The Sunday Poet: Linda Maria Steele

 

 

Linda Maria Steele is a teacher, writer and visual artist. She is the author of Meet Me in My Cape Cod Kitchen She has three children. She originally wrote 'tending a tender heart' for one of her daughter's after her daughter called while on a trip to California. You can see more of her work at www.lindamariasteele.com

 

 

Tending a Tender Heart 

In the end all we can really do is make a way for ourselves inside of ourselves.

We can wish and hope and pray things will turn out a certain way. And yet, all we have are the birds that call to us at dawn, the glimmer of light we notice at water's edge or the admiration we feel toward the rising moon.

If we're patient enough and remember to love our heart with our own tender hearts, that may be just enough to take us all the way home.

Newton Free Library Poetry Series Sept 11, 2018 Susan Eisenberg, David Blair. Marguerite Guzman Bouvard

(Click on to enlarge)

Sam Cornish First Boston Poet Laureate Passes at 82

White Storm by Gary Metras

 

White Storm

Gary Metras

Presa Press

Rockford, IL

Copyright © 2018 Gary Metras

ISBN: 978-0-9965026-9-6

81 pages, softbound, $15.95

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Gary Metras is best known as editor, publisher and printer of Adastra Press.  He is also known as an essayist and reviewer-- certainly as a superior fly fisherman-- and as a grandfather. But he is, perhaps, best known as an award-winning poet and the Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA.

Metras’s most recent poetry collection is White Storm, which covers the full range of his multi-faceted poetic talent--  this includes a number of titles such as “Robert Frost’s Chair,” “Pausing With Tchaikovsky,” “Listening to the Poet Laureate on NPR” as well as poems on “The Anecdote of the Chihuahuas,” “Chicken Fingers,” “A Hiker” and many more.

In “Torino” one would think the title refers to Ford’s former automobile which Clint Eastwood drives in his movie “Gran Torino.” But no, the poem takes place in Italy and may or may not explain religious history and legend.

This far north we see no Roman ruins

but downtown is torn up. Piles

of fractured asphalt and cement, trucks

queuing, men shouting, steel beams

awaiting use. In the distance, blue alps.

In a few years this city will shine

with Olympians and the crowds will not

know the dust and rubble we walk

to find the small church with the Shroud

of Jesus, where a handful of worshipers kneel

in pews. Tourists flash their cameras. We see

in the worn cloth the shape of a man,

face and arms, legs and buttock, his life

leaked onto this sheet. Is this our God,

mere stains on cloth like a rumor of joy?

The guide says this is only a copy, then points

to where the real Shroud rests behind

bulletproof glass, sealed in a metal box,

a treasure for the ages. She says

science disproves the cloth’s age, but

people believe, free to think as they will.

Metras’s “The World in Reflection” presents a pessimistic view of what could be, instead of what could be seen another way--  happy, and joyful.

The dirty clouds flare yellow and orange

with city bouncing over the black

mountain into our quiet valley.

If this was somewhere else in the ord,

think fire and murder ruling over there,

that, amid such destruction and death,

no one making love, no one

snoring sleep’s sweet oblivion,

that people couldn’t be laughing in parties,

that there were no parties,

not one single thing to celebrate,

and none were driving home after dancing

in clubs, music still hot in their blood,

the night’s light aglow in their eyes.

In Derry, NH Metras was fascinated by Robert Frost’s chair and pictured in his mind what the great poet did or did not do on this piece of furniture. It is on the road of the mind that Metras traveled with Frost’s chair, a poem similar in style to the work of Billy Collins.

Robert Frost’s Chair

He would rest his elbows and the writing desk he made

on the flat maple-wood arms

of the chair a few feet

from the living room stove.

He sank into the gold and green

flowery cushion, like sitting

in a meadow in August

as goldenrod bloom.

From the impression he left

in the seat, you can tell

he chose the way less traveled and journeyed

miles and miles in that chair.

The hay unmowed,

the wall unmended,

cows to milk at midnight,

but the notebooks fat,

leaking words all over

the sun washed carpet

Finally, there is Metras’s memorial to a woman. Probably very few know who she is, yet she is immortalized in song:

Believing in Eyes

Lucy O’Donnell Vodden 1963-2009

So there’s Lucy, dying sadly in middle age.

