The 4th Annual IWWG Boston Area Conference: Writing the Heroine’s Journey – In Poetry, Prose, Memoir & Drama, will be held in Medfield, MA, May 10 and 11, 2019

The 4^th Annual IWWG Boston Area Conference: Writing the Heroine’s Journey – In Poetry, Prose, Memoir & Drama, will be held in Medfield, MA, May 10 and 11, 2019

   

The International Women’s Writing Guild (IWWG) will host its 4^th Annual Boston area writing conference, featuring four outstanding IWWG instructors, on Friday, May 10, and Saturday, May 11, 2019. The conference offers new and experienced writers craft insights into writing memoir, poetry, prose and monologue, and will be held at The Montrose School, 29 North Street, Medfield, MA from 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. May 10, and from 9:30 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. on May 11.

This year’s conference theme focuses on writing the “heroine’s journey,” a narrative process developed by author of the bestselling The Heroine’s Journey, Maureen Murdock. In 1949, Joseph Campbell presented a model of the mythological journey of the hero that has since been used as a template for the psycho-spiritual development of the individual. This model, however, did not address the task for today's woman, which is to heal the wounding of the feminine that exists deep within herself and the culture. Now, more than ever, women are speaking their truth as the feminine demands healing.

Throughout the conference, writers will apply insights and themes of The Heroine's Journey, which redefines the heroic quest for women in memoir, poetry, prose and drama. Attendees will experience all four workshops, including: Boston area playwright and poet, Kelly DuMar, presenting: Voices of Unsung Heroines - Writing Photo Inspired Monologues for the Stage; Brooklyn, NY based poet, Vanessa Jimenez Gabb, presenting How the Political is Personal: The Heroine Probes Context in Poetry; Geneva, Switzerland based author Susan Tiberghien, presenting The Alchemy of Journaling: Emerging from Darkness as Heroine; and California based author and Pacifica Graduate Institute faculty member, Maureen Murdock, presenting The Heroine’s Journey as a Narrative Structure for Memoir & Myth.

The conference opens Friday evening with Maureen Murdock’s workshop exploring the stages in 

The Heroine's Journey. As women claim their voice and name their experience, this workshop will provide a framework for their voice to be heard. Come prepared to write your own narrative as a heroine’s journey.

In Susan Tiberghien’s workshop, The Alchemy of Journaling, she asks, why are we afraid to see ourselves as heroines?  Why are we afraid of the dark? If we enter the dark, we will emerge as heroines: vibrant, creative, compassionate. We will look at examples from C.G. Jung, Etty Hillesum, and Marion Woodman. We will see journaling as alchemy with its three steps: entering the dark, nigredo; distilling the memory, albedo; polishing the gold, the new consciousness, rubedo.  Through active imagination, we will find a memory, a dream, an image and take into the dark, we will distill its meaning, and find its worth. 

How is the Political Personal? Vanessa Jimenez Gabb will invite participants to think about the ways we can generate poetry based on the heroine's journey to bring attention to the various systems of which we are products, privileged, oppressed. We will reflect on and write our respective journeys through poetry, and share with one another so that we may realize their collective power. 

Kelly DuMar invites participants to write the voices of unsung heroines. “You hear them, you see them, you know them – these women from your families, your personal history, and your community – but their stories are as yet unwritten,” she says. In this workshop you’ll develop a draft of a short, dramatic monologue for the stage, inspired by voices of unsung heroines. Bring 1-3 photos of unsung heroines (from your life or from history) to write from.

The mission of the non-profit IWWG is to foster the personal and professional empowerment of women through writing. Our regional conferences, as well as our online digital village of writing webinars, and our annual summer, writing intensive at Muhlenberg College, offer women writers the support necessary to hone their writing craft and benefit from ongoing personal and artistic development.

Writers of all levels and genres are welcome. The space is wheelchair accessible. The cost is $130 for IWWG Members; $150 for non-members, and $95 for students with ID. It’s possible to register for just Friday or just Saturday. There is a new member special of $185 (includes $75 Annual IWWG membership dues). Registration fee includes snacks and lunch. To learn more about the workshops, presenter bios, and to register online, go to http://www.iwwg.org/boston-2019. You may also contact Dana at iwwgquestions@iwwg.org or Kelly DuMar at kellydumar@kellydumar.com

The Clearing. Play by Helen Edmundson. Hub Theatre Company--Boston.

