Thursday, November 21, 2019
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
Zvi Sesling’s Simple Game, Baseball Poems, published by Presa Press, reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos
Put
me in Coach, I’m ready to play today
Look at me, I can be Centerfield
--John
Fogarty, “Centerfield”
What is Baseball? It’s a sport, of
course, but it’s more than just that. It’s not a religion, but it’s close. It’s
called America’s pastime, but its time is more than simply the “past”—baseball
encompasses past, present, future in a way that makes the passing of time
irrelevant. Which isn’t to say that baseball doesn’t live in its moments—in
fact, it’s the moments that snag in our memory—a hit, a catch, a pitch, a play
at the plate, an argument with an umpire, a portrait on a baseball card.
On one level, each of us lives
within our own version of what the game means. For some of us, there are on
field memories: I, like the singer in John Fogarty’s song, played centerfield;
after fifty years my mind and body remember chasing down and gloving certain
fly balls as if they’d just been struck. But just as firm in my memory are
games I’ve experienced only as a fan: games I’ve sat through on the edge of my
seat, rooting for my team with a combination of superstition and prayer. And
then there’s the baseball I know through its lore—anecdotes and personalities
I’ve read or been told about. So, though my idea of “baseball” is mine and mine
alone, the scope of baseball is so universal that I and every other true
baseball fan can recognize and take pleasure in the individual baseball world
of another, especially when that private world is rendered as vividly and
joyfully as Zvi A. Sesling renders his in Simple
Games, his chapbook of baseball poems.
Poetry is perfect for baseball: the
form is meant to express the ineffable. Through their poems, writers strive to
make their individual experiences available to the reader, and, to fans of the
sport, the language of baseball is a perfect conduit for such sharing.
In
Sesling’s first poem, “Sibby Sisti,” he describes his “first baseball hero,” a
player whose name, to Sesling represented “a poetic sound, an alliteration.” Before
reading this poem, I’d never heard of this player. But, as a baseball fan, I
can identify with the attachment—I have my own cache of favorite players, and
Sesling taps into my definition of what “favorite” means. But his descriptions
of this and other players, sites, and events do more than just connect me to
past pleasures; the beauty of these poems, and of baseball, is that the lore
actually expands my own experience. For example, I’d heard of Warren Spahn,
but, after reading Sesling’s poem, “Warren’s Arm,” I can now picture him, as he
“let’s the ball go like a prisoner escaping/ from jail, fast and low.” I learn about Spahn’s pitching motion, his
uniform, his number, and his statistics—because, after all, one of the threads
that connects baseball fans as both a private and universal phenomenon is its
numbers.
Through Sesling’s memory, skill, and
generous spirit, my own world of baseball now includes Sam the Jet, the first
black player in Boston, former MVP Bob Eliot, and Rabbit Maranville. And while,
as a Yankee fan, I’m well acquainted with Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956
World Series, Sesling’s poem about the feat, “Larsen’s No-No” fills in details
with the names of no less than twelve participants in that contest in twenty-one lines. But more than just
contributing to the totality of my baseball world, Sesling’s poems vitalize
parallel associations. Both “Earl of Snohomish” and “Mr. Team” portray their
subjects on their baseball cards. Although I never knew these players,
Sesling’s descriptions, such as of Bob Eliot posed “on one knee/ in the on-deck
circle leaning on his bat/ not in prayer, but studying the pitcher/ waiting to
hit” evoke memories of my own card collections— of my personal favorites and of
the card-flipping games I played as a ten-year old on the school playground.
Some of Sesling’s poems lament
baseball’s darker moments, such as “Kenesaw’s Revenge,” which discusses the
commissioner’s decision to void a female player’s contract and a 1952 decision
that “strikes out women by banning/ them completely from pro ball.” In “Black
Sox,” Sesling describes a gambler in the stands, “looking every bit a rich
dandy . . . /waving like he is drowning” during baseball’s most infamous
cheating scandal. It is clear that the poet feels that these events intrude on
the purity of the game he loves so dearly. But even these poems expand beyond
the history they depict, leading me to reflect upon other times the sport has
disappointed its fans, such as the decade during which the rise in performance
enhancing drugs forced asterisks upon some of baseball’s most revered records.