None of her friends ever believed

there were diamonds in her eyes. But there were,

When he first saw them in the class room,

little Julian Lennon painted them as stars.

And his father wrote that song.

He believed in those eyes, those diamonds.

They were shining in my wife’s eyes

that first dance in high school.

And in my daughter’s when she first held

her daughter in the hospital.

And in my granddaughter’s eyes

that time we rolled on the floor, singing,

giggling. So let us praise all the women

who ever showed us that joy, that hope,

which men by ourselves can’t know.

There is always something enthralling about Gary Metras’s poetry. Perhaps it is the optimism within the pessimism. Perhaps vice versa. Maybe it is the accessibility to his work. Whatever it is, White Storm is readable and enjoyable, worth a place on your bookshelf.

________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer for Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

Author, The Lynching of Leo Frank and War Zones (forthcoming from Nixes Mate Books)

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7,8 & 12

Spare Change News Poems: An Anthology of Homeless People and those Touched by Homelessness--Edited by Marc Goldfinger and Lee Varon

Spare Change News Poems: An Anthology of Homeless People and those Touched by Homelessness
Editors: Lee Varon and Mark Goldfinger
Ibbetson Street Press ( 2018)
http://ibbetsonpress.com

Review by Doug Holder

In the introduction to the new anthology Spare Change News Poems... editors Lee Varon and Marc Golfinger write:

" The Spare Change News newspaper was founded in 1992 by a group of homeless individuals and a housed advocate. Since its inception, Spare Change News has worked to elevate the voices of the homeless and economically disadvantaged people in the Boston Area.

In these pages you will find the poetry of many people who are who are homeless, or who have been touched by homelessness in some way. You will find the poetry of veterans, of those with mental health issues, or those struggling with substance abuse disorder. You will find poems written by incarcerated or formerly incarcerated  people."

Personally-- I have a real connection to the paper not only for its laudable mission of giving the homeless a voice (and in some cases a chance to make a living by selling the paper),  but years ago I was an arts reporter under the managing editor at the time Linda Larson--and assisted the poetry editor Don DiVecchio. I worked closely with late assistant editor Cynthia Baron, and former editor Marc Goldinger, as well. I learned a lot during my tenure with all these people.  That being said, the poetry you will find in this anthology is not New Yorker-style work. It can be raw as the streets, visceral,  heartbreaking and even heartwarming.

There are many fine poets, with fine poems in this collection like: Martin Espada, Marge Piercy,  Alexis Ivy, the late Sarah Hannah and many more. In a poem by the editor Lee Varon  titled "Colleen,"  the poet uses colors to vividly portray a young woman doomed by her torrid love affair with heroin:

Heroin is white
      but your lips are blue
and blue is seeping into the room
where you passed out last week,
the room
where your head hit the floor,
blue dust is wafting from the ceiling,
oozing froom the floorboards...


In Martin Espada's poem " How We Could Haved Lived and Died This Way," Espada quotes Whitman,

Not songs of loyalty alone are these,
but songs of insurrection also,
For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world
over.

Here in hardscrabble detail Espada, like Whitman, takes it all in-and sings a song for the marginal rebels who survive or don't survive the vagaries of the street:

I see the dark -skinned bodies falling in the street as their ancestors fell
before the whip and steel, the last blood pooling, the last breath spitting.
I see the immigrant street vendor flashing his wallet to the cops,
shot so many times there are bullet holes in the side of his feet....
I see the man hawking
a fistful of cigarettes, the cop's chokehold that makes his wheezing
lungs stop wheezing forever. I am in the crowd, at the window,
kneeling beside the body left on the asphalt for hours, covered in a sheet.

From reading this poetry it is evident that there is tragedy, and beauty on these mean streets  and perhaps. ..salvation.


There will be a reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge  7PM  Aug 22

To order the book go to:  http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress

THE SCREENING: GROLIER POETRY DOCUMENTARY: REGENT THEATRE: AUG 25

PLEASE CLICK ON PICTURE TO ENLARGE

The Sunday Poet: Meg Smith

Poet Meg Smith

Meg Smith is a poet, journalist, dancer and events producer living in Lowell, Mass.

