Among the Enigmas Poems by Robert Murphy

Among the Enigmas

Poems by Robert Murphy

Artwork by Donald Golder

Dos Madres Press

www.dosmadres.com

ISBN: 978-1-948017-52-7

61 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Without an inductive or deductive leg to stand on, Robert Murphy, in his new collection of poetry, Among the Enigmas, nails the existential perplexities that niggle our attempts to apprehend human consciousness and metaphysical selfhood. Quite an accomplishment! He achieves his ends with humor, wordplay, and puckish subversions, marbled throughout with his singular warmth and kindliness.

Additionally, most of Murphy’s poems are paired up with intriguing artwork by Donald Golder. Golder’s ink drawings and watercolor images both complement the knotty verse puzzlements and tease away any trite conclusions.

Murphy opens his collection with a nod to poet William Bronk in a lovely piece entitled The Lay Of The Land—Hudson Falls New York, Just This Side Of Elysium. He recalls sending his fellow poet a myth laden daffodil, properly named poeticus narcissus. The flower was spoken of by Virgil and is associated with Persephone (she had been gathering them before her abduction into the Underworld) and Narcissus (the goddess Nemesis turned him into the flower). Bronk, who lived Hudson Falls New York, died there in 1999. Here is the heart of Murphy’s poem,

I sent Bill the poet’s flower, poeticus narcissus, variety

old pheasant eye. Those ones that are fragrant,

almost impossibly so, an echo of the Mediterranean world

from which they come, pure white, with six (as it is described

in the catalogs) perianth segments on a single stem,

petals slightly recurved; with a small, red rimmed

ruffled yellow cup into which you might pour yourself

to lie within reflected—the last of its kind to bloom,

                                                      late spring.

Turning the Cartesian philosophical proposition Cogito, ergo sum on its head, Jean Paul Sartre famously declared I am, therefore I think. Yet Sartre did not believe that the “I” even exists. In fact he declared it a fiction. Murphy seems to buy into Sartre with one exception: he concocts his “I” as a dynamic, but empty, container of sorts, enabling what was already there. Two of the poet’s early pieces make this clear. In The Real Problem Is, Murphy characterizes internal consciousness as an alien invader. The poet explains,

…we live,

Colonized, inhabited by

Thoughts as much unlived as we

Whose words survive us—

Life having fled with the naming of things

Murphy effects much the same proposition from a different angle in his poem The Times. In the process he reroutes Heraclitus’ famous river into a circular flow. Murphy illuminates the action,

… every day is

Brought back to life in us to live

Where what was, otherwise,

Would never think to do, does,

And remembered so

Time and Again

Has its way with us.

The poet warns his readers against the use of rational tools in delving into life’s appearances.  Murphy winks while comically employing cliché after cliché in making his case. He plays the Holy Fool with sacerdotal expertise. Speaking of these same appearances he says,

Hidden in plain sight as they always are

Right under our noses…

(if not the coffee, try the roses)

And just out of earshot too, 

     -- “Listen up!” –

Fact is, if facts mattered,

And they don’t.

Not in any real world:

Priest, Rabbi, Mullah,

Good Time Evangelical Rock and Roller.

Dear Mother of God, it’s true.

And you’re dead right.

When not for the first time

You find a serpent

In your shoe…

Jumping Jehoshaphat!”

My friend, have faith.

In Murphy’s poem entitled At the Border he ruminates on the very meaning of “I.” Observing the phenomenon of consciousness at work is not enough. His name is attached and that means something. Or does it? The poet considers his connundrum,

Trying to convince the authorities

We are who we say we are:

Those who know us best.

Ourselves being the ones we are

Most desperate to convince.

For a lot of us being human means making the best of things. Shadows menace us on the outskirts of our world. Yet, somehow, we must pass the time, we must continue as our nature demands. Something on life’s extremity, just out of sight awaits us with answers. We are pretty sure of it. Murphy, in his piece Shelter in Place, spells it out this way,

…still we are waiting

To be told what it is at the edge of our lives

That shadows us—

What it is that keeps us so at bay.