 

  Review by Doug Holder

Imagine--if you were arrested for speaking your native tongue. If the land you poured your sweat, your spirit, your very life was taken away with hardly a second thought. Imagine being deported to another country, culture, that will probably view you as yet another alien, pocking the landscape. No this ain't "Let's Make America, Great" territory, but 17th century Ireland, when Oliver Cromwell's English army ravaged the countryside, seizing land, separating families, and killing up to 620,000 people between 1641 and 1653.

In " The Clearing" by Helen Edmundson and directed by Daniel Bourque, presented by the Hub Theatre Company of Boston, the play focuses on the fate of two couples who are affected by draconian British law and its barbaric manifestation. Basically, the play centers around a young couple expertly played by Brashani Reece ( Madeline Preston) and Matthew Zahnzinger ( Robert Preston). The actors show the slow burn and raging fire of a crumbling marriage, as they are consumed by cruel fate.

Jeff Gill, a veteran actor, was certainly a standout in this performance. He plays the British Governor,  a man with a craggy face and persistent hacking cough. The couple pleads their case in front of him to no avail. Gill sticks out like an angry wound, stating between coughs, " Ireland is a whore. And a whore can't be trusted." He is an unblinking stooge of the state, and blathers off his senseless edicts like any drunk on a bar stool.

At certain points it was heard to hear the actors, especially when they addressed opposite sides of the audience. I could definitely see the hand of the director , as the scenes flowed, and were well-orchestrated. 

Hats off to Lauren Elias  a co-founder of the Hub Theatre Company, and her band of friends and actors.

THREE HANDS NONE BY DENISE BERGMAN

“THREE HANDS NONE” BY DENISE BERGMAN  ( Black Lawrence Press)

Review by Lee Varon

Denise Bergman’s new book of poetry “Three Hands None” is a stunning collection. The incident at the heart of the book is the assault of the narrator by a stranger who breaks into her apartment. She describes: “a twenty-year old woman alone in a tiny speck of bed/ deep inside sleep wakes up to a man with a knife at her throat.”

The “three hands” in the title refers to the confusion and disorientation the narrator feels as she attempts to recount her horrific ordeal: “his three hands one on my mouth one with his knife one/ holding the flashlight so close my eyes were on fire.

She feels as if her attacker has three hands to her “none” since she feels paralyzed in the moment of the attack— “this is what powerless is.”

The ten poems of the book are divided by long dashes enclosed in brackets which give the reader a pause between each of the connected poems. The often long lines without capitalization create a strong forward momentum—I couldn’t put the book down.

The story moves from the night the narrator is assaulted to her attempt to recognize her assailant from the many mug shots she is shown by the authorities—“photos of men was it this one that I tell them that I hadn’t seen his face.” In the aftermath of the assault the narrator is haunted by the feeling that threat is pervasive: “he knows who I am/ each man I pass on my way to work/ knows who I am.” He could be anywhere with his “surveillant camera” watching her, ready to strike again. And apart from the daily way in which the attack intrudes in every aspect of her life is the overarching question so many survivors ask: “why me/who was I to him…”

Like all survivors, the narrator’s being is shaken to its very core. The attack has stripped her of her sense of self and safety: “he he he gleaned me. what’s left are leafless stalks too thin to/ catch a wind.”

Bergman keenly depicts the disconnection and confusion which disrupts everything in the narrator’s world: “she sleeps I sleep for weeks a waking sleep though I can’t sleep/ can’t fall or stay asleep.”

Yet there is still a kernel of herself that endures and pulls her through the nightmare she is experiencing. It is midway through the book that: “on hands and knees I retrieve the kernel lock it in my fist.” There is a glimmer of reawakening and yet the narrator keeps circling back to the assault even as she moves forward.