Zvi Sesling in Simple Game often uses baseball as a lens through which to revisit
important moments of his life, such as in the poem “The First Girl I Kissed,” which
equates his memory of that event with one of the sports well known tragedies.
When pitcher Herb Score’s career was ended by a line drive, “just as suddenly
as the shot that/ takes out Score, I break up with the girl of the first kiss.”
Eventually, Sesling is “[f]orced to recover in a new town with a new
girlfriend/ While the Indians pursue their first World Series win since 1948.”
The use of baseball history as the palimpsest upon which to transcribe our most
enduring memories is a phenomenon shared by all true fans of the game.
“A poem,” Archibald MacLeish writes
in “Ars Poetica,” “must not mean/ But be.” Zvi Sesling in Simple Game transforms his life experience with baseball into
poetry; his poems not only afford us entry into his world of Baseball, they
lead us to a fresh assessment of our own memories. John Fogarty in his song “Centerfield”
doesn’t write, “Look at me, I can play
centerfield”—it’s “I can be centerfield.”
Because when we are part of this game, we become
it: Sesling’s baseball is my baseball and is the baseball of all fans who have
surrendered themselves to this game. The memories we inhabit are conjoined, and
though we may seem to live and die for particular teams, it’s really one perpetual,
timeless game that defines our world.
Monday, November 18, 2019
THE CHIMERAS Written by Gérard de Nerval Translated by Henry Weinfield Illustrated by Douglas Kinsey
THE
CHIMERAS written by Gérard de Nerval, was originally published in 1854 in
French.
Though the collection contains only eight poems, it is a work of monumental genius.THECHIMERAS It is a vision of unfettered idealism, madness, hope, and despair—that blossoms into a beautiful sonnet sermon Nerval calls ‘Golden Verses’.
Though the collection contains only eight poems, it is a work of monumental genius.THECHIMERAS It is a vision of unfettered idealism, madness, hope, and despair—that blossoms into a beautiful sonnet sermon Nerval calls ‘Golden Verses’.
On page 21, Nerval
writes: “This sublime, insensate madman, it was he, one could be sure, / This
Icarus forgotten who again began to soar”. The myth of Icarus and Daedalus is a
cautionary tale. It is the story of a son who ignores his father’s wisdom and
flies to the sun—though he knew the wax would melt from his wings, and the
ocean would devour him. For Nerval characters like Icarus are heroes— martyrs
who died in the pursuit of idealism and truth. Nerval places figures like Icarus
alongside Christ and other prophets from often incongruous religions and myths.
Henry Weinfield’s brilliant English translation and Douglas Kinsey’s beautiful
illustrations add rich layers and levels of depth to this collection.
Weinfield’s and Kinsey’s THE
CHIMERAS, was my first time reading Nerval. When I first saw Weinfield’s
and Kinsey’s translation I was immediately drawn to the book’s cover art. It
has an illustration of a chimera on it. On the body of the chimera are white
lines, which reminded me of a cave painting. I randomly flipped the book open
to page 11 to a poem titled ‘Artemis’, and saw the lines:
“White roses fall! Profanation to our gods:
Fall, white phantoms, from your skies, scorched abodes:
—The saint of the abyss is more saintly to my eyes.”
The moment I read those lines I was mesmerized, and looked Nerval up on Google, to learn that he that was one of the great giants of French Romanticism. There are many books out there, and we all have only so much time to read. I only spend time reading books that expose me to perspectives and ideas that challenge my own, teach me valuable skills, and or make me a better person. Had any one of the three artists not done exceptional work I doubt I would have continued reading this book. Nerval and Weinfield have created poetry that is exceptionally beautiful and elegant. The poetry is complex and forces the reader to confront the inescapable darkness and egocentrism prevalent at the core of human nature.