“Shelter in place!” “Shelter in place!”

Neither knowing how it came to be,

Nor how it must surely end.

We do what we can to pass the time of day.

Some tell stories, others joke,

The more guarded listen and look.

Of the unaccountable, no one will say.

Perhaps the most compelling poems in Murphy’s collection he saves for last. His Imp sequence of nine poems wrestles with the duality concept of mind and body, conjuring up the absurd construction of self. In Imp, the first piece in the series, Murphy opens by setting the conversational tone of gleeful wordplay,

Lord knows, for who should know better than I,

bottled up as you and I have been, the two of us, together.

What is it now, near to a lifetime? Ah, the soul,

the soul! How in the end we worry about its disposition,

as if the body, too, wasn’t just another name

for what you would, if you could, sell

separately on the cheap, down river. Admit it, though,

if wishes were fishes,… didn’t I reel you in a boat load?

Yeah, and beware of what you wish for. I hear you.

Yes, Murphy’s readers hear him too—both his oracular wit and his musical inquiry. And, in my experience, once one hearkens to Murphy’s especial brand of poetry, one wants, nay, one needs more. 

Doug Holder interviews Michael C. Keith author of " Stories in the Key of Me."

The Book Club Play By Karen Zacarias

Photo by STRATTON MCCRADY

  

The Book Club Play

By Karen Zacarias

Boston Playwrights’ Theatre

Through October 13

Review by Lawrence Kessenich

If you like your humor broad and a little silly, this production of The Book Club Play at Boston Playwrights Theatre will please you. I doubt you’ll be in danger of falling out of your seat with laughter, but you’ll get some good chuckles.

The setting is a middle class living room (beautifully designed by Jeffrey Petersen) where the eponymous book group of 30-somethings has been meeting for five years. The group includes newspaper columnist Ana, who claims to have founded the group; her college friend (and brief beau at the time) Will, a history museum curator who continually reminds Ana that the book group was his idea; Ana’s husband and Will’s former college roommate Rob, a reluctant member of the group who rarely reads the books (he says he’s in it for the food), Ana’s somewhat forlorn single friend Jennifer; and the newest member of the group, Ana’s protégé at the newspaper, Lily.

Adding interest—and making everyone totally self-conscious—is the fact that everything that happens in the groups for a couple months is being filmed by an unmanned camera and the footage will be used by an internationally famous filmmaker for a documentary about book groups. Many times in the play, members of the group address the camera directly, usually asking the filmmaker to cut the part that has just been recorded.

This is a very literary book club—when the play opens, they’re discussing Moby Dick—but a somewhat clumsy exchange with Lily, who is black, reveals that the group has only read white authors. They ask Lily to pick something intense and out of their wheelhouse, clearly hoping it will be a classic author of color, but Lily picks the popular novel Twilight, written by a white woman. Ana and Will are aghast, but the others are willing to give it a try, so they decide to read the book.

Much of the humor for the middle part of the play grows out of the discrepancy between Ana and Will’s classical tastes and everyone else’s appreciation of Twilight and then The Da Vinci Code, which is introduced by a man Jennifer springs on the group. The man, Alex, is a professor of comparative literature, but, having recently been dumped by his girlfriend because she read Twilight, he has come to realize that he knows nothing about popular literature and ought to be learning about it.

There is a good deal of back and forth between the opposing groups about the value of popular literature, and though some of it is interesting, and even insightful, it isn’t terribly dramatic and goes on a bit too lolng. What provides some drama is Rob’s dissatisfaction with his marriage to Ana, Will’s coming to grips with his sexuality, and Ana’s dealing with her slipping control over the group. It would be spoiling things to describe what happens in these areas, but suffice it to say that there are a number of revelations that cause confusion and consternation in the group.