It will take decades in which “speech was a pageless lexicon” before she is able to write about her experience. Some people don’t understand and wonder why she chooses to write about her ordeal after so many decades. Her answer to them rings out with conviction and clarity: “I say to sleep” and then, “to find the me back then.”

In this volume of striking poems the narrator finds “the me” that was stripped from her as a young woman and we as her readers are in awe of her courage and gratified by her incremental triumphs in regaining her selfhood.

In the final section of the book, the narrator broadens her view beyond her own experience to encompass the plight of all survivors of violence—both women and men. She connects with other survivors and encourages the reader to: “go to her though she doesn’t ask beg or hint” and also, “bring her a siren bring her a bell bullhorn megaphone/ microphone but know she will choose to whisper.”

In “Three Hands None” Bergman goes beyond a whisper to a full-throated, powerful, beautifully crafted work of art that will reverberate long after you have finished her book.

Susan Donnelly, Doug Holder, and George Kalogeris to read at the Old Manse May 3, 2019

Click on to enlarge

Doug Holder Interviews Daniel Lynn Watt about his memoir "History Lessons"

Lloyd Schwartz-- Somerville Poet Laureate--Announces!

"My first event as poet laureate is called Poems We Love, in which a grand variety of Somerville residents, including the mayor, the former mayor and congresman, members of the city council, state reps, and the Somerville Arts Council, social activists, librarians, teachers, school kids, writers, artists, actors, doctors, and Miss Black Massachusetts of 2018 will each read a poem or song lyric they love. It's all happening at the Somerville Armory on Wednesday evening April 17, at 7:00 PM. It's free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served. You don't have to live in Somerville to attend. 

Then on Saturday morning, April 20, at 10:00 AM, anyone who'd like to talk with me about poetry is invited to join me at the East Branch Public Library on Broadway. We''ll be discussing Robert Hayden's great and moving poem about his father, "Those Winter Sundays." Copies of the poem will be provided."

Boston National Poetry Month Festival, 2019 Now, with more music!

Thea Hopkins: A few guitar lengths from Somerville

Boston National Poetry Month Festival, 2019

Now, with more music!

By Kirk Etherton

This year's Festival is April 3-7 (see website below). As a Somerville resident, poet, and musician, I always enjoy writing about it from a "Somerville perspective." This year's photo is—for a change—of an artist who lives just over the line, but still in "Camberville." (Or is it "Somerbridge?")

Thea has released several CDs, and tours extensively. On Saturday, April 6, she'll bring her uniquely fine singing and guitar playing to the Commonwealth Salon, in Boston Public Library, Copley Square. As in previous years, this is where much of the Festival takes place.

Saturday is the Festival's biggest day, and it includes lots of Somerville folks. Doug Holder, founder and publisher of "Ibbetson Street Press," will start with a tribute to Sam Cornish, Boston's first Poet Laureate. Somerville resident, poet, and State Rep. Denise Provost is a featured reader.

Lloyd Schwartz, the City's newest Poet Laureate (plus a Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic), will share his poetry—as well as other creative observations. Our former Poet Laureate, Gloria Mindock, is also a publisher: when I host the "Panel on Craft and Publishing," she'll have many insights to share.

Berklee professor Lucy Holstedt (yes, of Somerville) will read some of her own poetry, and provide piano accompaniment for a number of other featured readers. Lucy also produces the Festival's always-popular "Evening of Poetry, Music & Dance," which this year is Thursday, April 4.

The New England Poetry Club was founded over 100 years ago. Hear what the NEPC is up to these days, from Somervillians Hilary Sallick (Vice President) and Linda Conte (Treasurer)—plus Mary Buchinger, President.

Sunday at the Commonwealth Salon, Somerville singer-songwriter Madelyn Holley, age seven, will probably be making her third Festival appearance. (Last year, she performed a really good song about fish.) The great claw hammer banjo player Yani Batteau, who was a City resident for years, will perform a number of original and other songs.

Oh...and Somerville's incomparable Bert Stern will be one of 10 Keynote Poets I'll have the honor of hosting at the BPL on Friday afternoon.

