Review of Rosie Rosenzweig’s Bring Me Into Flesh, reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

 

Review of Rosie Rosenzweig’s Bring Me Into Flesh, reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

            The poems Rosie Rosenzweig shares in her latest book, Bring Me Into Flesh, illustrate, with passion, bravery, and quiet contemplation, the enigma of our humanness: we yearn for a sensed spiritual wholeness that transcends the self while being bound by the physical limitations of our bodies, linear time, and language. Rosenzweig’s poems explore the ways memory, ritual, and symbol aid us in our quest to gain/regain connection to a power beyond our temporal experience. In her poetry, her personal journey entails the use of her Jewish immigrant background as a lens through which she can examine her personal and cultural history: for her, memory and ritual, and symbol are both the subject and means to transcendence.

            The title poem of the collection suggests a timeless, out of body perspective from which the narrator observes the joyful, “loved” young woman who, after she “blossomed into blush” and was “courted, possessed, then, catching her breath, taken to bride,” will literally “bring [the narrator] into flesh.” In the following poem, “Hush, the baby is awake!” we find the newborn, “Newly turned from the other world,” helpless now, dependent on her “mother, brimming with milk” who “raised and rocked me with a Yiddish lullaby.”  As the child grows, she becomes connected to her history through the baby-sitter her mother selected, a “Yiddish landsman, the old world countryman,” who, in the poem “Communal Bathroom,” “enlivened a young girl’s innocence,/ and initiated her ongoing quest for words.” Memory and language are associated, in that the first can only find definite form in the latter. In “The Haskalah,” the poet “dreams” into the present the life of her father before she was born, “a Polish cantor, a peddler,” “busheling out his songs, up and down Canadian streets.”

            The young narrator of “Migration: After Moshe” imagines herself the spiritual partner of birds, like an eagle: “floating to the highest seaside crags/ I held the air still, and dived with needle sharp aim.” She senses no limits to her power, when, as a plover now, “my hunger emboldened me to pick the teeth of crocodiles, and, finally, as the “original Bird of Paradise,” she envisioned herself “with a wing span towering over the curving earth,” and “cradled it in my fine-haired palm.” But the poet, though she hopes to imitate the birds, is separate from them, bound by her humanness; she abandons study (“undid myself from my desk”) to approach a flock of geese whose flight and landing have mesmerized her, but even as she “reached to touch them” and found herself beginning to become absorbed into their world, the geese are startled into flight: “Their thunder/ struck me just ten yards short with my loss caught, heavy and round, like an apple in my throat.” The fruit of knowledge, then, chokes the poet, reminding her of the separation she hoped to transcend.

            In “The Boy I Didn’t Marry,” we see the poet vitalize a memory of a fantasy love from high school, putting to use a poet’s skill with language she gained after a life’s experience: “Tortured by convention and conscience/ structured into the wannabe writer’s role, I traveled far to find this exact and skillful experience.” Yet, the poet laments, “All I have now is this forensic vapor of memory,/ a scene that may have never happened./ All really have now are these words.” The poet has preserved, even, perhaps, created, memory in language, but is that enough?

            The poems in Part Two of Bring Me Into Flesh continue the poet’s search for transcendence, the promise of which is suggested in “A Wash of Waves,” in which the narrator finds the rhythm of the waves connecting her to memories, but not just “[a] roll of facts/ that photograph the mood”; what “moves” her is “not just arms and legs,/ but body, breath and sound,/ singing to the sea/ in me.” Ritual and symbol connect the poet to memory. In “The Western Wall,” she describes “a wall whose words rise up from the sealed bonds of memory./ Hymns sound, spread and fly/ like the preened wings of birds.” The words of the hymns rise, and “[t]he wall grows bright and brighter at each round.” “Daughter to these prayers,” the poet asks, “ can I . . . blend with the sun and moon and stars?/ I want to be the wall. . . /Yearning to become one mouth with You / I crave to sing in choir, note by note, to rebuild rock by pillar,/ And to become myself with You.”

            Still, the poet realizes in “Malignant,” a word which causes “a mortal hush,” we must struggle to find solace in our physical, temporal world in which “catastrophe chastens me”; though she wished for a prayer that would “gather, build, and protect us/ with the promise of never-ending life, and “sages say this life is a waiting room for the next,” she puzzles over “which door leads to which and why?” Ultimately, she offers comfort through a reminder of the cycle of life, “flowers blooming, rising, praising their time to live/ and their time to seed.”

            The quest for transcendence is not achieved easily, as old forms may provide wisdom, but fail in the moment. In “Remember the flesh-pots of Egypt,” the poet acknowledges that “Freedom does not undo the harm/ of old time sin,” and that, ultimately, “our minds [are] still enslaved with memory. Unhappiness can lead to thoughts or actual attempts at suicide, a false route to transcendence, as the would-be suicide hopes in “145 Tofrinals”: “Take me, take me,/ take me to my home in the clouds.      Rosenzweig examines the difficulty in finding a route to inner peace in a world full of personal pain in many of the poems of Part Three of Bring Me Into Flesh. In “The Waiting Room,” the narrator imagines “Hari Krishnas chanting” as she is anesthetized, and “float[s] up/dying to live among the clouds. . . /and I sink lazily into a soft silk sky,/ until a steadfast booming voice disagrees:/ “Return! You have a lot of work to do.” Several of the poems that follow suggest a breakdown where old forms fail to resolve the narrator’s inner turmoil, as in “The Double Room,” in which she states, “A mind takes at least three months to turn, / to even find the corner to turn,” yet “She tried to say the watchword prayer: ‘Hear of Israel. God is One,’ but/ a ratcheting wheel of sobs turned her mouth closed.” Poems titled “My First Shrink Said . . .”, “Relapse,” and “Group Therapy,” convey the narrator’s struggle to establish a secure grounding, the last concluding with a shred of hope that transcendence is possible: “I enter this room, receipt in hand,/ all paid up for healing/ to play with hope/ and the comforting shelter/ of wings to inspire me once again.”