“White roses fall! Profanation to our gods:
Fall, white phantoms, from your skies, scorched abodes:
—The saint of the abyss is more saintly to my eyes.”
The moment I read those lines I was mesmerized, and looked Nerval up on Google, to learn that he that was one of the great giants of French Romanticism. There are many books out there, and we all have only so much time to read. I only spend time reading books that expose me to perspectives and ideas that challenge my own, teach me valuable skills, and or make me a better person. Had any one of the three artists not done exceptional work I doubt I would have continued reading this book. Nerval and Weinfield have created poetry that is exceptionally beautiful and elegant. The poetry is complex and forces the reader to confront the inescapable darkness and egocentrism prevalent at the core of human nature.
Traditionally,
the sonnet was a form used to write love poems—and most sonnets were written in
praise of a woman and or her beauty. THE CHIMERAS is a sonnet sequence,
where the ‘truth’ is personified, and praised in verse—in Greek mythology, the
chimera is a female. In THE CHIMERAS the ‘truth’ that Nerval pines after
takes on the form of a chimera: many headed, strange bodied, etc— each sonnet in
the sequence forming one of the parts of the chimera. Since each individual
sonnet is a crossbreeding of various religions, and myths— each individual
sonnet can also be thought of as a chimera as well.
Growing
up I was raised in a bilingual family, and I never really thought too much
about what an accent meant until recently. An accent is the superpositioning of
one language and by extension one culture on another. Many immigrant families,
like my own, often find themselves negotiating and bartering two different cultures.
The task of the translator is similar to the aforementioned phenomenon—there is
a constant negotiation between different languages and the cultures. It is
particularly complex when translating work from a different time and poetic
tradition.
Translating between French and
English is particularly interesting because English is influenced heavily by
French and German. I have read before that the English of the ‘upper class’ was
derived more heavily from French, while the English of the lower classes was derived
more heavily from German. When reading a French to English translation, I would
expect to find these linguistic patterns also present in the resulting
translated work, and often do. Interestingly, Weinfield’s translation reads
more like the translation of a 1900’s-1950’s Greek Myth or Epic, than a French
poem. After reading Weinfield’s translation of THE CHIMERAS, I decided
to read several other translations of THE CHIMERAS as well.
Other translations of THE
CHIMERAS read more like a French to English translation, the expected
linguistic patterns finding their way into the poetry. Weinfield’s careful word
selection ensures that that the poetry has a unique ‘mythical’ tone to it. I
would also argue that it is the most faithful translation of THE CHIMERAS
I have read so far. Translating work this faithfully takes great skill. In the
poem “Myrtho”, Nerval’s writes “À ton front inondé des clartés d'Orient,”. Weinfield’s
translation reads, “Your forehead flooded by the Orient’s bright rays”. Weinfield
uses the uses the word “Orient” while other translators refrain from using it,
and instead write “morning light”, or “radiance of the East”. The reference to
Asia is lost when d’Orient is translated to “morning light” or “radiance of the
East”.
If the word orient wasn’t capitalized it would
simply mean “situated in or belonging to the East”— referring to the position
of the morning sun. Capitalizing the word ‘Orient’ carries a more Eurocentric
reference to Asia. Nerval wrote THE CHIMERAS, in the 1850’s in the heart
of European Imperialism. Around this time a great deal of Eastern scripture and
literature was being translated by the likes of Ralph T. H. Griffith, Max Muller, Karl Friedrich Neumann, and etc. The
word ‘Orient’ plays a critical role in THE CHIMERAS, since the book
draws from many myths and scriptures. Additionally, the Romanticist movement as
whole was heavily influenced by Eastern scripture and philosophy—so, changing
the word Orient drastically alters the meaning and decontextualizes of the poem.