Somerville establishments that generously help to make this a FREE festival include: the UPS Store & Business Center on Somerville Avenue; Siam Ginger Thai Cuisine; and Master Printing & Signs.

Thanks also to Market Basket, for helping to promote the Festival. (You can probably find one of the Festival's fine printed programs at the front of the store.)

These are all great local businesses I've relied on for years. Special thanks to the Sater family: without them, we wouldn't have the Arts at the Armory (or The Middle East Restaurants & Nightclubs, over in Central Square.)

Don't forget to take a good look: http://www.bostonnationalpoetry.org

Our Purpose in Speaking Poems by William Orem

Our Purpose in Speaking
Poems by William Orem
Wheelbarrow Books, East Lansing, 2018. 77 pages.

Reviewed by Tom Daley

“One never fully leaves the Catholic dream,” admits the speaker of the first poem of William Orem’s poetry collection, Our Purpose in Speaking, and, indeed, throughout the book, the Catholic mythology and its impact is reconsidered, confronted, and honored, sometimes with respectful wonderment, sometimes with audacious, almost heretical re-imagining.

The earnest adherent to Christianity is always interrogating the authenticity of her or his faith. Orem’s speaker in “The Vinedresser” wonders if he has really understood Thomas Aquinas’s teaching, “To suffer ecstasy is the burden of this world.” “Did I only feel that meaning hidden in his words,” the speaker ponders, in a sensually adroit comparison, “the way a tomato gardener, fingers drifting // among scratchy bundles of leaves / feels instinctively the hanging weight?” In a less philosophical vein, we hear that the coins a speaker’s mother left “for saints to find her wandered keys” (“Sonnet: My Mother Refuses Mastectomy”) were eyed by the speaker as a boy, perhaps with another use in mind than that of bribing St. Anthony.

The humanization of the saints has been a project for writers almost since the first stories were assembled. In the poem “Handmaiden,” Orem’s Virgin Mary is depicted as a sexual being (certainly a taboo in some interpretations of Catholic doctrine). With “legs like cinnamon” and “breasts like almond skins,” she is subject to the propagandistic manipulations of an angel “who placed a finger on your womb / and said: here is my text.” In a bold-tongued assertion that might titillate the pubescent altar boy and scandalize the cautious curate, the speaker insists “You felt / something enter you like a man / I saw one like a son of man / something quite up past your thighs.” But the erotic transfers, splendidly, into the miraculous: that phenomenon (the Holy Spirit in Catholic teaching) is given as “passing into you over you the wings undid your sight / suspended you from threads / sun and moon, star and womb // and someone’s groaning shadow.”

If Leda in the Yeats poem “Leda and the Swan,” is “mastered by the brute blood of the air,” the god of “Handmaiden” overwhelms with a gentler, but still almost obliterating, touch. In the mind of the nubile Mary, with “eyes / already trained in looking down” but with the assertiveness of the pubescent teenage girl (“a face // clean as wheat, dark as thunder / when crossed (all girls are)”), the experience of the ravishing might just be a mixed blessing. Her final ejaculation (and the last line of the poem),“My Lord, you have eclipsed me,” may express the gracious submission of the handmaiden of God, or it may suggest the resentment of the young woman who had other ambitions for herself than to watch her only son submit to tortures endured by no one before or after him.
Elsewhere, the revision of hagiography doesn’t quite match the subtleties and inventiveness of “Handmaiden.” In “Sonnet: Francis to the Birds,” St. Francis wants to disabuse the birds of the notion that his followers have concocted that he “came to teach you songs of mine: / a canticle of suffering.” Given that promising reversal of the normal terms of endearment between Francis and the animals, I was hoping for something that would stake out a truly original position for Francis—some point on a circumference that arcs beyond the notion that he has entered into a colloquy to be taught by the birds (“I come to hear”), not preach to them. Perhaps the saint might have hinted that the mate-seducing birdsong magnifies the reflexes of his old prodigal joys—or that he finds the birds’ constant chirping about territorial control somewhat tiresome. Instead, the saint mimics Walt Whitman in revealing that he finds their “crying hopeful airs” “superior to prayer.” (In Whitman’s case the comparison is profoundly, comically idiosyncratic—it is the scent of his armpits that trumps supplication.)