            The poet’s struggle to find inner peace and ultimate transcendence is shown again in “Heaven must be a Stand of Lilies,” in which the narrator hopes to see “tall stand of rube-rum lilies,” but, though “hunched” in prayer, can see “no lilies blooming on this carpet floor.” Instead, she “afflict[s] my soul and reads the ritual list of all I did, almost did, or didn’t even do.” At the end of ineffectual prayer, she is left longing “for language to lift me like a shofar’s blast,/ to lift and alight me in a wisp of wind/ that catches fragrance, please,/ and transforms,/ like sacrifice into a perfume for the Force of all that lives.”

            Rosenzweig nears the close of Part Three of Bring Me Into Flesh with her poem “Caught in the Cave,” in which she meditatively “dreams” while “cross-legged and “open-palmed” of emerging from a cave of ignorance, doubt, and guilt. As she emerges, she is unsure if the spiritual guide she sees is “my guide Elijah in disguise dressed like me?” Is the “glimpse of light,” the “bright shining mist . . . a mirror or a doorway to the sky?” The poem ends with the hope that she has escaped herself as she prepares to leave the cave, as “The sky rolls out its sun, redeeming me./ I start to climb the never-ending path.”

            Part Four of Rosenzweig’s book reveals the narrator moving toward the redemption/transcendence she seeks. History, memory and ritual provide the faith to “hear but not quite sing” the song that emerges from “old volcanic rock,” “the dark past,”
“Hebraic cantillations” and is part of herself, “running unseen in the hidden chambers of my ribs.” Emphasizing that the song can be heard in the “rising and falling of a scribe writing on parchment,” she seems to accept the biblical direction to “choose life, walk between/ the parting waves, to the music that I am, have been,/ and always will be.”

Accepting the song, the narrator hopes, means accepting herself, perhaps as the transcriber or “minstrel” of the biblical message.

            In Rosenzweig’s poem, “In the Meditation Hall: At Bhante Gunaratana’s Silent 10-day Jhana Retreat,” the poet furthers the meditative pose she assumed in “Caught in the Cave.” Her silent meditation brings forth memory and history, “Mother, Father, . . . Sister, Brother . . . our Holocaust family, long gone. In the silence, Buddhist names are “a mere chill from an open window, and the “wordplay” of the “mystical rabbis/Whom I’ve studied for decades” are unavailable “in this sangha of silence Without End.” But in this enforced silence of a Buddhist form, the narrator hears the opening of Jewish prayer: “Hear O Israel,” ultimately discovering that “You can hear the unshackling/ of the fettered shells of the mind.”

            Paradoxically, a poem is an expression of the ineffable—perhaps it is up to the poet to come as close as is possible to committing spiritual experience to language. This is the awesome responsibility Rosenzweig confronts in “Let Me Not Be Afraid,” subtitled “A Prayer to Pray.” “Let me not be afraid of Your letters,” she writes. In them, she hears “an echo/ Sparking images of the first creation . . . / and all sensation/ Becomes a silent rush toward the curved embrace of time.” “If I could  close my eyes and remember You  who . . . can make the tablets bloom/ with holiness,” the poet writes, she could get “honey from a rock . . wrestle with an angel/ Know my true name and not fall/ A victim to this wall of chatter.” The poet prays for the holy power to know herself, which might give her the power to translate her experience into language: “Give me the power of the first aleph,/ The soundless sound before the first word./ . . . Before my long journey into meaning.”

            Prayer for Rosenzweig takes the form of the poem, and our observance of and participation with of her struggle to put that experience into words becomes part of the holiness of her endeavor. 

From the Bloc 11 Cafe: Ajda the Turkish Queen

Ajda: The Turkish Queen at the Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square

By Doug Holder



Ajda Snyder is a talented singer/songwriter, who met with me at my usual spot at the Bloc 11 Cafe in Somerville, MA. She told me that she has lived in these environs since 2012. Snyder said of our city,  " I love it here. I would like to buy a place, but it is just too expensive."

Snyder describes her music as a confluence between the East and the West. She reports, " My music has been described as roots mixed with the ethereal." Snyder, a graduate of the Berklee School of Music in Boston, said as a kid she was inspired by Judy Garland.. She started performing in the Houston, Texas Public School System when she was growing up.

Snyder told me she recorded at the famed BC35 Studio in Brooklyn, NY. This studio was founded by Martin Bisi , and has recorded members of the Sonic Youth, Swans, White Hills, JG Thirlwell, Cop Shoot Cop, Live Skull reunion, Pop 1280, The Dresden Dolls, Alice Donut, Lubricated Goat, Sxip Shirey, Parlor Walls and many more....

Ajda plays a number of instruments including: the mandolin, guitar, melodica, organ, piano and the banjo.

I listened to one of her songs, "Bobby's Car." It takes place in one of the more carnal places--none-other than a car. The tune is evocative, a sad/sweet homage, to a long lost love. Her voice is hypnotic--it seems to float through the air like an early morning mist.

Ajda is a voice teacher as well. She teaches privately at a shared-studio in Boston, and at Somerville's " Union Lesson Studios," right above the Bloc 11.

Ajda has played in many Somerville venues, such as the defunct Johnny D's, the Arts Armory, and elsewhere.

Snyder credits a former roommate, and  a one-time drummer for the Dresden Dolls-- Brian Viglione, as helping her get started--with his extensive contacts and his collaboration on any number of projects.

Snyder who founded the band "Black Fortress of Opium," as well as others" is focusing on " Ajda: The Turkish" band for now.

To find out more about Ajda  go to:
https://ajdatheturkishqueen.com/
 

IBBETSON STREET 46 READING: Feb 10, 2020

(Somerville, MA.)


