Doug Holder interviews Sara Siegel and Sharon Amuguni of the Mass. Poetr...

Union River by Paul Marion

Union River by Paul Marion.  ( Bootstrap Press)

Review by 
Kate Hanson Foster

Paul Marion writes, “To understand America, a good place to start is where you are.” A true “Poet of Place,” Marion’s Union River is a collection of writing that ranges from prose poems, to micro essays, to lyrical insights—all densely packed with the simple act of existing. Readers embark on a road trip where the concept of “America” becomes more than a country, a city, or spot on a map, but a place for the speaker to dramatize the state of consciousness and recognize the art of human life. In “Colorado” Marion writes, “I’m here but not grounded—a fresh context, Mid-continent, with only a map for proof.” Marion is a constant observer gleaning and communicating knowledge through the eye—giving us a verbal still life of images that comprehends the essence of place and one’s role within it.

“Poetry”, Marion writes, is more like knitting than people realize.” And perhaps that is why the various shifts and transitions in form feel so natural and almost essential when getting down to the bare essence of living. Union River is not a straight-line tour from place to place, not a haunting of the past, but a space in which Marion tries to understand experience in relevant detail, where “Motion is habit, the body moves by heart.” (“Kansas City Stars”)

A constant, dedicated observer, Marion’s writing explores the nature of perception, but does so unequivocally, and mostly without semantic figures such as metaphors or visual symbolic imagery. As a result many poems feel not of construct of the human mind, but instead subtle snapshots that carry their own unique poetic reverie.

In suburban kitchens and dens

Beautiful Californians,

Up from dinner tables and television,

Open windows on Robin Hood Drive

To hear pool filters hum

And watch Mt. Diablo absorb the red sun.

                                                (“Blood Alley, Fat City”)

In any area, one’s location is not a choice, but a place simply handed down through human chain of circumstance. So when Marion shifts focus to the history of Lowell, Massachusetts and his own family roots the writing is rich in fact and honest in memory and history is juxtaposed with basic life values. In “Cut From American Cloth,” Marion delves deep into the city of Lowell’s many transformations from colonial settlement, through the time of Jack Kerouac, to renovations of buildings and infrastructure including the backstory of Marion’s own home on 44 Highland Avenue.

“On mornings when I circle the track at the bottom of the Common’s green bowl, I scan a roster of names tied to the ridgeline of buildings…These names are entwined in history like the signature grapevines of the neighborhood, hundreds of them planted through the decades by Portuguese immigrants—green signs marking the presence of people who turn open space around their modest homes into miniature farms along the narrow, hilly ways. In the right season, waiting a minute before starting their cars for the drive to work, my neighbors, gardeners like Joe Veiga and Natalie Silva, hear the larks and the locomotive pulling toward Boston.”

Like “trees releasing their inner rings” we are told stories through social, historical, and personal observations. We are given anecdotes of Marion’s childhood and French Canadian ancestry. We are told tales of war between the settlers and the natives. Homage is paid to local heroes who have passed such as Paul Tongas,  “…gone to the air, gone to the sun, gone to the waters, gone to the ground.” (“Tsongas Steel”)

What makes Union River so captivating is Marion’s ability to navigate so smoothly within one’s own microcosm while also asking questions about the larger world and our place within a vast universe.  In “Black Hole Paycheck” he writes, “A hot-gas halo loops the Milky Way, smoke from a vast erupted star. This place has been exploding for eons. Will the Kepler spacecraft find another planet that’s just right? Meanwhile, inside our small worlds “People pass away and the trees grow taller, but the song on the wire looks like the same bird.” A question seems to linger as the fabric of Union River comes together—Can we enter into things? Unite with the whole and understand our essence? People can only understand their environment as much as they experience it with their senses, and yet Marion dares to go deeper, peeling away layers of living down to the “atoms in our bodies…engulfed in crumbs of light.”

In Union River, place is more than just a backdrop but the music in our heads, a sanctuary and a point of meditation, or perhaps best described by Marion as “a wide open space to make a verb out of America.” But what does it mean to America? Or to have America’d? What comes out of these locations where we are forced to dwell? Perhaps the mystery of this lingering question is what makes Paul Marion’s diverse work in Union River so powerful and memorable.

....

Paul Marion is the author of several poetry collections including What Is the City? (2006) and editor of Jack Kerouac's early writings, Atop an Underwood (1999). His work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Slate, Christian Science Monitor, Yankee, and others. He lives in Lowell, Mass.

Ibbetson Street Press/Endicott College Visiting Author Series: January Gill O'Neil

( Click on to enlarge)

Free and open to the public. Directed and hosted by Professor Doug Holder/Endicott College.