Orem manages to transform the material of the Christian liturgy and calendar into epiphanies, even for the secular minded. In “Christmas Eve, North of Dolan, Indiana,” the speaker’s car has struck a doe. The sheriff he has summoned to blast the deer out of its misery readies for the kill and “leans over her belly, / away from her feet, which may kick.” After the lawman shoots, the speaker muses over the insignificance of individual human deeds in the vast array of phenomena:

The act we commit
brings an echo, then nothing—no following sigh

from the deep winter trees, from the hillsides
asleep in their swaddling of white.

Orem engages other themes (the troubled relationship with parents, for one) in the poems, but they all seem to rise, even if at times reluctantly, into awe for the numinous that pervades the universe. “I see You in the world,” says the poet and priest-activist Daniel Berrigan in his poem, “Immanence.” Likewise, Orem’s images confirm the charge of the supernatural presence, as in “The Phantom Hitcher,” in which a seemingly very real woman is drawn as dissolving into the ether:

When
she slips into the bucket seat

the springs don’t even crunch

A cigarette the driver smokes is “making lines of atmosphere.” But the woman “is home in smoke, sad smile of // that same ephemera, she seems / a creature in- / between.” By the time the car arrives home, it is empty, “blank, / as hollow as an eaten gourd.” The ride might just have delivered both the ghostly hitchhiker and her driver from their imprisonment in what William Blake called the “same dull round” of their “bounded” existence:

Imagine knowing decades of rain:
of disappointed nights,
of headlights drifting up the hill. Perhaps

this one contains
your freedom, love’s

long-sought deliverance: this one: this.

Whether he is writing in formal or free verse, Orem’s ear recapitulates its pleasures and advantages the reader with its sensitive reception. Very few of the poems do not present with some melodious, memorably well-turned phrasing. One finishes with these poems in quiet satisfaction with the surety of the image making, the sturdiness of the imagination, and the devotion to craft which is the hallmark of the genuine poet.

The Hastings Room Reading Series Is Celebrating the Opening of our 5th Year Tonight March 27, 2019 7PM

The Hastings Room Reading Series

Is Celebrating the Opening of our 5^th Year

TONIGHT WEDNESDAY 27 MARCH 2019 AT 7pm

At First Church Congregationalist, 11 Garden Street, near Harvard Square

Remembering our VERY FIRST READING from April 2014,

a reminiscence by Michael Steffen

In special honor of all of those who have read for us…

David Rivard Doug Holder Toni Bee

Daniel Tobin Gloria Mindock Simeon Berry

David Ferry Frannie Lindsay Ed Meek

Franz Wright Daniel Wuenschel Peter Payack

Frank Bidart Marc Vincenz Mark Pawlak

George Kalogeris Kevin Kutrer Timothy Gager

Deborah Garrison Jean-Dany Joachim Dzvinia Orlowski

David Blair Lo Galluccio Brother Nicolas Bartoli

Joan Houlihan Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright Tomas O’Leary

Fred Marchant Greg Delanty Julia Carlson

Martha Collins Alex Green Lee Varon

Bert Stern Denis Daly Jaime Bonney

Ernest Hilbert Michael Dickman

Mary Buchinger Natasha Sajé

And The Woodberry Translation Group: Monika Totten Adnan Adam Onart

Gwendolyn Jensen Kathryn Hellerstien Margaret Guillemin

Founder Steven Brown will be giving a presentation of the poetry of his friend Henry Morganthau III, who died in July 2018 aged 101. Morganthau graduated from Princeton University in 1939. He served in the US Army during World War II. From 1945, he was involved in the television business, at various times working as an author, producer and manager for the larger national institutions like NBC, CBS and ABC. From 1955-77, he was a chief producer of WGBH (Boston). Morganthau came into his poetic gifts at the age of 98.

We have held yearly Seamus Heaney Memorial Readings (this year, September 4^th)

And have remembered many other poets such as Mary Oliver Mark Strand

Geoffrey Hill Galway Kinnell Richard Wilbur Diana Der Hovanessian

Ibbetson Street Press/Endicott Young Writer Series April 2, 12:30 PM Open Mic!