Interspersed with the book club scenes are brief monologues by a single actor, Brooks Reeves, who appears upstage, with the set dark behind him, as an amazing variety of characters, including: a female literary agent, who talks about how many books there are and how few get published and read; a male Secret Service agent, who talks about his own book group and how they enforce attendance; “Sam” from Walmart, who talks about how many books the company sells and how intra-Walmart book clubs keep its underpaid employees happy; and an elderly, retired librarian, about to skydive, who warns readers to live life for real, not just through books. While these interludes are sometimes fun, they really don’t relate to the rest of play in any direct way—except at the very end, when the Secret Service agent makes a brief appearance with the rest of the characters.

Besides Reeves, because of the variety of his characters, none of the actors really stands out. They are good performers, but I never really believed in them as real human beings, because the director, Shana Gozansky, has them play their roles on a kind of middle ground, neither realistically nor over-the-top (except for brief moments). If they’d been over-the-top most of the time, the farcical quality would have carried the humor better. But I think it would have been even more effective if they’d been asked to play their characters as naturally as possible, which would have set off the absurdity of what goes on among them. So, this reviewer was left feeling lukewarm about the play, caught on his own middle ground between liking and not liking the play. Depending on your tastes, you might go either way.  

Doug Holder Interviews Rob Dinsmoor about his new memoir "You Can Leave ...

Newton Free Library Poetry Series: Oct. 8, 2019 7PM Open Mic! Bergman, Tandon and Sheppard

America, Aeronwy And Me By Peter Thabit Jones

My friend, the poet Tino Villanueva-- sent me this handsome book about Dylan Thomas' daughter, Aeronwy Thomas, and Welsh poet Peter Thabiat Jones' visit to the United States in 2008. The tour was organized by Stanley Barkin-- their American publisher, in conjunction with American poet and critic Vince Clemente. Villanueva was instrumental in organizing their stop in Cambridge--working with Harvard University and the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in hosting the event. Aeronwy died in 2009, so thanks to Villanueva I was able to interview her for The Somerville Times at the place of her choice-- a Harvard Square Dunkin' Donuts. The interview is cited in the book.

go to  http://peterthabitjones.com   for more information

Violinist Beth Bahia Cohen is the recipient of this year’s Generosity Award.

   Beth Bahia Cohen is the recipient of this year’s Generosity Award.  
   Article by Kathleen Spivack

This very small award recognizes people within the literary/artistic community who have supported the creative work of others. Not only is Beth Bahia Cohen the center of Boston’s world music scene, more importantly for this award, she has worked tirelessly in support of poets in this community. With her music, with her artistic talent, she has been incredibly generous to writers and performers of the spoken word. Previous recipients have included Harris Gardner, Steve Glines, Gail Mazur, Nina Alonso Hathaway, Elizabeth Doran, and others. More to come, we hope.

    For all of you who do so much to further the work of other writers, who put your own egos out of the way so that others may have a place, please note that this award, though it singles out a few individuals annually, is symbolic of the spirit of generosity that inhabits our greater Boston writing community. This small award was originally established by Kathleen Spivack and Joseph A. Murray.

    If you would like to participate in recognizing our generosity award recipients, please do so. The funds are running out.

                                                       ***************

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Beth Bahia Cohen has spent a large part of her career exploring how the violin is played in various cultures. She was trained as a classical violinist and violist in NY, getting her master's degree from Manhattan School of Music, and spent several years performing with numerous symphony, ballet, opera and chamber orchestras in New York and Europe, as well as in Broadway shows and commercial recording studios.

Beth then traveled, studied and performed with masters of the violin and other bowed instruments from Hungary, Greece, Turkey, the Middle East, and Norway. She plays several Greek lyras, the Turkish bowed tanbur and kabak kemane, the Egyptian rababa, the Norwegian hardanger fiddle, and more. She plays village music from Hungary, Greek music from various regions of Greece, Turkish classical and folk music, and Arabic and Klezmer music. She has been the recipient of many travel and research grants, including the NEA/Artists International grant and the Radcliffe Bunting fellowship. She performs regularly with several groups and as a soloist in The Art of the Bow, which brings together the various bowed instrument traditions as well as her original music, and she teaches workshops and ensembles in universities throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. As an Applied Music faculty member in the Tufts WEFT program, Beth teaches the violin traditions mentioned above, as well as European classical violin and Celtic music.