  The Ibbetson Street Press  (http://ibbetsonpress.com) which was founded in Somerville in 1998 by Doug Holder, Richard Wilhelm, and Dianne Robitaille, announces a release party for the 46th issue of  Ibbetson Street magazine. The reading will be held at the "Remnant," a brewery located in the Bow St.Market in Somerville.  A potluck dinner will start the festivities off  from 6PM to 7PM and the reading will be from 7PM to around 9PM. Some of the contributors to this issue are: Ed Meek, Ted Kooser, Linda Conte, Marge Piercy, Tomas O'Leary, DeWitt Henry and others. There is also an interview with the late owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop Ifeanyi Menkiti with Doug Holder.

***Ibbetson Street is affiliated with Endicott College in Beverly, MA.


Remnant Brewery   https://www.remnantsomerville.com/      Admission is free. Open to Public.

Review of Marc D. Goldfinger’s Heroin’s Harbour

Review of Marc D. Goldfinger’s Heroin’s Harbour ( Ibbetson Streeet Press) by Gregory J. Wolos

The Split Man

            Heroin’s harbor is the addict, as Marc D. Goldfinger’s collection of poems and stories, Heroin’s Harbour makes harrowingly clear. Heroin is the body of the addict that craves the drug, and it’s the mind of the addict that cooperates with the insistent body, paradoxically rationalizing any action that might provide safe harbor for a poison. Human beings are frail things, ultimately, Goldfinger’s poems and stories illustrate, too weak to commit to our resolutions or to stave off gratifications that have become needs. Goldfinger’s work does more than merely describe the habits, lifestyle, and thoughts of a junkie; he takes his reader hostage, straps us to the back of his motorcycle so that we do more than simply observe—we participate. Goldfinger’s craft enables us, along with him, to feel the needle and the need.

            In “A Junkie’s Prayer,” one of the first poems in the first section of Heroin’s Harbour, “An Epistle to Opium,” the reader is told what the junkie prays for: not redemption, not relief, not freedom from addiction. The narrator of this poem is so embedded in his world of dependency—the “harbor” of the drug—that what is prayed for are his most immediate needs: “please keep our needles disease free”; “keep us safe from those who would poison our dope”; “keep the police the police from our door”; “keep us free from abscess.” What is prayed for is not an escape, but that “heroin’s sweet sleep” will “ease the pain that lives within our hearts.” The junkie does not beg for a way out and doesn’t seem to want one, asking only that God “keep watch over the farmers and the fields of poppies they tend.”

            A poem like “What Would You Do for a Fix?” lacks a religious core, but uses liturgical “call and response” and repetition to emphasize the all-encompassing nature of a junkie’s need. In this poem, there are sins against the family: “For a fix/ I would steel my mother’s purse; For a fix/ I would take my sister’s coin collection; For a fix/ I would desert my children.” There are sins against the purity of his own body: “For a fix/ I would risk hepatitis; For a fix/ I would shoot toilet water.” There are sins against society: “For a fix/ I would take the money out of the pocket of an unconscious man on the street, For a fix / I would sell dangerous drugs to novices.” Later in the poem, further biblical allusion occurs in another repeated construction: “In the beginning, I got high because I liked it./ In the end I got high because it was all I had left . . . In the beginning I got high because I was searching for the way./ In the end I got high because I was searching for the way out.” As the narrator concludes in “I Have Trouble with Names”: “Some of us name the Gods. / I have trouble with names.”

            Love itself for the junkie isn’t to be found through religion, as Goldfinger testifies in “Drug Store Christ (Heist): “They tell me to turn to Jesus Christ/ Just wait till I do this drug store heist/ . . . ‘Well, we found God/Just sittin’ in the safe of that drug store.’” And True Love for one’s significant other, as described in “Junkie Love” means “giving her the biggest hit,” or when you’re strung out and broke and don’t ask her to hit the streets.”

            Again and again, Goldfinger repeats the message stated in “Death Trippin,” one of the poems written in hard driving couplets that he suggests are “songs” but are all the more frightening in that they come off more as feverish rants: “One thing I know, Heroin’s the best/ For nullifying the pain that’s in my chest.” The shift from reading Goldfinger’s poems to reading his short stories is like a shift from listening to songs to watching a movie that uses those songs as background music. The refrain stated in the poem “Getting Fixed in South Carolina”: “addiction only remembers what it needs” throbs through the prose of stories that describe in detail the underworld of junkies. There are stories about dealing with crooked pharmacists and hard-ass police (“A Controlled Dangerous Substance Act”); stories about navigating life with various women who shared the narrator’s addictions (“Femme Fatale”); stories about obtaining prescriptions from doctors (“Running on Empty in Vermont”); stories about living in filth and failing to care for those innocents for whom you’re responsible (“Two Dogs and a Kitten”). The long poem “Getting Fixed in South Carolina” is itself expanded into a short story that depicts the life-threatening hazards a junkie will undertake to satisfy his habit. These stories powerfully convey the life of addicts whose focus is reduced to remembering “what it needs.” But even detailed stories are insufficiently descriptive, Goldfinger asserts in “The Rocking Chair,” which shows a recovering junkie’s return home to aged and ailing parents: “The imagination is limited when it comes to the real. Things get left out.”

            Recovery for the junkie seems a struggle doomed to Sisyphean failure. In his second section of poems, “The Fight to Stay Clean,” Goldfinger presents several portraits of those lost to drugs (“Medusa with Fire,” “One of the Tough Guys,” “Significant Other,” “Open Casket,” “The Way She Shakes”), or those who will be (“A Couple of Kids”). But there is a whisper of hope in the sisterhood of “The Angels of Gloucester,” who “walk an ancient path now, join hands at signs of trouble, hug each other’s children, knit their families into hot strong blankets with threads of prayer.” Ultimately, Goldfinger points to the necessity of the recovering junkie never losing sight of the fact that he is “The Split Man”: two alternate realities, this poem illustrates, are perpetually present, contending for the junkie’s heart: “I am the happy married man/ the junkie in the street begging/ the house-owner sitting  sitting at my computer/ in the bathroom sticking a needle in my arm . . . / I am a split man, this half of me dances with joy/ I am a split man, this half of me is dying day by day/ I can choose, I can stand by a lake holding the hand of my wife/ or my choices are gone, I probe my arm looking for a vein.”