In mythology Myrto is a Maenad, or a
female follower of Dionysus. Many translators change the name Iacchus to
Bacchus, possibly to make the poem more accessible to the reader. Though even
in mythology Bacchus is closely associated with Iacchus, they are not one and
the same. Iacchus is a minor god belonging to an agrarian cult, associated with
Demeter and Persephone; while Bacchus has been associated with several
different cults such as the hedonistic cult of Bacchus. Demeter and Persephone
play an important role in explaining the natural cycles of the world, life, and
death; while the cult of Bacchus was associated more so with sensual pleasures.
Translating Iacchus into the Bacchus completely strips the poem of its Eleusian
Mysteries (the agrarian cult) context. In the third verse of the poem “Myrtho”,
Weinfield’s translation reads “the volcano comes alive” while others translated
to “the volcano boiled up again”, and “I know why that volcano is aflame”. A
characteristic of many myths is the personification of natural phenomenon. In a
poem that draws very heavily on Greek Mythology, there is mountain of
difference between saying the “volcano is alive”, and “the volcano boiled up
again”. While the word alive is a personification of a natural event, the latter
are both retellings of an event. Myths serve many purposes—retelling events is
one of them, but another is explaining why they happened. If a child were to ask,
“why is there lava everywhere?”, “it boiled up again” does not adequately answer
why. On the other hand, “it came alive”, or “it was sleeping, and now it is
awake” not only answers what, but also provides a more satiating answer to why
something happened the way it did. Additionally,
using the word ‘alive’ as opposed to ‘boiled up again’ does a better job of
tying back into the narrative of Demeter and Persephone, the seasons, life and
death, etc.
Several years back when I was discussing
the work of Rabindranath Tagore with one of my Bengali friends, they explained to
me that Bengali is a very flowery language. He had me listen to Tagore in
Bengali, to get a better understanding of what the poem would have sounded like
in its original language. I don’t speak
French, so to get a better sense of what Nerval’s work sounds like, I listened
to several French readings of his poetry. When I compared Weinfield’s
translations with the translations of other English translators I found that
Weinfield’s was very close to Nerval’s original sound. Weinfield is an
accomplished poet with a great ear and captures Nerval’s melodies with precision.
Many poetry translators, especially with rhyming poetry, will try to force
rhymes just to maintain form—resulting in clunky writing. Weinfield’s
translation is very elegant—the rhymes and sounds, remarkably close to
Nerval’s.
Weinfield’s and Kinsey’s project
is unlike any other take on THE CHIMERAS: each of Nerval’s sonnets are
accompanied by one of the Kinsey’s illustrations. Each of the pieces are stylistically very
different. The illustration that goes alongside ‘Myrtho’ on page 3 looks a bit
like a Renaissance painting, while the painting on page 18 has a
post-Impressionist feel to it. However, each of the paintings are a blending of
many different styles—and any attempts at categorizing them would be
reductionist and do Kinsey’s work little justice. The artwork influences the
poems in a very interesting way. I find visual arts to be more accessible to my
eye than words and found myself first looking at the paintings, then reading
the poetry. Furthermore, since the paintings were laid out on the left side of
the book as opposed to the right side—I found myself taking a quick glimpse of
Kinsey’s art before reading each of the lines.
When we read English, most
of us, read from the left side to the right side of the page. In poetry the end
of each line functions as a soft pause, or a fractional comma or period. When
the paintings are laid out on the left side of the manuscript, the reader’s
eyes instinctually start on the left side and moves to the right again, where
it stops. Then it goes back to the left side where it catches a glimpse of
Kinsey’s painting before the next line is read. This to me was a bit like going
to a museum looking at a work of art, and then reading the label underneath it.
However, since the artwork and the sonnets were given equal page economy, the
reader looks at the artwork as they read the poems. Nerval’s sonnets on their
own are extremely complex and often the emotional power of the poems is muzzled
by the intellectual. Kinsey’s illustrations are abstract and use bold color
choices and patterns— this helps draw the emotions out of the poems, while at
the same time not forcing interpretation on the reader.