Click on to pic to enlarge.

OPEN TO GENERAL PUBLIC!

Bagel Bards Reading this Thursday!

Memento Mori: Poems by Charles Coe

Memento  Mori:  Poems by Charles Coe (LEAPFROG PRESS) $15.00


REVIEW BY DOUG HOLDER


I ran into Charles Coe at the Cambridge Public Library the other day. He is a man about my age, who was roaming the space with his signature causal gait, taking in the whole scene.  I did't see him hooked to the usual digital hardware, no texting finger dances...he was there... in the moment. As fate would have it he gave me his new collection of poetry "Memento Mori." It starts out with a quote by Marcus Aurelius, " Use your numbered days to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun.  If you do not, the sun will soon set, and you with it."

Coe, an accomplished writer in his sixties and holding--marks the passage of time and accepts it. He has conversations with his brash younger self--the shadow of death and the joys of life are in close proximity. He appreciates the simple beauty around him-- he is forgiving--he remembers grudges, but they take on different dimensions. He often laughs at us,but just as easily laughs at himself.

I was touched by his piece " Poem for an Absent Friend." The poet is in the Boston Commons with a friend who has a grim diagnosis of cancer. And it seems that the Commons in my life, and I am sure others-- has often been a stage for any number of dramas. In these three stanzas Cole populates his poem with "things," that infuse it with deep layers of meaning,

" So we walk across the Common
past pigeons pecking in the grass,
that scatter before the lion-hearted toddler's
charge, past the piper who whose ancient call to battle
bounces unheeded off the blank faces
of high-rise condos, past beautiful young women
in spring finery who will offer their bodies
as gifts  for someone else to unwrap
and your taking it all in on this farewell
tour of the world, taking it in and letting it go.

A young couple near the fountain holds a baby.
An older woman with a camera clicks the shutter
as we pass and we are captured in a frame.

Perhaps 100 years from now
someone flipping through a dusty scrapbook
will pause a moment to contemplate our faded images,
tow ancient and mysterious ghosts..."

Coe, also has a fair number of haiku in this collection, and one in particular made me think twice before I petted by beloved feline,

"if i were bigger
i would be licking your bones
sweet and gleaming white."

Coe's poetry is peppered with humor, and wry observation. He is a walker in the city, a flaneur--taking in the blues, a long lost dive bar,  and the finery and scent of  young women now out of his reach. Like the great photographer Walker Evans he stalks the subway-- he takes it all in, and knows one day--he will have to let it go.

CHAPBOOK REVIEW: LEE VARON’S LETTERS TO A PEDOPHILE

CHAPBOOK REVIEW: LEE VARON’S LETTERS TO A PEDOPHILE  ( Encircle Publications)

REVIEW BY ALEXIS IVY

In Lee Varon’s first chapbook, Letters to a Pedophile, she creates a true relationship between the abused and the abuser. It is complicated and Varon expresses that complication through images and line breaks. Her poems are formal—they are written in a series: the title is also the first line and they all attribute to you—the receiver of the message. This pattern is very insightful. She is showing the reader a sense of compulsion that is a symptom of the you in her book. This makes the poems even more heartbreaking and at times we feel sympathy as she humanizes the you:

I was desperate

to guard my own light.

I could never have stopped

on the highway

even if I saw your thumb

raised, even if I saw

the shattered stars at your feet.

Her repetition of the word small and images of small is impactful. “children sprouted like mushrooms / soft and combed inward;”, she never states fact but abstracts the ugliness of her concept and makes it into beauty—devastating. At some points Varon is speaking as a child, “as if we were going to a good day at school / and subtraction was just math…”, and others she is speaking as her present-day self in recollection. “…a wafer near nothingness.” when describing memory. This back and forth strengthens the series making the reader trust the poet as she guides us through the chapbook— she knows without abstractions it would be too disturbing of a text for some readers, but by using the form of poetry we let go of the unbearableness of the subject. Varon has written it in a way that lets the subject become bearable. The chapbook is the fluidity of self and how many ways one can look at trauma. Varon takes trauma and shows us through poetry how to survive it:

I thought it was only a matter of

packing different clothes,

diverting a tornado,

breathing the correct number

of rescue breaths against blue lips.