            With devastating honesty and heartbreaking detail, Marc D. Goldfinger offers in his poems and stories glimpses into the lives of tortured souls who have abandoned themselves to an all-consuming, unsafe harbor. “A junkie’s body never forgets,” he concludes in the poem “All of Me”: “If it was just physical, I would never use dope/ again. It is not my body, it is me, all of me, my body, my soul, my mind/ interlocked in heroin hypnosis, even/ free, I will never be free again.” Goldfinger’s words seem less buoys warning of an unsafe passage than a testament to the hope of a single split man’s survival.

Doug Holder interviews poet Dennis Daly

Worcester County Annual Poetry Contest: Frank 0'Hara Prize: Judge Doug Holder

Click on Picture to Enlarge

                      ****                  Just a reminder that folks need to have a connection to Worcester County, or be WCPA members, to have their submission qualify for the contest.
                     

Sarah Kramer: The Artisan's Asylum's Dinosaur Lady.

                               

SARAH KRAMER

           
 
                                                                   By Doug Holder



I met crafter Sarah Kramer at the Artisan's Asylum right outside Union Square in Somerville. This is where Kramer works amidst all the high tech gadgetry, and cutting-edge art the other members are involved with. She talked with me about her craft-- creating what she calls semi-saurs which in a nutshell is taking small plastic dinosaur figurines, cutting them in half, add a magnet, and let the consumer mix and match body parts of many types of dinosaurs. She also makes gift magnets, with intriguing images under glass. She places them in gift boxes with colorful Japanese Washi paper.

Kramer lived in Somerville for three years. She now lives in Somerville with her husband. Kramer laughed and said, " I made a big sacrifice moving to Somerville--giving up a rent-stabilized apartment in New York City for love."

Kramer has quite the eclectic background. She studied theatre at New York University, as well as the Lee Strasberg's "Actors Studio". She has worked on the technical side of theatre.  She had a stint  on  the play "Heidwig and the Angry Inch," as well as working on the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.

The she found another calling. That was-- tutoring students for the Law School Admission Standardized Test. She told me, " I love to use logic in my teaching. This was a great fit for me. I helped students prepare for the test, and even more importantly I helped with deciding if the law was the right fit for them."

Unfortunately, the black dogs of depression found her, and she was unable to teach this demanding material. She went through a number of clinical trials. She was in a major study at Mass. General Hospital about the use of the drug Ketamene. With Ketamine her depression lifted, but there was still cognitive impairment from the many treatments of  ECT, and the other drugs she has taken over the years.

Kramer told me that she buys mini plastic dinosaurs on Amazon.She uses a drill press to secure a space for the magnets inside of the inanimate creatures. They have been quite popular, according to Kramer, and  she is starting to make a small profit.
.
Kramer hopes to get back to teaching, but for now her little creatures, magnets occupy her time, and keeps her creative juices flowing here--in the-Paris of New England.

For more information about Kramer and her work:  go to  https://www.somervillemedia.org/som-arts-semi-saurs-with-sarah-kramer/

Jacob Kramer: A children's writer who brings noodles and critters to life.

Jacob Kramer: A children's writer who brings noodles and critters to life.

By Doug Holder

Jacob Kramer met me at my perch in the backroom of the Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square, Somerville. The fireplace was on full blast—to foil the frigid winter winds just outside the window. Kramer, is a youngish man with a scruffy beard, and wears his long hair in a ponytail. I noticed something wide and child-like in his eyes—undoubtedly some seminal flame that still burns with a kid's wonder.

Kramer is a graduate of Harvard University, and has lived in our burg for six years. Originally from Providence, Rhode Island, he lives in what I consider a well-appointed spot in Union Square—close to that U.N. of  supermarkets, Market Basket. Kramer told me,“ I love Somerville—I have a number of friends here. The Somerville Arts Council has been very supportive of my work, not to mention the Somerville Public Library, Porter Square Books, and the Somerville Museum.”

Kramer revealed to me that a person has to have a good sense of humor to be a children's writer. He elaborated, “ You have to try to understand what you care about, and why you care about it on the most basic level. Then you have to deliver to your audience. And for children that means delivering it in the most straightforward way.

I asked Kramer if his study of film at Harvard informed his work as children' writer. He replied, “ With film making you have to think in scenes, cuts and edits. This is in some ways like my genre of writing. You always have to have a page turner to keep the kid's attention. You have to have one scene, then cut to the next surprise on the following page.”

Kramer's beautifully illustrated book “Noodlephant” is about a bunch of despotic kangaroos, who take over the production and distribution of noodles, much to the chagrin of noodle-loving elephants and other critters. It is a story which has a social message—and Kramer, as an activist, is very much into this kind of narrative. Kramer opined, "Kids have a natural interest in what's fair, and what is not. So this kind of theme will appeal to them."

Kramer also wrote a light verse book that he calls “Critterverse.” He feels light verse is sometimes looked down on as too shallow or trite, but he finds that it can be a teaching tool for kids, as it mixes easier and harder words. Kramer feels the kids will understand the harder words through the context of the story. He believes that kids are intuitive, so they don't always need a parent next to them to explain things."

The illustrator Kramer often works with is K-Fai Steele. Her vivid and colorful work goes well with the inventive text.

Kramer is a man with many interests. He was a founding member of the Union Square Neighborhood Council, and has worked to make sure that the community's interests are met by the developers of Union Square.

Kramer told me he is writing a sequel to “ Noodlephant, "Okapi Tale," and if I were you, I would secure an advance copy as soon as they are available.