In
summation, I would like to thank Weinfield and Kinsey for the work they have
done. Had it not been for them, I would have never read Nerval’s magnificent
poetry. Thank you both for your remarkable work!
Tuesday, November 12, 2019
Keith Moul’s The Journal
“Like so many other men of his generation, the war was
transformative, making him almost mute on the subject,” writes Keith Moul of
his father, a veteran of World War II, in Moul’s foreword to his poetry
chapbook The Journal. My own father
was of this generation, and, like Moul and many other children of these
soldiers, my brothers and I grew up in an atmosphere largely defined by his
silence. We the nearness of history—the war was less than a decade distant. We
played with our toy guns and plastic soldiers, fought backyard battles, and
vanquished imaginary enemies. But though we were aware that our parent was a
human artifact of that “transformative” time, something about the cocoon of
silence around my father, a silence that seemed nurtured by our mother, kept us
from satisfying our curiosities about the war. Passively, we concluded that
this was what all men—all fathers—were like. We saw so many of them at family
and social gatherings, at church, working on our cars and plumbing, standing
behind the counters of our hardware and shoe stores.
The thing about monuments is that it becomes easy to
believe that they are stone all the way through, and so my brothers remained distant
from my father until his death. As the youngest, maybe because I was furthest
from the defining conflict, maybe because something in my own personality
allowed me to see through the chinks in my father’s rusting armor, I found a
softer parent. Maybe I created him myself. We became friends, my father and I,
but never companions—I learned no more about the war and what it had done to
him than had my siblings.
Keith Moul, a fellow child of a soldier, was gifted late
in life with a chance to peek into the inner life of a man whose life
experiences had made him hard to know. His father, he discovers, had kept a
journal for a short time while serving as a radar man on an aircraft carrier in
the South Pacific at the height of the war. Moul’s mother had held onto that
diary for years after his father’s death, passed the journal on to Moul’s
brother shortly before her own, and his brother gave it to him. As Moul writes
in “Silent Man,” “His silence lasted emptied almost fifty years . . . / I got
the journal on her death. I never knew/ his eloquence, his effort to write to
her his love,/ his sifting of boogies through tedium, the carrier/ tracing
burial sites over the ever-swirling waves.”
And thus, in this chapbook, The Journal, the reader participates in Moul’s creation of links to
a man long dead, to an experience his father kept to himself for “almost fifty
years.” Like an archaeologist, the poet uses the fragments his father leaves to
reconstruct an inner life that, had they not been discovered, would have
remained forever buried: Moul provides, in each of his pieces, first his
father’s journal entry, followed by a poem extrapolated from the detailed
experience. For example, in “The Axis,” we learn from the senior Moul’s entry
of March 26, 1944, this seemingly mundane fact: “Crossed the equator again
yesterday. This makes it about 15 times I have been across it.” From this
information son Keith hypothesizes about the inventorying—of trips, of planes,
of mines and bombs—that fill his father’s journal: “As it happened, even if
asleep at the crossing, he counted it;/ he captured it as an electric surge,
extending life, running life/ as if attached to a long umbilical, as if
overruling death’s generator.”
In “Darling Honey,” Moul quotes an entry from his father’s
journal intended to explain to the poet’s mother why there may have been a
lapse in his letters home: “I was scared a few days, and when you get that way,
you just can’t write, honey.” The son’s poem intuits his father’s feelings:
“Fear in battle . . . the momentary scare of known death/ on the deck, or
unknown death waiting for its moment/ . . . that reaper hanging above every
breath . . ./ This is why, dear, another letter may have failed,/ may have
given you the wrong impression of both me, now, and my universe of war.”
