J. M. W. Turner Watercolors Mystic Seaport Museum Mystic, Connecticut 06355

J. M. W. Turner Watercolors

Mystic Seaport Museum

Mystic, Connecticut 06355

www.mysticseaport.org

Thursday through Sunday, 10-5 until February 23

This exhibit of Turner’s works may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to enjoy the visual equivalent of sitting in the corner of a music studio listening to (pick your composer – Beethoven – Mozart – Paganini –…) practice and compose. I say maybe once-in-a-lifetime because these Turner’s so rarely travel from the Tate in London and this will be their only venue in the United States this trip and who knows when they might come again.

Turner was a prodigy who enrolled in the Royal Academy of Art at 14 and was included in their annual exhibition at 15. When he died 61 years later he left over 500 oils, 2000 watercolors and 30,000 works on paper. He was famously eccentric; when he chose his pigments he was interested in color and not in longevity, so much of his work is at risk of fading if exposed to light, which is one reason the Tate so rarely allows them to travel. We have this opportunity because the gallery at Mystic Seaport’s North Gate was designed so that it might safely display the Turner’s.

But enough of those sorts of details; if you feel the need for more of them, the review by Murray Whyte in the Globe would be a good place to start; the digital reproductions of the Turners in the online version are much better than those in the paper but no substitute for the real thing. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/01/08/arts/swimming-dreamy-romantic-world-jmw-turner-watercolors/

However, given the rare opportunity to witness these watercolors, which this exhibition affords, I suggest they should be approached in the romantic spirit with which they were executed. Don't drive down and arrive with your mind buzzed out by the realities of Expressways and Interstates; instead, use public transportation and travel with a compatible companion to arrive with your mind quiet, engaged and open for what these Turner’s have to show us.

My sister and I chose the Northeast Regional 93 (let us mourn for a moment the romantic past when it was The Shoreline of the NYNH&H and the trains had names like "The Owl"); it left the Back Bay about 9:30 and deposited us in Mystic an hour and 20 minutes later. The museum was a pleasant three quarters of a mile walk north, so we arrived at the gallery relaxed, warmed up and ready to receive. When we filled up on a first course of the Turners we paused for a light lunch (at Latitude 41 right next door) and conversation to digest what we had just seen. Then back to the museum for another helping, which we followed with a leisurely mile walk north to get the local bus to New London where we would catch the Northeast Regional 174 for our return.

Standing on the platform as our train approached, we shared an appreciation of the “Turner Sunset,” to which we were being treated. Turner had taught us, Turner was teaching us, how to look at the world, how to see.

--Wendell Smith

In Ibbetson Press #46 out of Somerville, MA, 2019. Doug Holder, publisher.

In Ibbetson Press #46 out of Somerville, MA, 2019.  Doug Holder, editor.

Edited by Harris Gardner, and Julia Cirgnano

Design: Steve Glines

Front/Back Cover Photos:  Bonnie Matthews Brock

Arts/Editor Jennifer Matthews

REVIEW BY MARCIA D. ROSS

If there were a contest of best first lines in Ibbetson Street (#46) the winner would have to be a toss up between several contenders. Mary Buchinger’s brief “Song” begins with “The river didn’t say” – an effortless glide into the exquisite (but never fancy) river of the language of imagery and sound that comprises the entire poem. In a distinctly different way, Denise Provost’s first line, “You might have crept up, grabbed us by surprise–“ is, like the rest of the poem, in fetching Petrarchan sonnet-form, trying to fend off a brutal hurricane’s dreaded arrival. These two have many rivals, but first lines are important.

 As for last best lines, another tie. Michael Ansara’s closing for his tender poem, “As a Child I Felt the Wind,” echoes and resolves the entire drama of learning how to listen in the last lines “. . . that passed quickly / As a sigh, skimming the surface of this, my one, life.”  By contrast and equally exceptional, Dennis Daly’s final line in “The Harrowing of Hell” produces a gaze of sudden desire: “Eve, bedazzled, eyes transfigured Adam” (eyes is a verb here). This line ends the packed and powerful poem that never lets up for a second, and finally crashes into the lustful ruin and guilt of the world’s first couple.  And, as for pure and brilliant finale, there is Harris Gardner’s “This masquerade unmasked in empyrean au bade” at the end of four full dancing stanzas, in “Acolytes of Terpsichore.”