Fever by Irene Mitchell

Fever by Irene Mitchell*

                        Dos Madres, 2019

REVIEWED BY MARCIA ROSS

The temperature in Irene Mitchell’s stunning new collection of poems, Fever, holds steady throughout at about 101.5°. give or take an occasional cooling breeze. Mitchell’s excitingly named book makes several mentions of the word in poems throughout the slender three-part collection. With a title like Fever, one might expect some aroused panting, a bent toward hot sensationalism, warm corpses, a very sick sickness, insanity. 

That is not what she has in store for us.

A reader could easily miss a “fever” or two on a first perusal; there are many mentions. But that is not a sign of carelessness, or careless repetition.  Mitchell’s subtle placements of the title word (and overarching theme) are reminders that everything is already before our eyes, if only, as Dickinson wrote, “gentlemen can see.”  The dangers of fevers are at our fingertips, in our pulses.

Pernicious Ease” is the first of the book’s three sections.  One may flinch at the imagined evil possibilities of such a banner — say, the self-indulgent ennui of the unhappy gods in Milton’s Pandemonium, or the ease with which any of us can nurture harm.  Never in a hurry, though, Mitchell lays it on slow; no need to plummet for nine days and nights into a burning lake.  Her poems float like falling leaves or swoop like birds from nectar to nectar. She sidles her way in, and it is easy to go with her, even if you lose your way.  In “Salt and Burn,” for instance, we may not know what’s happened when

She dipped her brush in ochre and painted each flower’s

center as a wound.

But we feel it in our bodies when the next line knocks us sideways:

Then came the earth’s full wobble.

What wobble? It must be a big one! We grope blindly for an answer. Yet we don’t really need one; we believe it; we feel it in our legs. Thus we remain with Mitchell’s speaker, her imagery, perhaps beneath some maple boughs where,

Like the spikes and ebbs of fever

Flushed peonies are cooling.

There are no road bumps or tangles in Mitchell’s writing: it is never fussy, vapid , pedantic, or tediously promoting a cause. She is delicately (and wisely) witty, plain in her loves, always skillful. And there are surprises, even bursts of humor. “Hey, these coals are heavy!” erupts a man at the end of a meandering, endearingly neurotic poem titled “Joe, carrying coals.”  While her subjects are not without weight, she doesn’t shout them.  In this case Joe gets to shout, ending the poem abruptly. A joy. In other pieces, distant bells ring in mood or an image flashes bright.

Here and there, Mitchell engages in repartee with imagined artists or figures, or with her own notions of what the heck is going on in this life. In a brief poem “Night Over Blue Mountain,” from the section, “Therapeutic Harmony,” she writes that  there “is no fascination in darkness except in trolling for a gleam.”  Someone has been playing close attention.

Further on a small perfect poem, “Status,” is told by a watchful but playful speaker:

According to my shadow,

the prognosis is rosy.

With savvy survival techniques

I shall be transformed

from a fragile parenthesis

to a circle’s

plump perfection.

It is not uncommon for Mitchell’s poems to end in satisfaction.  There may be no place this poet can’t reach with her effortless language, her open mind (looking, listening, imagining, knowing), with her trust in how her words sound—the music her poems make, their modesty, their mischief, their centered and multiple meanings.  Visionary, crafted, awake, delicious, Fever is not to be missed.

