand and was himself questioned by the Nazis because of his friendships with multiple Jewish scientists.

In his work Lemaitre anticipated and solved many of the problems inherent in Einstein’s physics. He disagreed with Einstein on issues of quantum mechanics and his insights were later proved correct. He also developed the theory of cosmology that became known as the “Big Bang.”

Though writing mostly in the third person, Tobin occasionally speaks in the voices of preeminent scientists of the time such as Lemaitre himself, astronomer Edwin Hubble, Robert Oppenheimer, and George Gamow. The technique works wonderfully by infusing emotion, humor, and, generally, other points of view into the text.

A consideration of Lemaitre’s deeply felt faith and his scientific persona opens this collection of distinct, yet intrinsically connected, poems. In this piece entitled (Fountain) Tobin expounds on the attraction between matter and anti-matter before ending his argument with Lemaitre’s own words,

… your physics and your faith,

the divergent roads with their singular horizon

where the radius of space converges into zero,

where what was, is, will be waxes without boundary

into seed and sand grain, a Cepheid luster of eyes—

news of the minor signature keyed from everywhere,

the primal radiation, omnipresent, the prodigal

wave arriving from its Now that has no yesterday,

the proof of your calculus, the tour of the expanse:

“The evolution of the universe might be compared

to a display of fireworks that has just ended,

some few red wisps, ashes, and smoke. So we stand

on a well-cooled cinder to see the fading of suns,

to glimpse a vanished brilliance, the origin of worlds.”

At the Battle of Yser Lemaitre details a chemical gas attack and pivots from realty into a work of art. The poem, (De Rerum), is spoken, amidst the spattering of machine guns, in Lemaitre’s voice. Here’s the heart of the piece,

Why is it, O my Precious Christ, we do this to each other,

crouching in transverse, trench, the barbed, deadlocked lines,

who might have joined like harvesters among hedge and fold?

A hiss, and from enemy dug-outs the strange cloud curls

in waves, grayish, yellow to green, darkest at the bottom.

And I know we are in a biblical plague, the men fumbling

for bits of flannel, cotton pads, the gassed in spasm, clawing

at their throats, their eyes, vomiting, crawling off to die—

the way the forsaken do in Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death,   

its black plumes of smoke and burning cities, its scythes

and armies, skeletal, their coffin lid shields, the slit throats,

wagonloads of skulls, that dog nibbling a dead child’s face.

At his most provocative Tobin summons up Pope Pius XII, the mystic and Vicar of Christ, loathed by Adolf Hitler, obsessed with apparitions in Fatima, and utterly alone in his bureaucracy. He had ordered his churches to save individual Jews by hiding them and issuing phony baptismal records. He broadcasted veiled condemnations of the Nazis. He seemed to mean well, but yet…. The poet, speaking of the audience Lemaitre had with the Pope, concludes the piece this way,

… his silence at the roundups

near Vatican walls: culpability caught by hindsight,

the encyclical denouncing hate shelved for diplomacy.

In the photograph you look up at him, your pontiff,

as he welcomes you. Obedient, open, to his throne.

And had he donned the yellow star? History’s “What if.”

Using the famous double-slit thought experiment as a metaphor in his poem (Aperture), Tobin plots out the possibilities and paths of science, as well as Lemaitre’s mystical hope for religious salvation. In the experiment that charts “wave theory,” particle photons, when shot through a slit screen, seem to know where to go; they have a kind of consciousness. Does probability theory indubitably lead to an invisible world? The poet explains,

--“ Infinity is such an artistic creation, all symmetry

And elegance, but your method smacks of metaphysics,

Lifeless life, and the Bible is not a textbook of science.

If relativity theory had been necessary to salvation

it would have been revealed to St. Paul or Moses.

Still, the deeper we penetrate the universal mystery

The more we will find one law and one goodness.”

Lemaitre envisions cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) in Tobin’s poem entitled Canto. His predictions were validated shortly before he died by Arno Penzias and James Wilson. The poet begins his piece by quoting St Augustine,

Is it motion itself that makes the day? Or is it the time

taken in the motion? Or is it both? The saint asked,

searchingly— Deus creator omnium: the measure

of mind made by the Maker of minds, and time

come to existence only observable as time, phase

transition to the radio spectrum, pre-recombinant,

the primordial light unchanged from the initial

sea of light, a television hiss homing everywhere,

mysterious, incessant…

Tobin has dared mightily with this multi-faceted book of cosmological wonders and soaring divination.  The degree of his rarefied achievement startles beyond mere artistic credence. Bravo.