Not counting Doug Holder’s gold nugget interview with the esteemed Ifeanyi Menkiti, there are 62 entries in the fall 2019 publication of Ibbetson Street.  Of these, if I may say so, at least half are worthy of the ink for printing the issue, and half again of those are worth reading at least twice (or sometimes twelve times); a handful can make your head spin and cause you to shift in your seat, and a final few that are right up there with Milton’s “fittest though few.” My growing feeling is that to read a poem once is to have looked at only the gift wrap on a package, which, as we all know can be a poor representation of the quality of the gift itself, or even a garish overstatement. Even with such limitations there are many more poems here than can be given their due. The poets themselves range in age from grownups to grandparents and write with everything from urgency and anger to humorous winks or grateful or subtle praise for life itself.  They also vary in world view, sexual definition, and political positions, if any. All of the usual subjects are here, with mothers perhaps outnumbering fathers, then, in no order, children, friends, lovers, siblings, uncles, neighbors, ghosts or cats and dogs, crows, bicycles, smells, desire, Zen, death, rivers, weather, clothing, food, crops, ageing, grief, rage, revenge and Fine! I’ll not go on. (You’re welcome). By virtue of basic arithmetic, each of these fewer-than-62 subjects has its very own own poet.  Some of these poets are well known, some are unknown or ingénue or gifted, and some could benefit from examining what makes a poem a poem or simply practicing their craft with more diligence. (And of course the writer of this review has been known to be dead wrong.)

Having said that, I want to present several poets’ work, and have a go at saying something meaningful about them.  For starters, there are poets included in Ibbetson St. #46 who, although famous, are continuing to experiment with the genre, in this case to great comic effect. Dewitt Henry’s “On Rank” is breathlessly clever and essentially an essay in poetic form, a riff on Shakespeare, and a rollicking tease. It also has the funniest line in the entire collection. Rounding up plethora of nasty smells, the speaker spews out: “Pee-yew!” Then again, that may be a Court Jester speaking, a very low “rank”ing Fool right out of Lear or Hamlet, although Hamlet himself fooled around with the varieties of rotting flesh; his noted mention of “thinks,” rhymes of course with “stinks.” Henry’s poem fools with Shakespeare’s high-ranking Sonnet 94 which itself smells to high heaven, and presents a presumably farcical but accurate footnote to his own un-poem.

Speaking of fun, Diana Cole’s “My Father’s Annual Stint in the National Guard” presents the problem of whiskers in a marriage. Managing to induce even pathos, Cole’s verse trips through the awkwardness and hilarity of a couple’s difference of opinion about the value of a moustache. The effect upon the observant and loving daughter (poet) is both priceless and cautionary.

Another impressive yet slightly off-kilter poem is the beautifully written “Acolytes of Terpsichore,” by Harris Gardner.  Not rude or ugly or vain or guilty or clumsily losing control, it is an accomplished and attractive poem, with fine, dazzling imagery and luscious sound. It may have been written as a specimen of artifice or even sleight of hand, with glittering twirling ballerinas vacantly but perfectly dancing around in circles– in which case it has achieved his deliberation; it’s damned good, but its elegant and artificial beauties may be marred by an overindulgence in uncommon words. For a perfect poem, its stanzas split jarringly in new directions or purposes. To be fair, this poem is unquestionably meant to be artificial and pristine, and to be read with a dictionary handy. It reminds me of one of those perfect dresses that cannot express the real woman wearing it. I’m not sure how a masquerade is unmasked, either, though I admire the sound of it. Altogether impressive.