*Mitchell is a former poetry editor of the Hudson River Art Magazine

Eating Raw Meat by g emil reutter, reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

                       

                           Eating Raw Meat by g emil reutter,
                               reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

            Reading g emil reutter’s new collection of poems Eating Raw Meat and other nuances of life is like entering a series of museum galleries full of life: character portraits abound, as do scenes of communal activity captured on a grander scale. Beware the final gallery, however, as Part II of this volume represents a descent into despair.

            reutter guides us through his museum, and as we pause to appreciate each poem, he explains his relationship to his work, as he informs us in “Silhouette”: “So I look at these captured memories of time and place, enjoy them without a care for what happens when I am gone.” Among these “captured memories” are portraits of individuals—character sketches—not necessarily flattering, but always true. In “Raw,” which lends its name to the title of the book, the poet depicts human frailty, fallibility, and, ultimately empathy in the brief anecdote of the elderly man, “just an old retired guy from the neighborhood,” who mistakenly orders the meat in his sandwich “raw” instead of “rare,” only realizing it afterward. There are other character studies which capture a moment or feeling as a painting might: “Quiet Men,” where we witness an elderly father and his elderly son smoking in a park; “The Politician” who “speaks to himself” loudly about his political opinions before returning by bus to his “darkened room of loneliness”; an elderly woman picks sandwiches from the trash at a food festival in “Good Times.” reutter neither condemns nor praises the characters he observes; rather, he reports the truth of their lives with a keen eye. He leads us to see that, like the mailman he describes in “It’s a Job,” whose name the poet doesn’t know though he watches him work every day, that these characters are “part of the fabric of life.” Those who reutter knows more intimately are also captured in his poems, as in the aptly named “Painting,” in which the poet frames his subject in a window, where “the sun gently silhouettes your body,” and “lights your green/blue eyes that stream across the room into mine.”

            In other galleries of reutter’s museum there are grand tableaus that teem with vibrant activity: scenes of city life witnessed from a park, at lakes, or in the streets. In Fox Chase II,” reutter widens his focus from a single character, situating the narrator in “the gazebo in a small park,” where he absorbs the sights, sounds, and smells of the shops on the bustling surrounding streets. The title of “A June Afternoon at Core Creek Park,” echoes Seurat’s famous pointillist painting “An Afternoon at La Grande Jatte”: reutter’s landscape depicting “the shore of Lake Luxembourg” is equally full of picnickers drawn to nature, where “In the midst of pavilions, barbeque, Frisbees, roller blades, a herd of deer prance . . .”

            reutter is hyper-aware of nature and its cycles, and his poems frequently record the tensions wrought by the changing seasons or weather. He seems particularly taken by the manifestation of the natural world within urban settings, as in “Urban Woodlands,” in which a “no name brook eases its way out of the city” along a “dirt path that snakes through trees and underbrush into a small valley.” Storms and heat oppress, and city life can be bleak and lonely, yet beauty often blooms where least expected. Many of reutter’s poems name flowers and trees, their names alone evocative, as if they are the sunflowers of Van Gogh or the water lilies of Monet: forsythia, hyacinth, tulips, easter lilies, hydrangea, azalea, rhododendron. Yet while nature as seen in natural cycles renews the poet, reutter, as he expresses in “Resting with the Moon,” feels the “tug and pull” of the moon and its “reflected light renews” him, “nothing will change. I am linear in destination, not circular.” The poet may recognize cycles, but though he is situated within their gyres, he preserves his own objectivity.

            reutter, in the first three-quarters of Eating Raw Meat, seems to draw inspiration from Whitman, whose doppelganger appears in “On the Bus with Walt” as a bearded fellow who reads to his fellow passengers from Leaves of Grass. The captive audience applauds the old man, who laughs heartily before whispering to the narrator, “There isn’t any money in poetry, my friend.” Poetry may not pay, but up to this point in his volume, reutter has shown the act of observation to be a noble enterprise that celebrates our shared human experience, reassuring us that there is beauty even in the contemplation of our losses, loneliness and poverty.