But Keith Moul’s poems in The Journal are more than an explanation or expansion of his
father’s wartime journal entries; they are also more than simple acts of
ventriloquism. Because of the son’s enrichment of the journal through his poetry,
the father is both memorialized and resurrected. The relationship between entry
and poem is both symbiotic and synergistic: the pair becomes a unit that not
only recreates the father’s past war experience, but fills a void in the poet’s
understanding of his father’s silence. The poem “The Fact of Circling Light,”
poses the question, “And what of coming generations amassing questions,/some
risking long stifled memory?” The answers to Moul writes are “too often wide of
the grisly mark, too grisly to confront.” The truth, however, is that by
inhabiting his father’s wartime experience, the son has forged both a truce and
truth from that silence. As Wordsworth states in the opening lines of his “Ode
on the Intimations of Immortality,” “the child is father of the man.” In a very
real sense, Moul himself in his poems has created the father he needed and
missed from his father’s brief journal entries. And through these poems, I find
that I myself gain insight into my own soldier-father’s silences.
Saturday, November 09, 2019
Sunday, November 03, 2019
That Swing Poems, 2008-2016 By X.J. Kennedy
That Swing
Poems,
2008-2016
By
X.J. Kennedy
John
Hopkins University Press
Baltimore,
Maryland
ISBN:
9781421422442
72
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
X.J.
Kennedy knows what he’s doing. Into his ninth decade he is one of a handful of
poetry grandmasters who revived the ongoing formalist tradition of rhyme and
meter, giving it new life and introducing original beats and jazzy tones. His
countermeasures against the status quo not only presented an alternative to the
undisciplined brand of free verse popular at the time, but rejected its mirror
image, the old, tired, formalist drivel being foisted by academia onto that unsuspecting
generation of long-suffering students.
Much
of Kennedy’s verse is light and funny, but not that light, and not that funny. He
has serious things to say and significant points to make. His accessible,
colloquial language and breezy wit disguise much. Kennedy’s new book entitled That Swing
promises a lot and delivers with a slew of good poems and a couple of great ones.
In
Lonesome George, the opening poem in the collection, Kennedy, somewhat
hilariously, meets and identifies with, an ancient giant tortoise showcased at
the Darwin Research Station, Puerta Ayora, Galapagos Islands. This tortoise is
rather special, the last of his subspecies. Watching this beast eat eelgrass,
cactus leaves, and catch the occasional fly, the poet clearly recognizes
telltale signs of kinship,
… Dead-ending male,
lone emblem of despair,
he
slumps on his kneecaps, tail
antennaing the air.
For
a long moment we bind
Sympathetic looks,
we
holdouts of our kind,
like rhymed lines, printed books.
Kennedy’s
poem entitled Insanity in the Basement dishes out the smells and sights of an
early twentieth century man-cave presided over by Kennedy’s father. Once the
reader gets by the fish guts (toasted over furnace coals) , the rabbit cadavers
(victims of coal fuel vapors), and Uncle Bill (who, expelled by his wife from
his own home for a ‘twitching’ proclivity, was recovering nicely on the mohair
sofa), he or she will marvel at this truly marvelous haven. Women visitors,
however, were not encouraged to visit these subterranean environs. Kennedy
explains,
And
when fish-hating Uncle Norman’s reel
Cranked
in a tuna fit for Gargantua’s meal,
Who
had to be that fish’s glad receiver?
My
old man. Whipped out his butcher’s cleaver
And
in our basement took a vicious whack
At
its backbone, causing the blade
To
take off into space. It made
Straight
for my mother, missed her by an inch.
She
wasn’t one to flinch
But
dryly said, Good Shot.
Occasionally
in Kennedy’s poems one can hear the classic tones of other practitioners of
narrative poetry, especially pieces ending in twists of irony. Think Edward
Arlington Robinson. One such piece Kennedy calls Progress. In this poem Kennedy
tells the story of his father, a very good bookkeeper, who was replaced by an
early form of automation, the Burroughs adding machine. The powerful skills
that once provided essential human dignity lose their value in this brave new
world of mechanized progress. Here is Kennedy’s penultimate ironic twist,
…my
father saw that his number
Would
shortly be up. As he feared,
Anybody
could tug on a handle
And
an accurate total appeared.