To find out more about Kramer go to:    

http://jacobkramer.com

Ibbetson Street 46: Due out Next Month!

Well--  we ordered a number of sample copies of the new issue from our printer-- if those are okay-I hope to be sending comp copies to contributors by early to mid January.... A little late this year--but it will be worth it!  You will notice the wonderful front cover photo from photographer Bonnie Matthews Brock.   *** Ibbetson Street is formally affiliated with Endicott College in Beverly, MA.

The Human Half: Poems by Deborah Brown

The Human Half: Poems

by Deborah Brown

Rochester, NY: BOA Editions Ltd., 2019

$17.00

ISBN 978-1-942-68382-7

Reviewed by David P. Miller

In The Human Half, Deborah Brown wrests vitality and insight from doubts, contradictions, cul-de-sacs, and seemingly wrong turns. Her rich, unexpected diction reminds us that each starting point is fraught with multiple, buried potentials. Nevertheless, our lives’ permanent unpredictability need not be simply disorienting; with proper attention, we can understand, maybe experience, fluidity and depth.

“Voices,” the opening poem, testifies to the slippery relationships of sound with speech, speech with identity and personhood. At the start, something has gone missing:

                This isle, my ear, is empty.

Before, voices hummed in my ears,

they piled up, black cannon balls

stacked on the town green, geometric,

perfect, all memory of death

swept under June’s mown carpet.

Many different things occur here. The remarkable image of voices as cannon balls pivots into their assurance and tangibility. At the same time, their perfection is petrified, as the speaker can’t help but bring death into the picture. In any event, the voices no longer have stability: they mutate into other sounds, vocal and otherwise, “rarely songs.” She wishes “for tones / that shimmer, sounds that twangle, a poem / in the swill of speech” but must settle for “dried peas in a coffee can. The day rattles / empty as a gourd.” Notice that although she concludes “My ear’s been alone too long”, it’s clear from the language itself that her ear is well and thoroughly tuned, whether to voices or tones.

There are poems that suggest a difficult family history, often embedded in seemingly simple memories. In “The Unpainted House,” the speaker as young girl has either just fallen from her first bicycle or is “on my knees in the woods / scraping pine needles left and right / with cupped hands to make neat trails.” One or the other (or both) of these moments is wedded to remembered voices both definite and tentative:

[ . . . ] From the woods –

I think I heard it—anger so loud

trees and rocks and earth piles trembled

and then—I think I remember it—

a screen door from its hinge

left to flap like a demented tongue.

The rage that disables the door from speaking carries forward in an encounter with a mother, likely in later life, bound up again with voices both frank and stifled:

I hear my voice, stuck in memory,

“Pull your nightgown down, Mother.”

And my name in my mother’s voice,

a growl in her throat, the taste of tannin

and fear in my mouth, the burnt

crust of the edge of ever[y]day.

In “What I Know About the Night Sky,” Deborah Brown fuses the qualities of light and darkness, almost to suggest them as inextricable. “The new moon is never visible / on the night of the New Moon.” There’s a failure, as the night betrays its own name, “though when the sky is darkest / you sometimes see fireballs flash.” This image pivots in two more lines to the speaker’s brother, suffering during that same night the explosions of electric shock therapy. At the same time, light arrives from a dead time: “Andromeda / so many light years away that the rays / I see tonight were emitted / when wooly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers / roamed here.” A moonless night named for a moon; light in the night sky like the bursts in a wounded brain; starlight from a possibly extinct source; and finally

The next day my brother

reaches out to me from the darkness

he’s wrapped in. He tests the light.

Many poems in The Human Half express the radical uncertainty of knowledge, or instability of perception, with what appear to be simple premises that go to pieces as one contingency evokes the next, the poems escaping the speaker’s (and reader’s) control. “Here’s Looking” is an outstanding example. The lead-in title evokes “here’s looking at you,” and at first the poem seems genially autumnal: “at the way fingers of birches tangle / as roots reach up, reach out”. That’s the first couplet; the second quickly undoes it: “at the row of colored bottles lined up / that you’re taking aim at”. While in that first line, the bottles could have been decorative finds or souvenirs, with the second there’s immediate violence or its threat. This pace slides into further rapid-fire images of danger and threat:

and at the mulberry bush we hid under

together and at the father speeding

into the garage, ramming the bins

after you jump out of the way

There’s an attempt to recover with another “Here’s looking” and some quiet expressions – “through the keyhole, out the window, / down the rabbit hole” but that can’t be sustained either. The poem hurtles toward a conclusion of forced looking/refusal to look. The title finally becomes impossible, with even “Here” unbearable:

Am I still looking for, at, out

for you? Not. And not

under the bed. Looking past

the house, the car, the guns.

“What to Call a Chicken,” complete in six couplets, similarly seduces at its opening with a curious question: “Why call a chicken a chicken when you could / see it as a yellow feather in the eye of the morning?” An interesting, fresh metaphor. Then, as with “Here’s Looking,” the poem plummets almost instantly, one image falling into another in stunning succession. An unsettled farm (“the broken eggs, the goat’s sad bleat”) slides through an empty bed to an empty, collapsing house (“the shattered wall, the crumbling / bedroom door”) , to hanging, crumbling stone and even a snow that fails:

The stone wall has toppled all over itself,

the snow failed its banks, its whiteness.

Quieter on the surface, but finally as unsettled, “The Green Scent of Snow” begins with a modest sensory image:

Snowfall fills the crevices

in my dreams, a scent fresh

as green. My neighbor

leaves for the night shift,

snowbanks reflect car lights.

Looking into the night, the speaker searches for Pluto but remembers it’s not possible with the naked eye: “Another one / not seen anymore.” That disappearance is followed by an understatement of willful collective suicide: “We clear our neighborhood / of the atmosphere we need to live.” A state of complete obscurity, created by us, ends this brief poem:

For weeks now no one in Beijing

has seen a neighbor

walk through the thick gray air

towards her at noon.