Women Musicians Network 20th Concert Wednesday, November 9, 2016, 8:00 pm (doors 7:30) Berklee Performance Center

Christiane Karam & Lucy Holstedt
photo credit: Carolyn Alden

                                                         

Women Musicians Network

20th annual concert, Wed., Nov. 9th

Berklee Performance Center

www.berklee.edu/BPC

"Once again, it's a once-in-a-lifetime show."

20 years ago, Lucy Holstedt moved to Somerville and also co-founded the W.M.N. concert. Today, Lucy (a professor in Berklee's Harmony Dept.) feels "very good" about both decisions: she is now a homeowner here, and this concert has become well known and highly regarded.

One fan is Cambridge Major E. Denise Simmons, whose 2016 PROCLAMATION thanks Holstedt for her huge role in creating an "exciting and diverse showcase {that brings} the gift of music to so many throughout Greater Boston."

"It's never easy," says Lucy—who is also the W.M.N. student club advisor, concert co-director, and primary host—"but I love working with the great, original talent constantly pouring into Berklee. This may be the only college where you could put together such an eclectic concert that's different every year." As always, the focus is on Berklee women (mainly students) as songwriters, composers, bandleaders, and producers. In the course of 90 minutes, you'll see 10 original acts—from Solo Jazz and Contemporary Classical, to Funk/Gospel and Rock.

The Nov. 9th show begins with a Big Band arrangement by Berklee professor Ayn Inserto, based on a jazz composition by pianist Zahili Gonzalez Zamora—a Berklee student from Cuba who has already performed around the world. "I'm excited we're starting with an all-women, 19-piece band," Lucy remarks. "It's not something you see every day."

Soon after, concert co-director Christiane Karam will be leading her magnificent (in my experience) traditional Pletinitsa Balkan Choir. Near the end of the concert is a setting of a poem dealing with refugees. The poem was written by Boston Poet Laureate Danielle Legros Georges (born in Haiti), who now teaches at Lesley University. This poem inspired Holstedt to write "Miles Apart," a song she'll be performing with vocalists from Kenya and Zimbabwe.

Every Women Musicians Network concert I've been to—roughly a dozen so far—is like a cross between an international music festival and a magic trick: 10 acts in an hour and a half!? How is this possible? "The staff at the B.P.C. deserve a huge amount of credit," says Lucy, who adds that W.M.N. student leaders are always working to make smooth transitions between acts.

The focus is on women, but a good number of Berklee men are included. Lucy shows me a draft of the program, and I count participants from more than 20 countries.

Not quite as "international" as Somerville, of course—but not bad for a concert.

Women Musicians Network

20th annual concert the

Berklee Performance Center

8:00 pm - 9:30 pm (doors 7:00 pm)

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

www.berklee.edu/BPC

The Sunday Poet: Gary Fincke

Gary Fincke

Gary Fincke's latest collection is Brining Back the Bones: New and Selected Poems (2016, Stephen F. Austin University). His next book will be The Killer's Dog, which won the 2015 Elixir Press Fiction Prize and will appear early next year.  He is the Charles Degenstein Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University.

The Chernobyl Swallows

In April, near the anniversary

Of catastrophe, barn swallows returned,

Flying inside the exclusion zone to

Nest in the radioactive ruins.

Like disciples, the swaddled scientists

Marveled. The work crews, weeks later, toasted

The newly hatched, especially the fledged

With albino feathers after they soared

Like their siblings, devouring insects

With the ravenous hunger of swallows.

For months, the left-behind celebrated

How weak the worst was, and when the swallows,

,

No exceptions, flew southward, how feeble

Apocalypse could be. But come spring, not

One of the white-flecked birds returned, only

The ordinary nesting and spawning

Their own mutations. Families, by then,

Had moved back to where the world was quiet

And uncrowded, reclaiming rooms inside

The official radius of poison.

And through succeeding springs, no flight with white

Above them, just guards and squatters were left

To praise what they took for heroism,

Even if only among the swallows.

Souped Up Poetry Slam @Dudley Café Roxbury, Mass.