Her poems have appeared in The Cafe Review, Poetry Bay, Astropoetica, Illumen, Dreams & Nightmares, the Dwarf Stars anthology of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association and many more.

As a journalist, her coverage has been in honored by the New England Newspaper And Press Association, including first place awards for coverage of racial and ethnic issues, and coverage of religion.

She is a past board member of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! and produces the Edgar Allan Poe Show, honoring Poe's presence in Lowell, Mass. She recently published a second book of poetry, Dear Deepest Ghost, available on Amazon.

The Amulet

For keeping,

on a Cairo balcony

overlooking

gardens of satellite dishes

rooftop flowers

and rose-colored dusk

calling, chanting.

I know

every life here.

I hold this, close,

wearing, to signify,

everything copper,

everything in a diminishing sun.

The Hastings Room Reading Series Presents: Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading: August 29th 7PM Tobin, Buchinger, Vincenz

Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading

The Hastings Room Reading Series presents   August 29th  7PM

Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.

The china cups were very white and big—

An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug…

“Clearances” from The Haw Lantern

W i t h g u e s t r e a d e r s—

Daniel Tobin is the author of eight books of poems, most recently of The Stone in the Air, his suite

of versions from the German of Paul Celan (Salmon Poetry, 2018). The translation is called “lucid and lyrical” by Stephan Schneider. Tobin’s many honors include the Julia Ward Howe Award, The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, "The Discovery/​The Nation Award,"the Robert Frost Fellowship, and creative writing fellowships in poetry from the National Endowmentfor the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Mary Buchinger is the author of three books of poetry, most recently e i n f ü h l u n g/in feeling (Main Street Rag, 2018) and Aerialist (2015, Gold Wake). Her poetry was chosen for the Raining Poetry Project on Boston sidewalks and will be permanently installed in the city of Cambridge, where she has served as a Cambridge Poetry Ambassador. She’s been a featured reader at the Library of Congress and is President of the New England Poetry Club (founded by Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Conrad Aiken).

Marc Vincenz has published twelve books of poetry, including, most recently, Becoming the Sound of Bees (Ampersand Press, 2016), Leaning into the Infinite (Dos Madres Press, 2018) and The Syndicate of Water & Light (Station Hill, 2018). He is also a prolific translator and has translated from the German, Romanian and French. His work has received fellowships and grants from the Swiss Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. 


 7pm at Christ Church ,O Garden Street--just outside of Harvard Square..

The Sunday Poet: Susan Tepper

Susan Tepper is the author of seven published books of fiction and poetry. Her most recent title “Monte Carlo Days & Nights” is a Novella set in the South of France. For more please visit her website at www.susantepper.com

Petal by Petal

The moon has settled down

to dust, and the sadness

of time overwhelms

your eyes—

Each morning

blurring

an otherwise unobstructed view

they scarcely open

Despite the beauty of

the day

beckoning

beyond window shades—

O darkness

scrape away what you can

gouge them ‘til they open wide

Letting in deliverance petal by petal.

Doug Holder Interviews Marc Goldfinger and Lee Varon editors of Spare Ch...

Jesus in the Ghost Room by Rusty Barnes

 

Jesus in the Ghost Room

by Rusty Barnes

Copyright © 2017 Rusty Barnes

Nixes Mate Books

Allston, MA

ISBN 978-0-9991882-7-9

Softbound, 63 pages, $9.95

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Rusty Barnes’ poetry is cold, hard, raw. That is exactly what makes it an engaging read. It is about Rusty Barnes … at times Rusty and his late father. Barnes is also warm, soft and polished. His poems are down-to-earth, easily accessible.

In “Arrow-Fishing” he recounts his days fishing in what was once fairly deep water and how animals get the best of the quarry he was after.

Arrow-Fishing

The pond has become marsh now

but when it was waist deep I would

go to the middle in the depths

of much to arrow-fish for the huge gold-

fish my landlord had stocked years

before. I remember brining the bow

to my eye and sighting like a gun7

along the top of my thumb the string

tense in my fingers and the feeling

as I Barnes f I were going under. I remember

overshooting as I adjusted my shot

for refraction. I didn’t make that one

but eventually the heard heart of the world

won out and the goldfish became bones

on the bank killed by coon or mink.