Although every perception is provisional, every conviction unstable, what consistently stands out in these poems is a lack of rhetorical distress. There’s no melodrama in Deborah Brown’s language: the insecurity of our existence comes through in what almost seems like a succession of rudimentary facts.

This selection doesn’t do justice to The Human Half’s range of tone and subject matter. There are insightful ekphrastic poems, such as “In Black and White and Red,” concerning a painting by Matisse, and “A Woman Holds a Balance in Jan Vermeer’s Painting.” In contrast with Matisse’s work, where a female model representing a maid is subjugated to function as a compositional/color element, the Vermeer painting seems to model the speaker’s own longings for reason and harmony. “A Woman” is also one of the few poems in the book that speaks in short lines, and the only one with lines of a single word. Its line-broken diction skillfully enacts its images, as in:

of this

derangement of mind

and senses inflicted

on me—perhaps not

on me alone—

“Various Rains” stands out with the remarkable imagination brought to bear on its subject. These rains are sometimes personified (“sooty city rain that grabs your lapels”), sometimes not (“rain full of molasses”).  Each has an unexpected relationship with human moods or emotions, but resists stereotyped associations, as the feeling-tone of each is experienced for itself.

“In the Snowfield,” the book’s concluding poem, evokes blankness, a potential fall off the edge into a void. At the same time, this hazard is countered by her actions and the imagination she brings to the place:

[ . . . ] My skis

carve an equator. The wind

sketches meridians. So much

that I see is not there.

The map I make

guides me through the blank fields.

But these markings are provisional, to be taken back by the world which includes us but does not depend on us. “The straight lines / are longing. Drifts / erase our path.” We desire, we pass through. We leave our traces, we are erased. Until then, as “In the Cambrian” reminds us, there is “that flare of life in me, through you.”

Poet Lyn Lifshin has passed at 77.

  The " Queen" of the small press-- poet Lyn Lifshin has passed at the age of 77.  Lifshin was published in almost every magazine out there including my own.You always knew it was a Lifshin submission because it was an overstuffed envelope with 50 to 100 poems--and many of them were very good. I met Lynn in the North End of Boston at the late Jack Powers' house, and later attended a reading with her and Jon Wieners at the Old West Church in the Beacon Hill area. I interviewed her in a funky little restaurant in the North End in the 90s. She was a very engaging woman, very kind, and wore an in your face red mini-skirt and high heels. She loved talking about her love of dance as well as poetry. Here is the interview I conducted with her--may she rest in peace... https://www.lynlifshin.com/Int-holder.htm The taped interview is held in the Harvard Woodberry Collection...

Dec. 2019 Somerville Poet Laureates reading. Lloyd Schwartz, Gloria Mindock, and Nicole Terez Dutton

Five years ago I founded the Somerville Poet Laureate position with Greg Jenkins and Harris Gardner. This reading took place at the Somerville Public Library. Lloyd Schwartz, our current laureate, and our previous laureates Gloria Mindock and Nicole Terez Dutton read at the event. I was honored to read an introduction, and very grateful to Michael Steffen--who organized the event.

Doug Holder's Poem "Oh, Don't, She Said," put to Dance and Music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdFORxjiK7s&feature=youtu.be

A wonderful rendition of Holder's poem about his 93 year old mother, " Oh, Don't, She said..." performed by the textmoves dance collaborative ( Founded by Karen Klein) music by Jennifer Matthews--this was part of the Third Life Choreography Series that was presented in the South End of Boston ( Urbanity Central Studio) in Dec. 2019. The dance has been performed in other venues around Boston.

REVIEW: Phillip Arnold’s The Natural History of a Blade Dos Madres, 2019

REVIEW: Phillip Arnold’s The Natural History of a Blade

Dos Madres, 2019

REVIEW BY MARCIA D. ROSS

Two important things about Philip Arnold’s poems: they are faithfully attentive to etymology, and intently focused on the natural world while not self- consciously showing off his considerable knowledge. His plain subjects—earth and leaves, changing light and shadow, the fall of snow, the death of everything, suggest with exquisite sensitivity our parallel human experience, our struggle, even as his poems enrich the mind with gladness and ease. They do these things with so little showiness that one can easily miss the deep moments as they pass by in modest expression. 

By my sights, Mr Arnold is a poet to watch for—or better, to listen for—as time goes by. His future poems may leave behind some of their delightful but occasionally distracting linguistic eccentricities, stuff that sounds really good or obscure, but that can baffle the earnest reader or cause her to lose her pace or place, or progress. But there will be a Casino Real payoff.  For all of us.

Arnold’s interest in etymology is one of the quiet pleasures of this collection. We learn immediately that the word blade is derived from Middle English, German, and Old English and that it can denote (or suggest) a leaf, a blossom, a blade (knife, spade). It can also bring to mind the voices of other great poets. When we read a single line like “at night/ we become the delicate tongues of bees” and have a sweet sense of Walt Whitman who sits nearby, contemplating “a blade of grass” at the beginning of Leaves of Grass. Or we may be surprised with one of Thomas Hardy’s fine tetrameters rhythms that feels almost uncanny and which is not copying Hardy in the least, but instead riffing on rhythms that conjure his genius. Arnold is on firm, familiar, rich ground in these poems, and he knows it. I take that as a sign of good courage as he grows as an artist.

The title piece of the collection, “The Natural History of a Blade,” is an example of a poem with an original voice and something important to say.  Without ever sounding astonished Arnold astonishes:

The scored sapwood opens the mouth

Of the forest: brown petals open

In a dream of thirst, a throat as wide

As the mid-winter sky.