Letters to a Pedophile is a stunning collection. You feel the truth and pain it took to write each poem. Art is how to transform trauma. Varon shares with us a topic that is hard to face. She has shown us how she processes trauma by using the technique of poetry. She has made this subject not only approachable, but brilliantly moving.

Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry. Her first poetry collection, Romance with Small-Time Crooks was published in 2013 by BlazeVOX [book]. Her second collection, Taking the Homeless Census won the 2018 Editors Prize at Saturnalia Books and is forthcoming in 2020. She is a Street Outreach Advocate working with the homeless and lives in her hometown, Boston

You're Still Alive! Live from Somerville: The Saturday Morning Bagel Bards!

Sketch by Bridget S. Galway

You're Still Alive!   Live from Somerville: The Saturday Morning Bagel Bards

By Doug Holder

Often we greet our members of the Bagel Bards group (that meets at the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square, Somerville ) with the refrain, “You're still alive!” This group of writers, playwrights and poets take nothing for granted. But this reflects on the group's informal nature, and the gallows humor that we have refined into a high art.

It is a bit like being in a play or a Marx Brothers movie. I sit back and enjoy the humor and drama that unfolds every Saturday morning. Yes—we discuss our writing, but is more than that. We have a member who regales us with stories of union corruption, corporate greed, and his clandestine forays into Afghanistan. Two of our millennial members often stop by to fill us in about their jobs, their navigation of the world, and their writing. Some of our member sit back and take it all in-- while others compete for center stage to make their pitch, plea, joke, gripe, only to be drowned out by other hungry voices.

In some regards it is a madcap dysfunctional family. Many of our members are accomplished writers, and they bring a wealth of experience and talent to the group. No one takes themselves too seriously, and if they do,they will be brought down to the earth quite quickly.

Some times you need to take a deep breath to try to get a hold of the topics our public intellectuals bring to the plate. We can start out with a discussion of Botticelli and it could easily morph into a heated conversation about Donald Trump, or the meaning of meaning.

Most importantly we are a Saturday morning band of friends. We have a spot to discuss the writer's life, present our own work on occasion, and revel in our own eccentricities. We linger, we schmooze, we pontificate.. . And when it comes to the time for our last cup of coffee , and we leave for all points—we can expect to be back next week greeted by the Greek Chorus, “You're still alive!”

Celebrate National Poetry Month: The Newton Free Library Poetry Month Festival:April 9 7PM

Click on pic to enlarge

Like Poems by A.E. Stallings

 

Like

Poems by A.E. Stallings

Farrar Straus Giroux

175 Varick Street, New York 10014

New York

www.fsgbooks.com

ISBN: 9780374187323

137 Pages

$24.00

Review by Dennis Daly

Alexander Pope famously defined “true wit” as “what oft was thought, but n’er so well expressed.” More than any other contemporary poet, A.E. Stallings, an American expatriate living in Athens, Greece, exemplifies this pedigree of versifier. Her poems make that which seems quite ordinary or just everyday sing.

Stallings’ new book, Like, doubles down on what she has done before in her three earlier volumes of original poetry— identifying and, on occasion, inviting irony, tragedy, and most of all, a deeper understanding of human nature into her formalist domicile. Her narrative conclusions can be biting.

The meditations of Stallings often include domestic objects such as a pair of scissors, a cast iron skillet, a pencil, a pull toy, and colored Easter eggs. Her descriptions for each of these sedentary items or groupings create both a great depth and an array of un-tranquil perceptions. For instance Stallings describes the common careening of a pull toy this way,

It didn’t mind being dragged

When it toppled on its side

Scraping its coat of primary colors:

Love has no pride.

 Or consider Stallings’s piece Dyeing the Easter Eggs, the pun firmly placed on “Dyeing,”

… Resurrection’s in the air

Like the whiff of vinegar. These eggs won’t hatch,  

My daughter says, since they are cooked and dead.”