The Sunday Poet: Neil Silberblatt

 

  Neil Silberblatt

 Neil Silberblatt’s poems have appeared in various journals, including Poetica Magazine, The Otter, The Aurorean, Two Bridges Review, Verse Wisconsin, Naugatuck River Review, WordPeace, Chantarelle’s Notebook, and The Good Men Project. His work has been included in the anthology, Confluencia in the Valley: The First Five Years of Converging with Words (Naugatuck Valley Community College, 2013); and in University of Connecticut’s Teacher-Writer magazine. He has published two poetry collections: So Far, So Good (2012), and Present Tense (2013) and is hard at work on a third collection, tentatively titled Past Imperfect.

He has been nominated (twice) for a Pushcart Prize, and one of his poems received Honorable Mention in the 2nd Annual OuterMost Poetry Contest (2014), judged by Marge Piercy. Neil is the founder of Voices of Poetry - which, since 2012, has presented poetry events, featuring distinguished poets & writers, at various venues throughout CT, NYC and MA - and the host of Poet's Corner on WOMR/WFMR, for which he has interviewed acclaimed poets on and off of Cape Cod.

 How to Build a Fire

Start slowly,

no, slower

with longing or, perhaps,

a lemon cut along its pregnant midsection and

squeezed over plump scallops seared to a walnut

finish while their flesh recalls the ocean.

Nurse it with desire or, perhaps,

garlic roasted until its sweet pulp emerges

Minerva-like from its parchment skin, like Torah scrolls

whose crowned letters leap from flames.

Only then, add touch or, perhaps,

logs whose air pockets wait to be emptied

by pickpocket flames, releasing ash fireflies

like so many copper pennies scattered onto

the night’s floor.

Skip the fire pit.

You don’t even need matches.

Just start with kindling or, perhaps,

a poem about kindling.

Transom Poems 2016 By Rick Mullin

 

Poet Rick Mullin

 

Transom

Poems 2016

By Rick Mullin

Dos Madres Press

Loveland, Ohio

editor@dosmadres.com

ISBN: 978-1-939929-76-1

65 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Dismal things embedded in a city-scape of soaring architecture gaze outward like Gothic demons into the crisp sunlit clarity of Rick Mullin’s poetic universe. Mullin notices them there and paints their likenesses onto the pages of Transom, his newest collection of ground-breaking poetry. Unlike some of his grander books such as Soutine (a stunning verse biography of a neglected artist) and Sonnets from the Voyage of the Beagle (a wondrously detailed retelling of Charles Darwin’s epic journey), Mullin scales down his subjects to pedestrian or, more to the point, commuter proportions.

As a consummate formalist Mullin uses measure and rhyme in a fifteen line sonnet-like invention he calls a Third Sancerre. Appropriately enough the name suggests a French wine region noted for its elegant, yet very drinkable, wines grown in flinty, mineral rich soils.

From his very first poem, At Century 21, Mullin frames chaotic details and turns them into art. The poet remembers a troubling scene where fate chooses and rejects its victims indiscriminately. He sets his tableau at Century 21, a department store that survived 9-11, located across from the World Trade Center. What often gets brushed off as unexceptional low-drama incidents evolve into high tragedy.

… A woman cried as all

the contents of her briefcase scattered

over Dey Street. I assume she worked

in Tower One and would have made it in

by 9. And then the transit cruiser parked

on Broadway hit its lights and faded in-

to smoke and mirrors and a sense that mattered

more than any rational surmise.

Notice that the measure picks up steam because of Mullin’s effective enjambment technique. Form and material complement each other perfectly here.

Another early piece in the collection, Ferry Weather, projects timeless classicism (The Odyssey, which the poet’s persona is reading on his way to work) as well as tragic hints (the World Trade Center) onto the stunning but everyday imagery of New York Harbor. A tug follows the poet’s ferry, cutting its wake, which then bleeds into a blue-green palette. The poet praises the clarity of this September day—like the infamous day of September 11^th. As he watches the tug, it

… rumbles through an image in the book

that carried me, unconscious, from the train.

The giant-killer channeling a brook

of weedy ghosts. But, oh, the sky again!

That unforgettable cerulean lake

Of clean electric air that spells September.

Apparently Mullin is not impervious to psychoanalysis. He questions his own disquiet level or lack thereof after he misses his train station in his poem entitled After Little Falls. Was he reading a good poem or did he just fall asleep? And, since he forgot his cell phone at work, why not panic like anyone else would instead of exuding a solid front of apathy? The poet considers the conundrum and its potential resolution,

… So why the smirk?

Your nonchalance is irritating. Show ‘em

something normal like anxiety. Oh, well.

Someone would have let you make a call—

you don’t look crazy, staring at the swell

of taillights bleeding in the rain, the wall

of autumn, lost in the enfolding gloam.