They
broke the news to him gently,
They
professed their profound regret
And
presented him, not with a pension,
With
a pen and pencil set.
For
a time he displayed it proudly
Till
the pencil had to be tossed
When
it wouldn’t quite twist as it used to
And
the cap of the pen got lost.
The
poet details an epic dance scene, set in a nursing home, in his poem Invitation
to Dance. Through eighteen stanzas Kennedy rivets the attention of his readers
(How is this possible!) with humanity, elderly humor, and an exhilarating sense
of existential joy. The words in this piece seem to dance off the page. Even
the dark humor rises a couple of notches to a musical grin. Consider these
stanzas,
Now
out on the floor move the hesitant dancers:
And
two-fingered Fein bows to Mag O’Quin.
Tim
Mudge finds his feet, takes a break from quaking,
Screws
his courage to sticking point, soon cuts in.
Now
women and men into dance steps stumble,
All
hatched from the shells of their separate woes.
Their
crutches and walkers and canes forgotten,
With
slow steps they weave the design of a rose.
“Circle
round!” hollers Mabel. “Once more now, me dearies!
You
wheezing old engines, set wheels to the track!”
In
the thud of their heavy steps nobody notices
Finver
slump to the floor with a last heart attack.
My
favorite poem in Kennedy’s collection is In the Motel Office. Somehow, around a
horrifying vignette of loneliness, old age, and illness, Kennedy weaves another
tale, a farcical one. Here the distasteful greed and low brow ethics of a motel
staffer takes center stage, showing the poet’s insightful comprehension of
human nature. The predator sizes up his prey while conversing in the heart of
the poem,
Jesus,
Jack.
What’s
this, a hospital we’re running here?
I bet there’s dough or something in
his bags.
Used
underwear, you mean.
And something better, Christ,
You see him sign in? Face all gray?
He drags
Like one whole side of him is
paralyzed
And coughs up black blood on the frigging
pen
And when he breaks his wallet out the
green
Is like he robbed a bank.
Dreaming
again! Another get-rich-quick. I never seen
A
guy like you.
You mean a guy that claims
The chips left lying around…
Memorable.
Timeless. Tragically funny. Yes, X.J. Kennedy knows what he’s doing.
Saturday, November 02, 2019
Women Musicians Network 23rd annual concert, Thursday, Nov. 7th Berklee Performance Center
23rd annual concert, Thursday, Nov. 7th
Berklee Performance Center
Kirk Etherton
I think this is Boston's best annual concert: completely different every year, extremely diverse and very high quality. Often, I run into people who share my opinion.
I met a very interesting Berklee student a few years ago (she was older, having taught classical piano at a university in Japan before discovering jazz, and eventually getting a full scholarship to Berklee).
This woman knew music--travelled widely, had her own radio show, etc.--and she insisted, "This is the best annual concert anywhere! For me, missing this show would be musical tragedy."
As always, it's at the B.P.C. and focuses on Berklee women students and their bands from around the world, plus special guests.
There are 10 (yes, ten) original acts again this year, ranging from Cuban Jazz and Flamenco, to Korean Folk, R&B, and Poetry set to music and dance.
The WMM concert (and its co-founder / leader / host, Lucy Holstedt) has gotten special commendations from the Cambridge Mayor's Office and the Mass. House of Representatives, and been featured on WGBH's "Eric in the Evening."
I hope to see you there.
Women Musicians Network
23rd annual concert
Berklee Performance Center
8:00 pm - 9:30 pm
Tickets: only $10 in advance / $15 day of show
www.berklee.edu/BPC
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Directed by Lucy Holstedt.
Supported by Berklee's Center for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion & the Office of External Affairs, plus Boston Union Realty.
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