In “The Appalachian Character for Death,” with its revelation of ravishing, frightening brevity:

six  

black 

strokes

“spell out nature’s shorthand /across wet branches” in “winter ink” for the sign of death. Before long, after some thoughtful consideration the poet settles into a Keatsian/Hemingway/Camus musing with:

It isn’t how a life will be erased

That unsettles me, but how hunger grows

While the dying are now on our time.

Our time

In “Black Mountain Point” where the poem’s speaker remembers “to isolate the details / of your silence” (just try it), you have a hint of Arnold’s considerable linguistic powers under the cover of understatement and ambiguity.  Whose silence, we don’t know; and the mental impossibility of isolating the details of a silence?  There are many examples of such skill and innuendo. At the end of this poem his speaker says only “Nothing is sudden.” (Was it Freud who said, “all change is incremental”?)

Of the several remarkable poems in this collection, there is nothing to criticize except perhaps a tendency. Arnold can be thrilling, provocative, and insightful in bringing together the reality of a living nature and the catastrophe of living, for all creatures. At times the level at which he unearths showy or strange uses of language can distract; it can sap the flow of meaning from his more predominant and expression of humble suggestion and modesty.

I believe he has the makings of a great poet.

--Marcia Ross

11/24/19

Interview with poet, publisher and translator Jim Kates/ with Doug Holder

Robin Stratton brings a lot to the table with Big Table Publishing

Robin Stratton

Robin Stratton is a dynamo in small press publishing.  But this founder of Big Table Publishing  extends beyond publishing quality books of fiction and poetry. Now based in San Francisco--she remains a big presence in the Boston area literary community. I caught up with Stratton recently to talk about her release of two volumes of  The Very best of Big Table Publishing.

Stratton is the author of four novels, including one which was a National Indie Excellence Book Award finalist (On Air, Mustang Press, 2011), two collections of poetry and short fiction, and a writing guide. A four-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she has been published in Word Riot, 63 Channels, Antithesis Common, Poor Richard’s Almanac(k), Blink-Ink, Pig in a Poke, Chick Flicks, Up the Staircase, Shoots and Vines, and many others. Since 2004 she has been Acquisitions Editor for Big Table Publishing Company, Senior Editor of Boston Literary Magazine since 2009, and she was Director of the Newton Writing and Publishing Center until she moved from Boston to San Francisco in 2018. Now she lead the popular "Six Feet of Poetry" and "Fiction by the Foot" series. 

You just released the two volumes of  The Very Best of Big Table Publishing. There are a lot of wonderful poets and writers included. Was it hard to narrow it down?

It was, yes. In many case, it was easy to select chapter one of a book, or the Intro… but for the poets, especially, I had to keep choosing which of their poems was not just a favorite, but captured a sense of the poet him or herself, since the hope is that people will read the anthology, fall in love with some of the writing, and then buy a book from that author or poet. Some poets, especially those we worked with on more than one book, had a lot of poems that would be perfect, so I had to go through, say ten… then whittle it down to five… and then down to one or two. Sometimes that was painful, but I obviously had to make room for everyone.

What constitutes for you a " Best Of"' piece of writing?

Over the years, many of the poems, short stories, prologues, or intro chapters have stayed with me, either on an emotional level, because I could totally relate to the theme or character, or because I so admired the literary skill; sometimes I read a poem or micro fiction piece that is a million times better than anything I could ever write, and I find myself wondering if I could ever even come close. When we did Every Day There is Something About Elephants with Timothy Gager, I loved so many of the pieces that I felt like never writing again! At the launch I asked him if he would allow me to read one of them (“Jack” appears in Volume Two) because I was so head over heels in love with (and jealous of) it. So those pieces were where I began, and as I went through all our titles, so many of them made me think, Oh yeah, I forgot how brilliant this is! and I’d grab those, too. And before I knew it, I had two full volumes that represented almost all of our authors. Almost no one got left out, and only one author didn’t want her piece to be included. 

It has been noted that you like writers who are not ashamed to show their vulnerabilities.  Do you think there is a lack of that in contemporary writing?

I try not to judge “contemporary writing” because I understand how society shapes literature and art, and it’s just part of human nature, so if there is a lack of vulnerability out there, I don’t think I would particularly notice. On the other hand, yes, if it’s there, I am drawn to it. Our hottest seller of all time is Fat Girl, Skinny, by Amye Archer, a blazingly raw account of how her self esteem issues and food addiction led to really bad life choices. She didn’t hold back at all, and I found myself admiring her so much for having reached a point in her life where she could just say Here’s what I did, but here’s why I did it, and now that I understand that, I’m not going to do it as much. It’s not as if she now has a talk show where she teaches other people how to live in a constant state of bliss – she still struggles. But in addition to being a fabulous writer, she is a very sweet human who wins you over. She inspired me to start writing poems that exposed my own vulnerabilities… my own serious, crippling self-esteem issues. She made me see that putting that stuff out there doesn’t make it go away – but it empowers you because you found the guts to put it out there. She is my hero. The Prologue to Fat Girl, Skinny kicks off Volume Two.

I also loved the book we did with you, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Poseur, because the whole thing was brilliant, amazing you now making fun of dreamy, idealistic you then… I loved how you told us that when your apartment was excavated because of a fire, you “ran down the stairs in my blue corduroy sports jacket—a slightly irregular affair—from the depths of Filene’s Basement… padded shoulders to bolster my narrow ones and a frail ego—a waxed mustache—with a red scarf around my skinny neck—like a poor man’s ascot” and heard the reporter Kirby Perkins say to someone,  “Look at this fuckin’ character.” Your “271 Newbury Street” was the first piece I chose for the anthology, and it appears in Volume Two.  

I feel you have achieved a real community of writers at Big Table Publishing. How was that brought about?

Thank you for saying that, it’s one of the accomplishments I’m most proud of. When I see on Facebook how many of our Big Table authors have become friends with other Big Table authors, it just makes me feel so good! I think all literary communities naturally come together when they discover that there are others out there who feel the same way about the importance of writing and creating, and have a place to gather. You and I both know how many literary events are not about selling books, but are about sharing our own writing and encouraging others. I feel so fortunate to be part of that, because that is a HUGE thing to be part of. Now more than ever.