A hard-boiled batch.

I am the children’s blonde American mother,

Who thinks that Easter eggs should be pastel—

But they have icon eyes, and they are Greek.

And eggs should be, they’ve learned at school this week,

Blood red.

Other sorties into nature, the classics, and even current news headlines by Stallings amass a hoard of well-expressed insights.  With her poem Little Owl, the poet engenders a world of predation observing human organisms stroll through their habitual landscapes or seascapes along life’s way. Danger also exhibits its warnings in equal measure. Stallings, speaking of her subject owl, says,

A drab still vessel attuned to whatever stirred,  

Near or far:  

Hedgehog shuffling among windfall of figs,

Gecko, mouse.

Then she swiveled the orbit of her gaze upon us

Like the Cyclops eye-beam of a lighthouse.

Pure irony flows, line by line, out of Stallings piece entitled Parmenion. The title is taken from the name of an air raid test. Originally, however, Parmenion was the second in command of Alexander-the-Great’s army. He was wrongly accused of treason by his own son and executed. Stallings connects the false alarms, which in turn excite and puzzle the populace, to this historical breach of justice. The poem begins as if describing a god’s pontifications and builds into very earthly anxieties,

The air-raid siren howls

Over the quiet, the un-rioting city.

It’s just a drill.

But the unearthly vowels

Ululate the air, a thrill

While for a moment everybody stops

What they were about to do

On the broken street, or in the struggling shops,

Or looks up for an answer

Into the contrailed palimpsest of blue.

Centered by serendipity (The poet arranges her titles in alphabetical order), the collection’s masterpiece, Lost and Found, sprawls over eighteen pages and thirty-six stanzas. The poem is wonderful. A mother, frantically and unsuccessfully looking for a child’s plastic toy, continues her search into a metaphoric dreamtime. Arriving in the Valley of the Moon, she peruses continuous landfills of mindlessness and lost opportunity. Along the way this protagonist-seeker and Stallings’ persona is guided by the mother of all muses. Here the poem becomes a parable on creativeness and artistic choices. Some stanzas have a very specific point to make, like this one,

Not water, though, I knew as I drew near it—

It was a liquid, true, but more like gin

Though smelling of aniseed—some cold, clear spirit

Water turns cloudy. “Many are taken in,

Some poets seek it, thinking that they fear it,

The reflectionless fountain of Oblivion.

By sex, by pills, by leap of doubt, by gas,

Or at the bottom of a tilting glass.

Empathy, the most emotionally efficacious poem in Stallings’ collection, rewrites the plight of today’s northern African emigre into a more familiar interior venue. Stallings’ family-centric verse is as personal as it gets. The poet concocts a thought experiment with her own lineage. She posits them precariously adrift and then gives cosmic thanks that this scenario is not so. She explains,

I’m glad we didn’t wake

Our kids in the thin hours, to take

Not a thing, not a favorite toy,

And didn’t hand over our cash

To one of the smuggling rackets,

That we didn’t buy cheap life jackets

No better than bright orange trash

And less buoyant.  

Amazing as a poetic tour de force, perfect as the title poem, and outrageously funny as an angry rant, Stallings’ Like the Sestina moves determinedly to its droll facebook-like conclusion. The ride alone is worth it. The poet ends each line in “like.” She enumerates every cliché type (or most) that uses “like” as a space filler. And finally she initiates a versified crescendo,

…Like is like

Invasive zebra mussels, or it’s like

Those nutria things, or kudzu, or belike

Redundant fast-food franchises, each like

(More like) the next. Those poets who dislike

Inversions, archaisms, who just like

Plain English as she’s spoke—why isn’t “like”

Their (literally) every other word? I’d like

Us just to admit that’s what real speech is like.

But as you like, my friend…

For those readers who, incongruously, still believe that the medium is the message, or at least a good part of it, don’t miss this Stallings’ collection. Like may be her best book yet, her opus supreme. For those others, who aren’t formalist aficionados—read it anyway; you’ll more than like it, you’ll love it.