            The final poem of the volume’s first section, however, suggests that reutter is turning away from observation and celebration and investing the role of poet with a different kind of responsibility. The narrator of “On the Rubble” is no longer merely an observer—he is a harbinger of despair, declaring, “I stand on the rubble that is left of the American dream, pick up a brick, look at the glass ceiling, throw it, and watch it bounce off.” As the reader enters Part II of Eating Raw Meat, the museum of observations is left behind, and we seem to fall into a nearly post-apocalyptic world. Whereas the poems of Part I depict a kind of hard won beauty found in our human struggles, those of Part II portray defeat and desolation. The cycles of nature may still predominate, as in “Season to Season,” but it is the “harshness in the beauty of death and renewal” that is memorialized. reutter now directs our attention to desolation, and there seems very little to celebrate. Generalized social criticism replaces observation, as in “In Plain View,” where the narrator decries “a life lost in greed” in America and asserts that we suffer from “a divide as simple as the intersection of a crumbling alley and an avenue of greed.” In “Shadows, Dreams, and Reality” the narrator concludes that our hopes for a positive future are a doomed dream, a “[r]everie of jobs coming back deluded in the reality of what is.”

            Observation in Part II of Eating Raw Meat has become political commentary, and the keen, fresh eye reutter shows in the character studies of his earlier poems is sacrificed to jeremiads like “Pennywise,” which transparently describes our current president’s “grotesque comb over” and “plastic smile,” calling him a “dancing clown” who “sits on his gold throne on his tower of babble,” and leaves us smothered in a “sewer gas of despair.” Whereas the cycles described in the earlier poems of this volume suggest that if we look closely enough, we can find beauty entwined with our suffering, there is little such beauty in Part II: no flowers, peaceful lakes, or gentle snowflakes. What we’re left with are frightening scenarios as depicted in “Machines Ply Their Trade,” where, reutter concludes, “Though no one can see, the misers are dancing,” as “[v]iolence is the way of the world,” and “it seems it will never change.”

            Is reutter declaring that our world has become so inhospitable, our plight so desperate, that hollow ranting is all that’s left to the poet? Is shouting the only volume remaining for the visionary? It may be that reutter’s goal is to shock his audience into action before it’s too late, but the last lines of the final poem in the collection, “Hullabaloo,” tell us bluntly that the time for salvation is past: “Nirvana is empty, the second coming has been cancelled.” Apparently Whitman has gotten off the bus and has left no forwarding address.

           

Celebration of Life in Honor of Ifeanyi A. Menkiti 1940-2019: Oct. 5th, 2019

IFEANYI A. MENKITI August 24, 1940-June 16, 2019

Please Join us for a Celebration of Life in Honor of Ifeanyi A. Menkiti 1940-2019 Saturday, October 5th 5:00 P.M. Newton Country Day School Auditorium 785 Centre Street Newton, MA Reception to Follow Wheel Chair Accessible

In The Spirit of Ifeanyi, his family will continue the mission of the Grolier. We will remain open and carry forward the activities of the Bookshop. Thank you for your continued support. Please Save the dates: For our upcoming Fall Reading Series Tuesday, September 17th, 2019 Subhashini Kaligotla And Philip Nikolayev Get Ticket Here Tuesday, October. 22, 2019 7:00 P.M. Reading for Firsts 100 Years of Yale Younger Poets Anthology readers: Jessica Fisher Arda Collins Get Ticket Here Saturday, November 2. 2019 Ariana Reines Tuesday December 17, 2019 Nina Maclaughlin

Before a Common Soil poem by Ifeanyi Menkiti  Let this then be your understanding  You sons and daughters of the ancient stars  That your home reaches beyond  The earth which is your home  May you go forth across the land  And with the movement of flutes  Celebrate the blessings  Which the gods have given you.  May you catch the shifting of the light  At the tip of the flute's tongue;  And may you ask of the darkness  That it remain with you  Lest the light lose sight  Of whence it came  Yes, I have heard song  The power of which was not of the world  Though the singer of it was in the world;  And I have called out to you,  Children of an undivided earth,  That you join your hands together  And be of one accord before a common soil--  Lest the rivers cease to water the land  Lest the voices of the singers be forever stilled.  Yes, I have heard song  The power of which was not of the world  Though the singer of it was in the world.  ©Ifeanyi Menkiti