But I love the tense thrill of the shot still

I have only to close my eyes to recall.

As in his other poems, Barnes reflects on his past and in this poem, “Circus,” he recalls

some aspects of those days.

Circus

If the Ringling Brothers were alive today

they wouldn’t know how to begin.

Freak shows today are everywhere

if you know where to look,

there on the common field of life

with the tattooed and the pierced,

the extraordinarily hairy together

with the unfunny and the trolls

who try to ruin it for everyone who

is not so jaded. I can see the tents in

my mind, the huge spikes that serve

as pegs and the groups of rope fest=

ooned with elephant shit and stale popcorn.

It is pur magic and we only have so much.

What makes Rusty Barnes interesting is that many of us have, “been there, done that,” but have not seen it in the way Barnes portrays it in this book.

In “My Father’s Hip: 1972 Flood” Barnes provides insight into not only his childhood and tenderness toward his father, but his daughter as well. He recalls an important moment in his life despite the dangers he encountered.

One day the crick rose a couple feet

after three days steady rain that brought

logs ramming into rocks and a couple

dead dogs floating in the brown spume.

My dad lifted me up and brought me

to the very edge of the eroded banks

that with every rainstorm came just

a little closer to our house. I don’t recall

what he said to me but I felt safe next

to his gritty cheek and the typical cigarette.

Beside me my brother Joes jumped from foot

to foot excited as all hell to be a branch

in that raging water. He slipped down

the bank screaming but dad never lost

a beat still holding me he whipped around

and caught my brother by the back

out pretty heavily once he was safe

but sitting on his hip in the driving rain

I felt overcome by my smallness.

Like all kids I returned to the site

of the scene 30 years later, dipping my

young daughter’s feet in that same water.

These are examples of Barnes’s recollections of life. In particular his poetry recollects memories of his father, the death of his uncle and his leaning on his loving wife for support.

Barnes grew up in rural Appalachia. He weaves those years with his life in the Boston, MA area into a book of poetry that moves along at a rapid, always interesting pace,

with many poetic stories not soon forgotten.

_______________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling, author of The Lynching of Leo Frank

and the forthcoming War Zones (Nixes Mate Books)

Publisher & Editor of Muddy River Poetry Review

and Editor of Bagel Bard Anthologies 7,8 & 12

Poet Laureate, Brookline, MA

The Sunday Poet: Heather Sullivan

 

Heather Sullivan

 

Heather Sullivan’s work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, most recently Chiron Review, Paper and Ink Literary Zine and Trailer Park Quarterly. Her debut collection, Waiting for an Answer (Nixes Mate Books 2017), is available both through the publisher and Amazon. She is also the co-editor at Live Nude Poems. She and novelist Rusty Barnes live with their family in Revere, MA.

Piggy Bank

Every happy thought I have ever had

is stored away in a square shaped

piggy bank on my dresser. I dole them

out to pay the toll keeper of existence

like peeled off pesos in that trip south

of the border for low priced pain meds

for my slipped discs that we never took.

When I’m out, I’ll be holding up the line

behind me just like when I’d overshoot

the bucket with my change, digging

through the ashtray looking for quarters,

shoving my hand down the side of the

console for the profligate dimes. You

remember that old joke your uncle would

rib any newlywed with, every time you

have sex the first year of your marriage

you put a marble in a jar on the bedside

table, then pull a marble out every time

you have sex thereafter – you’ll never

empty the jar. My storehouse is almost

empty, and Joseph has left his post.

Three Poems by Geoffrey Gatza: Presented by the Poetry Collection at the University at Buffalo

Geoffrey Gatza

Geoffrey Gatza "Three Poems"

Publisher: The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries of the University of Buffalo

Reviewed by Ari Appel

“Three Poems,” published by The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries of the University of Buffalo, is a pamphlet of three poems by Geoffrey Gatza from his most recent book, A Dog Lost in the Brick City. The pamphlet is an excellent example of what poetry can be in its least inhibited form, when using language becomes painting with pens, paper, and word processing. It is an experimental force rather than a typical poetry collection.