Souped Up Poetry Slam

@Dudley Café

23 Warren St. Roxbury

Right at Dudley Station

7 PM, the first Tuesday of the month

Next Slam, November 1

Cover $10

Dear Readers and my fellow white armchair radicals and knee-jerk liberals, who have been so politically correct in our support of  "Black Lives Matter,"

I invite you to come along with me on Tuesday, November first and allow that slogan to mature into a more heartfelt reality, encounter some black lives and let them begin to matter. I warn you; this has risks, because it will mean letting the individuality of a black life grow out of the abstraction of  “Black Lives” as a masterpiece would emerge for Michelangelo from a block of Carrera marble. The risk comes because, while Michelangelo's marbles wouldn't bleed if you were to hit them with a nightstick or 38, a 45 or a 357; an individual black life that you allow to matter might at anytime become collateral damage in a firefight of the urban war that sputters in Roxbury and Dorchester or a victim of the liberal rules of engagement we have given the police.  Nevertheless, I'm suggesting we need make those attachments even if they do put our souls at risk of grief.

My particular risky connections began to stalk me late last spring, when Kirk Etherton brought Matt Parker of SOUP, the Society Of Urban Poetry (http//www.soupboston.com) into the Bagel Bards. Although Matt hasn't been back to the Bards (could it be that we Bagels are too white bread?) he did extend to us an invitation to the Dudley Café for their “Souped Up” slams on the first Tuesdays and their poetry/performance workshops on the last Tuesdays of every month.

I took Matt up on his invitations. I have been attending the workshops regularly and on October 4 attended the slam, which has provoked this review. Superficially Souped Up was much like any other open mike, performers come in and sign up but this one has a cover charge, which finances a $100 prize for the best slammer of the evening. It also had a larger crowd than any open mike I remember and that crowd was unusual in the number of its members who were not part of the performer’s claques. The community was interested in what was happening at the Dudley Café and this audience’s attention had to be earned. I think that fact, more than anything else, gave the evening its vitality. Because the performers could not assume that any one would pay attention out of some reverence for “poetry.” At this venue poetry would have to entertain; it could not be merely read.

The slam had three rounds; it started off with eight poets and then winnowed those down to six and then to the three from whom the winner would be chosen. All of the slammers held my attention; not once was I embarrassed for a performer, as I often am at events where anyone who signs up in time has a crack at the mike. And it was obvious from the greetings and banter around the poets who were collecting the covers that SOUP is part of a vital, vibrant and dedicated community; one where poetry is considered an important ingredient in any recipe for progress towards sharing our humanity.

While the roster on November 1 will no doubt to be different from the one I saw October 4; here are some quick notes on four of the eight poets I saw in October. I think they are an indication of the range of work that you might encounter next month and I feel confident from what I've seen, that you will be similarly rewarded for attendance:

·        Rasheem Muhamed finished one poem describing his reality with "They still wonder why we talk about despair." Rasheem, of course, was not despairing and lasted into the third round; his poetry overcame the lack of polish in his delivery (too much bombast) but at 17 he has plenty of time to Simonize it.

·        Ashleigh Randolf, who performs as Leigh Lahane, came in second. With her piece about lying men in the first round she struck me as a sort of whiny young woman but when she made it to the final round I realized that the persona in her opening performance was just that, an assumed persona, and that she has a strength to be reckoned with.HERE ?! 

·        Arafat Akbar had the best poem of the night; all five judges in the second round gave him 10's so, after the high and low scores were thrown out, he had a perfect 30 for his long riff on fairy tales and the problems princes charming have with princesses. Akbar is not a prince because his “daddy's rich” but because his “principles are rich,” so he keeps telling the princesses to wake up, to act, to become independent women, to stop lying around waiting for him, for some prince charming to make them happy. At one point this challenge becomes a refrain, "I'm not your Romeo; you're not my Juliet." He then makes it clear that what he means is that she is not his "jewel, yet," but might be if she would just wake up. Unfortunately it took him 50 seconds too long to tell his tale so his score was docked five points and, with a 25, he didn't make it into the finals.

.

·        Art Collins won with a confessional poem, "I was a fool" about losing his soul mate because of his infidelities. He is on the Lizard Lounge slam team and his delivery was the most polished of the evening.

I have not addressed this review and its invitation to white folks because I want to feel more comfortable or less alone at the slams; in fact, I felt less alone in the Dudley Café than I do in Newton Center. I'm addressing them because most of the white folks I know need to hear what these poets have to say. We need to bear witness to their anger because bearing witness is healing. It will be healing for them to have us listen without being defensive and it will be healing for us to come to know and empathize with the costs of their reality. After all, how can we learn to live together (and we must learn) if we don't get together and talk about “How!” The SOUP events at the Dudley Café are one location where we can start the conversations. I am sure there are others; if you know of any, tell me about them.