There is real sense of eclecticism in the works presented. It can range from the high holy, the rarefied, and the down and dirty.  So you don't favor any school of writing?

Thank you for noticing! Yes, one thing about Big Table is that we’ll consider just about any genre, and I think writers appreciate that. Volume One includes the four Prologues to Still Here Thinking About You (which was our hottest seller before Fat Girl, Skinny.) This book is a compilation of four incredibly talented women writing about their troubling relationships with their mothers, and is told in a loving, tender, powerful way. I always say, “If there is a better Mother’s Day gift than this book, I don’t know about it.” Volume One also includes some macabre from Phil Temples (from Helltown Chronicles) and Michael Keith (a real favorite of mine, “The Smoking Olympics”) a chapter from The Flaws that Bind, Rebecca Leo’s fictionalized autobiography of spousal abuse, and closes with one of my favorites from Richard Fox, the sweetly-sentimental “To Katrina, Wherever You Are xoxo.”

What's in the works?

So glad you asked! We are bringing back Boston Literary Magazine in January, 2020 – in a new format. Instead of making you wait three months for each new issue, we’ll be posting a monthly issue on line, and at the end of each year, our favorites will be compiled into a print volume. Check out our submission guidelines at www.bigtablepublishing.com! We are so excited to be back!

Softly Glowing Exit Signs By Georgia Park

Softly Glowing Exit Signs

By Georgia Park

Softly Glowing Exit Signs is a book of poetry with three longer pieces included: one of non-fiction, one of fiction, and an excerpt taken from Georgia Park’s writing catalog.  The takeaway from reading Softly Glowing Exit Signs, is that the writing is real life, and that overall poetry is real life, and that real life can be measured and unmasked within writing itself. When reading Softly Glowing Exit Signs I felt I was left in a room with Georgia Park, and she is telling me everything with a vulnerability she has not shown many people. It left me needing to read more, or sit and listen because anything else would be unjust.

Ms. Park, a professor at North Shore Community College takes the reader through her life, from the beginning to the end, the years running through the pages. The first poetry section, FIRE!, is not about the recent fire which ran through her apartment and left her homeless, but rather some snippets of her early life totally exposed. There is a Grease Fire where her brother causes the kitchen to ignite and the narrator is left frozen and doesn’t flee until the firefighters arrive, which rings true to some of the other poems where she is left counting daisies in the outfield when a fly ball is coming, or in emotional pain when a piece of glass is imbedded in one’s heal which causes pain and discomfort in every step. These are all metaphors used deftly by Ms. Park. I was stricken by the how real objects or things are personified into visceral feelings….old broken down Volvos that are named, dead fish in a tank, and even a morning cough, are all wounds that are open inside the vision of this work.

As in the opening essay, What Happens in the Maloka, an attempted expulsion and exercising of demons via Ayahuaska, the book also travels down the battleground of spiritual growth and the feeling of being whole.  As there is growth, there are mistakes, and lessons---and sometimes outright defiance of the world we all live in. We see choices made in the poem The Last Reunion, where the poet who felt small, bookish, and invisible in High School is made to feel that way again, by a “now known/famous classmate,”  who is her date for the evening. The poet then hooks up with two of her past bullies at the event to take back some power.

The next section, EVERYBODY RUN!, starts out in Costa Rica where there seems to be an awakening. The poems which take place during times of travel, in general,  show new strength and acceptance with the ability to look back at the past. How Stupid I Was and Lost, looks at past behaviors and the growth into new ones. Other poems in EVERYBODY RUN!, explore Koi Fish as an unexpected solution to decrease angst, and anxiety, and the spiritual serenity written about in the poem Buddha’s Lap:

I am so warm
in the Buddha’s lap the Buddha

and there is buzzing
in my ears
moths and dragonflies
are settling
here and there
my cheek warms
on his stomach
and like a statue
I think of nothing

The section then morphs into some dangerous adventures featuring alcohol and lust-making followed by a repeated theme of therapy, and therapists. The jury is not out on if it is actually helpful or not, but the most hope of all is found in thinking about the possibility of running into a daffodil,

and there’s a little daffodil
I can’t see it, but I know it’s there
its strong, wild and vibrantly yellow
and someday, I’ll pluck it from somewhere

            This section is followed by what is called an excerpt, but what I would call a strong, stand-alone, twelve page story called Hot Pink Iron Lung. It is pure magic, where the metaphors can be believed, and the truth be told in metaphor, much like the underlying technique of the entire book. Poetry books can often be books people read in dribs and drabs, rather than cover-to-cover, but during any time a reader’s brain might need refreshing, I would strongly recommend jumping to Hot Pink Iron Lung immediately.

            The book ends with the final titular section, Softly Glowing Exit Signs, where we do get to the poet’s recent fire. This time, instead of being frozen, the poet continues to live and work wearing smoky clothes, and the bare minimums---the message being, she is stronger, functional, and getting through this. This is reflected upon in the poem, Spiraling Questions where the most treacherous act is What if I recklessly wrote three or four poems a day?  Near the end of the poem there again is growth, and it is shown with such beautiful self-discovery:

                                                   Could I possibly
forget what happened to me (was it me, really, even back then?)
or at least stop talking about it and just go quiet
could mine pass for a brain that’s not short circuiting?

            Perhaps the tenderest piece of Park’s occurs in the poem, Bits of a Butterfly, were vulnerability isn’t hidden or camouflaged, it just is.

I kiss you because I see

softly glowing exit signs

in your eyes

Conclusively, Softly Glowing Exit Signs feels exactly like spending hours, being up all night, with a person bearing their soul, to which all you can be is silent, and listen, and all you can say is, “Thanks for sharing all of this with me.”