The cover of the pamphlet introduces us to the author's use of font colors other than black, an innovation that seems to have so much potential once the unwritten rule of using black has been broken. In a world in which printers can print pages in color, why should a poet, someone who uses language in its most raw and ultimate form, not experiment with the possibilities that color printing technology has to offer? It seems that this use of color deserves attention and incorporation into more works. The titles of the three poems in the pamphlet, "What Is Done Cannot Be Undone," "Draw Up My Prisoned Spirit To Thy Soul," and "The Truth Is Rarely Pure and Never Simple," come together in a colorful circle of red, blue, yellow, black, green, and purple, with the end of the text meeting the beginning so the titles continue on infinitely. The cover demonstrates that Gatza has something unique to offer.

The inside of the pamphlet does not fail to deliver on the level of creativity promised by the cover. Each poem is composed of the words of its own title written thirty-nine times in three thirteen-line stanzas. Each line contains all the words of the title, with the first and last line of each stanza occurring in the exact order of the title, and the rest of the lines occurring in another order. The three stanzas of each poem are all exactly the same. The order of the words within each line in the lines that do not occur in the same order as the title may have a strict order such that the poem occurs according to a logical rule rather than the creative choice of the author; in other words, the author may have created a rule and structured these poems according to the rule. The colors, the formal nature of the poems, and the repetition within the poems are reminiscent of artist Bruce Nauman's neon displays like “One Hundred Live and Die.” Reading the poems is hypnotizing and magical. Effects like “The Truth Is Rarely Pure And Never Simple / Is Rarely The Truth And Pure Simple Never” toy with the meaning of the first line due to the orders of the words in the next, generating semantic possibilities latent in the words themselves and their formal arrangement rather than in authorial intent. The poems in this short pamphlet are very cool and make a good plug for both the pamphlet series and the author's book.

What I like most about “Three Poems” is that the poems are simultaneously highly formal and highly innovative. While most poetry that is formal reverts to old traditions, while innovation is seen to occur in free verse, this poetry makes its mark through formal innovations, by experimenting with the tools available to the poet. “Three Poems” innovates by using these tools in a new, yet highly structured way.

The Grolier Poetry Book Shop: The Documentary. Aug 25, 2018 Regent Theatre

Somerville writer Shariann Lewitt: A Darkly Clad Scribe of Science Fiction

Somerville writer Shariann Lewit at Remnant Brewing

Somerville writer Shariann Lewitt: A Darkly Clad Scribe of Science Fiction

By Doug Holder

A darkly clad figure with long black braids—loomed outside the Remnant Brewery at the new Bow St. Market in Union Square. I approached her—she smiled and joined me at my well—appointed table that had a handsome view of the market's courtyard. My guest this afternoon was Shariann Lewitt, a prolific creative writer—who works in a number of genres. Her writing includes, but is not limited to: literary science fiction, young adult fiction, and military science fiction. For years Lewitt has taught writing at MIT. Lewitt lives with her husband in the Highland Ave area of Somerville, that is in walking distance to Union Square.

Lewitt told me she came to the “ Paris of New England” from Washington, DC in July of 2000. She is enthusiastic about the city stating, “ I love it in Somerville. We own our own home, the Board of Alderman is fabulous—I like the mayor. Somerville has great energy.” But not everything is a bed of roses for this writer. She reflected, “ I am also concerned about the lack of affordable housing, and how the diversity and uniqueness of the city is likely to suffer.”

Hewitt has not been stingy with her writing. Under the pseudonym Nina Harper she wrote two books: Succubus in the City and Succubus takes Manhattan. Both deal with a fashionable, urbane and seductive woman who is an agent—not for an upscale real estate agency-- but for the devil. This woman lures often boorish men into a sexual liaisons, and after the deed is done she leads them to an even hotter destiny—Hades itself.

Lewitt describes her work as speculative fiction—meaning science fiction or generally fiction that does not deal with the here and now. She has written in the genres of military science fiction that specifically deal with intergalactic wars. She also has written space operas. According to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction this genre consists of “colorful and dramatic stories ( sometimes melodramatic—like –well-- a TV soap opera) that deal with interplanetary or intergalactic conflict.” Lewitt has taken a hiatus from publishing—but has expressed an interest in more historical writing rather than speculative.

Lewitt, who graduated from Yale Drama, was first published at the tender age of 23. She /had a number of early influences, like the iconic science fiction writer Philip K. Dick—whose work inspired the movie Blade Runner. She also considers folks like Samuel R. Delaney as influences as well.