Blue Jay, Mullin’s suburban song of paradise lost, delivers full frontal comedy as well as a twist of irony to the collection. Before ceding his property to the progeny of dinosaurs, and making clear his position on the unfairness of his own wretched fate, the poet introduces the invader of his world,

Oh floppy dishtowel blue jay in the yard,

most vicious of the garden birds, most summer;

who understands suburban life is hard,

who hates the robin and the neighbor’s Hummer;

who scares the children in the plastic pool

and tears through my tomatoes—criminal,

you fall from grace and crap on my Toyota.

Political poetry doesn’t do much for me unless it approaches the intensity and the not so subtle recklessness of an Ossip Mandelstam piece (I’m thinking of the “Kremlin mountaineer” poem). Mullen’s poem The Aggregate achieves that level. The poet dates his poem November 9, the day after the general election. He sandwiches the poem with a dazzling opening image and a finale that cuts through a morning walk like a machete. Mullin knows what he’s doing! The poem begins this way,

Somewhere out there, not so far away

from all the inconsolable commuters

solemnly interred beneath a day

they’d warded off on personal computers,

wakes the shadow of catastrophe

and rage…

For pure magic you can’t beat The Peppers in December, Mullin’s piece about very little, or perhaps quite a lot. The poet’s wife brings a bunch of dried out peppers from the kitchen and mysteriously places them on his writing desk. That’s all. There is no more. Except, of course, in Mullin’s imagination and egomania and music. Consider here the poet considering,

Was it the pressure of the holidays,

your hectic preparations that consume

a month? Whose judgment of what stays

consigns memento mori to my room?

Ignominy. The sheer effrontery of it all!

And not a word! A motherly reproof

so unbecoming of a wife, this slap

with no report but elegance and truth.

I am the husband, now, of husks.

With this collection Mullin adds the poetic portrayal of everyday hubbub in a way that engages and compels to his stash of impressive artistic achievements. This extraordinary poet never disappoints.

Ibbetson Street Press Poet and Bagel Bard Zvi Sesling Named Poet Laureate of Brookline, Ma.

ZVI SESLING

 Zvi Sesling, author of King of the Jungle ( Ibbetson Street Press), and publisher of the Muddy River Poetry Review--was named Poet/Laureate of Brookline, Mass...  For an interview with Sesling go to:

http://www.whlreview.com/no-4.3/essay/DougHolder.pdf

Doug Holder Interviews Poet Richard Waring

Boston National Poetry Month Festival, 2017/ Famous poets, Berklee musicians, a WWII veteran & you

  Boston Poet Laureate Danielle Legros Georges will be a featured reader at the Festival.

Boston National Poetry Month Festival, 2017

(Famous poets, Berklee musicians, a WWII veteran & you.)

By Kirk Etherton

April 5-9, there's a bunch of stuff to enjoy. I like to say "diverse eclecticism" — which may be redundant, but has a nice ring to it.

As usual, the B.P.L. portion of this fine festival begins Friday afternoon, April 7, with a group of great "Keynote Poets." David Ferry (National Book Award), Lloyd Schwartz (Pulitzer Prize), Gail Mazur, and Rhina Espaillat are among them.

That evening, there's a "Poetry, Music & Dance" concert across the street, produced by Berklee's Lucy Holstedt and boasting 10 highly diverse acts — including Ron Reid from Trinidad, reciting poetry and playing his ringing, singing steel pans.

If you just can't wait to check out the website for this FREE festival, here it is: bostonnationalpoety.org NOTE: make sure to check out the "Directory" tab, where you'll see some of the great local businesses that help make this FREE festival FREE!

(Another NOTE: 'til April 15, one of our constant sponsors, The Middle East & ZuZu, has a 50% OFF SPECIAL, every single day from 4 -7 pm. I mention this as a "public service announcement"!)

OK! So, if you're still reading this, instead of our website — or a menu in Central Square, Cambridge—here's a little more about the poetry (& music) festival. Saturday, you can hear 35 established poets. Beatrize Alba Del Rio, from Argentina, is also an attorney. Jim Schley is coming down from Vermont; he's Managing Editor of Tupelo Press, and will also be part of a panel on "Craft & Publishing." Richard Hoffman and Fred Marchant are two great writers you should never miss.

Sunday features 15 more fine poets, including Doug Holder and Danielle Legros Georges, Boston's Poet Laureate. WWII veteran (and poet) Joe Cohen will perform with his daughter, Berklee prof. Beth Bahia Cohen. BOTH weekend days include Open Mics—hosted by accomplished poets. Acclaimed singer-songwriter Thea Hopkins will also be there on Sunday with her great voice, lyrics, and a very fine guitar.

Last — and first — the Festival begins Wednesday evening, April 5, with our third annual High School Slam Poetry Contest.

—Kirk Etherton, B.N.P.M.F. board of directors