Lewitt told me, “ Although these guys were sexist in their writing I still admire their work. I mean they were coming up in the 50s and 60s and this was the status quo back then. Of course I don't endorse that sensibility.”

The writer told me she love teaching at MIT. She is the recipient of the university's Levitan Award for excellence in teaching. It is presented by the School of Humanity Arts and Social Sciences. And to her credit she was nominated by students.­

After our chat I separated from this dark figure and headed away from the wilds of Union Square. I looked behind me and saw her black hat bob up and down in the wind like a brimmed omen of yet more fiction yet to come.

The Sunday Poet: Miriam Sagan

Miriam Sagan was born in NYC, raised in New Jersey, educated in Boston, liberated in San Francisco, and has lived more than half her life in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of 30 published books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). which won the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She founded and headed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement in 2016.  Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas.

Fogg Museum

I liked it better

than the rest

of Harvard. Sad

undergraduate, I’d wander,

depressed and damp,

my boots leaking

my vision compressed

among the world’s artifacts

that calmed me. Archaic

Chinese bronzes,

vessels that held smoke

or who knows what

sacrifice, a Greco-Roman torso

an Ingres of an odalisque

(now that

was something to look at!

Better than boys,

soft and voluptuous flesh,

mine? or another’s?)

Each frame was a window

each painting

promised someplace else

Gaugin’s “Poemes Barbares”

a kind of Waikiki Beach cliche

but still located far from here,

far from the rainy square

where I’d skip dinner, buy a magazine

and apple, read the unassigned

Jane Eyre.

Each reader sniffs the air.

There is a boat, a bus, a train,

the blue line to Logan, and a plane.

Or let me turn

inside myself

to anywhere but here,

self like the earth must spin,

the snowy road, the vanishing point

the figure’s back

will led me out of this

to somewhere else.

Animalalia Liz Hutchinson

Poet Liz Hutchinson

Animalalia

Liz Hutchinson

Salem, Mass.: Yes/No Press, 2017

ISBN 9780692837757, $14.95

Reviewed by David P. Miller

Poems about animals: a keyword search in Poetry.org on the simple word “animals” brings 326 results on July 19, 2018, including titles such as “Four Questions Regarding the Dreams of Animals” (Susan Stewart), “To Pipe the Animals Aboard Noah’s Ark” (Constance Urdang) and “O My Sweet Animals” (Salvatore Quasimodo). I immediately think of Ogden Nash’s poems for The Carnival of The Animals, read by Noel Coward on an LP I had in childhood. The book in hand, Liz Hutchinson’s Animalalia, doesn’t have animal, beast, creature, etc. words in any of the poems’ titles: the titles themselves are mute. That is, the titles are drawings: the contents page matches thumbnails with page numbers. There are thirteen sections, each dedicated to the creature in the drawing. In the drawings (by Scout Hutchinson), those creatures who have faces (not all do) have their backs to us or regard us obliquely. None of them face us. They aren’t performing or posing, and they certainly don’t explain themselves to us. They’re not available to become videos on social media.

Animalalia consists mostly of prose poems, with one numbered statement or section per page. The book design is generous, with plenty of white space to invite reflection or daydreaming before moving on. Most are in four to ten sections; the longest (fox) has twelve. The briefest consists of one unnumbered page: this is for the animal represented by a drawing of a constellation. It would be a spoiler to say more about that one. Three of the sections (rabbit, fox, and cat) are presented in pages of verse paragraphs.

It is difficult to generalize about Liz Hutchinson’s animal-writing, and that’s a sign of the work’s strength. Each creature requires its own approach to the challenge of minding the gap between our (often facile) sense of identification with other humans, and our typical difficulties with “understanding animals,” once we drop the habit of anthropomorphizing. We’re all sentient beings, but the spaces among our sentiences are permanent mysteries. And we just have to keep trying to find our way in: we don’t really know how Dr. Doolittle managed it, say. We can be sure, though, that “Hello, I’m a giraffe, have you ever seen anything like me?” or the like is pretty much played out.

Human/other animal communication is immediately enabled and prevented by the premise of Bear. The reader has been waiting, apparently – “After what feels like a long time” – and the spark almost jumps the gap – “the bear rips the page out of her notebook, folds it twice. When you open it, you see that her folding has marred the ink.” It’s the instant failure of anthropomorphizing hope: the bear has a notebook with a message just for you, available and impossible. “It might have been […] it might have been” a great many things: esoteric bear dance steps, a story about her break-in to the house of Three Goldilockses, a refutation of your intrusive action: “Do I come to your den in the middle of the day? I don’t think so, I do not.” It might have been a berry stain. The bear is gone, and nothing remains but an undefined gesture between species.

Unlike Bear, Skunk lives where we do. Skunks have a knowledge of our extended spaces, but theirs is alien to ours: skunks map. “Skunks map your driveway.” “They have maps for things you’ve never heard of.” “They map out whole neighborhoods in chicken bones, draw slippery trails through lo mein.” We more or less know that our garbage can make their landmarks; we didn’t know that “night, the smell of snow, despair” are mapped too, as well as “more constellations […] more stars, all the things they point to.” Skunk’s knowledge is hermetic to us, but unintentionally: they just make different transparencies overlaid on the same phenomena. We might have access to something like this if, when “stoop[ing] down to pick up one skeletonized leaf” from the driveway, you might then “trace the map of your life: the taste of something sweet gone sour.”

Cat is, of course, famously one anchor of the cat/dog polarity. Is Cat actually there for you, cat lover? Is she, as some insist, faking it for food and housing? Does she maybe have only an orthogonal relationship with what we call affection? “Cat is a cat / accidentally // She didn’t mean / to do it / but there it is”. Maybe both she and you form relationships out of continual misunderstanding:

When Cat is inside

she is a cat

She wears her

self for you

You don’t know

who Cat is

when she’s outside

She looks at you

with big eyes

brings the sparrow inside

You watch its head

turn back and forth

in her mouth

It could be a matter of misread signals — “you see her / out in the neighborhood // looking at you / like she’s never seen you // like she’s never seen anything / on such slow stupid legs” — which have somehow stayed in a wobbly balance for millennia.

Perhaps it is because rabbits are inherently furtive (rarely living with us as pets, mostly seen running away) that the rabbit poems are elusive. Full of suggestion but bounding off into the underbrush. Plums, a jacket, rain, rabbits (but mainly the idea of rabbits): these elements combine and reconfigure in a multiply-folded puzzle. Who is speaking here?

mother told me

not to run

with plums in my

mouth mother

isn’t always

right

(Note in passing the stark brief line, “mouth mother” and the affirmation of “right” free of the denial “isn’t always.”) Or, what is a rabbit’s paw – a good luck charm or a means of escape? “there is no way // or knowing / which one it means / at any given time”. Perhaps they’re not animals at all, but tokens for “your hands // which you fold / like two rabbits / in your pockets” over-filled by plums. In most of the sections of Animalia, the creatures are named in upper-case (Bear, Crow, Fox), like proper names assigned to individuals. Not here, as there’s barely any actual rabbit anywhere.

Two more instances will further suggest the range of animal being in Animalalia. Coyote is an antihero: his is the outside case here of solo animal readable as solo human. This coyote is one we all thought we knew. His name is silenced, and I won’t tell you, but we know him as an animated figure fixated on a roadrunner. (Oh, that coyote.) What might it be like if his cartoons were documentary, a kind of cinema verité? His obsession blossoms into self-loathing and regret, his ACME bills are out of hand, he becomes the object of his desire, the archetypal Roadrunner, in his dreams. He finds roadrunner roadkill: “consumed by lust and terror … He devours it, bursts into tears and shakes for days afterward.” When he “falls from a great height,” as we’ve so often seen him do in these pursuits, what does this actually mean? “He does not collapse into a limbed accordion. He sprains his wrist, twists his ankle and hits his head. It’s all he can do to crawl home.” Existentially miserable, a prisoner of his compulsion, Coyote goes to the mountain, “dances Roadrunnercoyote, Coyoteroadrunner, round and round.” A new transformative legend arises from the hilarity of the premise: Liz Hutchinson beautifully works a piece of popular culture away from any expected meme.

The final example is the first: Owl, whose section begins the book. Owl is not found to be wise-old, and does not utter “whoo.” He begins in relationship with a dying tree, a state which seems apparent (“The owl rides the tree bareback. The owl and the tree are old friends.”) But the owl’s connections also seem opaque though plainly stated. He abandons the tree as soon as it dies and “takes the long way around the forest” to avoid it afterwards. The longings between owl and tree are asymmetric: the tree wants an owl hat but the owl only wears hats of other owls. The owl might stalk newborn kittens in a dumpster behind Burger King, but we only learn of the owl listening to their “collective, unsorted mewl.” Does the owl deliberately conceal its meanings from us, or are they disconnected by the owl’s very nature? (The opposite of the coyote’s tale.) Was it always impossible to go beneath bare observation? “Nobody knows if owls bury their dead because owls have a different definition of both the word bury and the word dead.” There’s a suggestion of linkage, that we might find owls in ourselves, but it stays empirical: “If I am an owl and you are an owl then we are probably all owls who drink from the same ceramic bowl.” The owl grazes us, scratching If you are an owl into the glass of a bedroom window, but there’s no then to go with if. A suggestion abandoned as soon as made.

I am pleased that Microsoft Word does not recognize the word Animalalia. Liz Hutchinson’s lucidly written but subtle parables could have been brought together under the title “Animalia,” of which the software approves. That could have signaled a more expected approach to the theme, instead of the faceted surprises found here. Congratulations and thanks to Yes/No Press for bringing this forward.

Poems from Miriam Sagan

Poet Miriam Sagan

Miriam Sagan was born in NYC, raised in New Jersey, educated in Boston, liberated in San Francisco, and has lived more than half her life in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is the author of 30 published books, including the novel Black Rainbow (Sherman Asher, 2015) and Geographic: A Memoir of Time and Space (Casa de Snapdragon). which won the 2016 Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Poetry. She founded and headed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement in 2016.  Her awards include the Santa Fe Mayor’s award for Excellence in the Arts, the Poetry Gratitude Award from New Mexico Literary Arts, and a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas.

How To Find Henry David Thoreau

1. Wake up at 5 am. Take a small plane to a larger plane.

2. Arrive in Boston, a city you have too many feelings about.

3. See your body asleep in a motel bed, as if from a great distance.

4. Get on google maps.

5. Watch Lexington Street turn to Moody turn to Common.

6. Get lost at Hanscom Airforce Base and feel humiliated when the soldier you ask for directions glares at you.

7. Overshoot.

8. Ask the turbaned owner of the convenience store for directions and go back.

9. Bear left on to Old Bedford Road.

10. Turn right on to Virginia Road.

11. Sit at a green desk on a mustard colored floor.

12. Eat a peanut butter sandwich, because what would Thoreau eat?

13. Write haiku, by hand.

14. Get slightly bored because it is raining.

15. Realize you could have stayed home and read WALDEN.

16. Admire bright green lichen on tree trunks and the piles of oak leaves this raw November afternoon.

17. Realize every day is a fine day for Henry David Thoreau.

***

On Elizabeth Bishop

I bought, second-hand, not wanting to waste

The Complete Poems

of Elizabeth Bishop

in paperback

that someone named Emily

had already marked up

in green ink

for English 310—Section 1.

Her handwriting, firm and round

makes puerile comments

“Mirror to the soul?” and asks

“But who is he really?”

something we’ll never know,

are not supposed to know,

about hermit, gentleman, or boy

who populate these poems—

an animus, poet’s

masculine self

suffering

yet not lying wan

like a century of pale

Pre-Raphaelite girls

floated tubercular

in bathtubs

full of flowers

for the painter’s brush

to smirch.

I don’t think Emily

has chosen these poems herself,

they seem assigned, and she

although obviously a careful student,

is baffled.

Her comments further obscure:

“The negotiation between what is real

and what is real”

Then underlined.

I know she has gone on to other things.

The copyright is more than thirty years old.

Emily, if she is even still alive

has children, grand-children maybe, and I’m guessing

is on a second husband

and has forgotten all about

the inexpensive book

she sold back

or gave to Goodwill

or the library sale.

I doubt she misses it

while I, sitting in bed

am reading it bit by bit

hope not to drop

one stitch.