A very different kind of poem in this edition captures one’s entire attention while never for a moment explaining itself.  It’s so slender, it doesn’t even have the time! Isabelle Kenyon’s “Breakfast Is an Important Part Of the Afternoon” puts sensual pleasure and indulgence hand in hand with the discomfort and anxieties of the body in a hot Italian town. Along with these are indefinable hints of timelessness, desire, discomfort, bliss, unavailability, and physical pain. It even has pretty polka dot spider bites and sweet hands that touch the sores. However, the sores seem to be spreading. In contrast, a plain but exquisite poem by Zvi Sesling, “Ghostly Memories,” produces an old sock from a drawer that becomes a portal or arena for the return of long-held but heretofore distant memories. In another drawer, an instruction manual for a short-wave radio signals anguish for all the fine things that time has kicked aside, discarded and useless. Towards the end of the poem, long-deceased parents are about reappear, and the speaker casts an eye on bones sunk in a La Brea tar pit, embodying the worst of all possible endings in a life: separation.

 There are many more poems that should be included in this discussion. The delightful and perfect “Full Service,” Ted Kooser’s amused and poignant meditation on a windshield washing at an ordinary gas station, observed from inside the car. There’s a sad but surprised smile in this poem, with its hint of troubled vision.  We also have Gary Metras’s very physical yet mystical poem of line-casting for a fish at the ocean, in “As If a Dream.” In the midst of repetitive casting motions and physical sensations, suddenly the speaker’s dead mother’s voice cries out, “Let me go.” And the speaker complies: “I cut the line.” Linda Fischer’s poem, “As a Season Ends,” is succinct, wise, and witty. “How much is finite!” she writes:

Even the universe threatens

to self-destruct as everything

we know flies off into space—

defying gravity, eroding

the pillars of faith.

Finally, in case (like me) you are forgetful, Steven Ostrowski’s “Old Woman”­ presents a brief encounter between an old wizened woman in her “sunbox garden“ and our speaker, perhaps a young poet who happens by, not for the first time, not realizing he is learning to listen. In her mirthful voice she responds to his question about how she knows about next year’s weather: “Remember. Remember I told you.”

Were We Awake, L.M. Brown

Were We Awake, L.M. Brown, Fromite Press, Burlington, Vermont, 216 pages, $15.00.

Book Review

By Ed Meek

In her new collection of short stories, L.M. Brown quotes Emily Dickinson for her title “it is good we are dreaming—It would hurt us—were we awake—.” In her poem, Dickinson goes on to say “It is prudenter to dream.” Brown refers to Dickinson to imply that reality is so painful that we need to bury it. In her stories Brown digs beneath the surface to unearth the painful truth we bury and hide. In writing as in life, it isn’t always easy to delve into tales of infidelity, accidental deaths and murder, but Brown explores those subjects with authority.

Many of the stories are written as mysteries with information slowly revealed. Someone has been found bludgeoned to death behind a bar. It is well known he cheated on his wife so it could be any one of a number of people. In another story a woman driving home at night in the rain runs over a boy who suddenly appears in front of her car. Was the boy committing suicide? Whether he was or not, Brown goes into how we might deal with something like this. In another story, a young woman finds out that the relationship between her parents and her aunt is much more complex than she thought. Most of the stories either take place in or refer back to Sligo, Ireland, the setting of earlier books by Brown. In this collection of stories as in Treading the Uneven Road, we are introduced to characters who reappear in later stories where the same event is looked at through different eyes.

In “Anniversaries” Brown has characters reflect back on the murder of Nick Moody. When Brown does this, it has the unique effect of making the reader think about the earlier stories and it brings a coherence to a collection of short stories that we don’t often find. The mother of the woman who was working at the bar that Nick Moody was found behind thinks about her daughter Margaret who left Ireland years ago to go to Australia. “Nolllaig wanted to imagine Margaret as the little girl who stood shyly on the sideline of the green watching the other children play, but just as her daughter’s smells had disappeared from the room, it was impossible to hold onto that little girl.” Although the mother is losing touch with her daughter, the reader is reminded of her and of the way we lose all touch with relatives and old friends.

In the same story, Nollaig finds herself visiting a neighbor Eilish who loves cats and takes in strays. Nollaig thinks Eilish should name one that keeps showing up. But Eilish thinks “certain things can’t be owned, like a cat or grief. But Nollaig owned her grief. She held it to her, and on a certain day every year, she examined it.” A few pages later Nollaig “thought of all the things people kept inside, like the grief for a cat, and questions about a certain night.”  Nollaig wants to ask her daughter what happened that night and why she had to go all the way to Australia to get away from it, but Brown knows there are certain questions in life that we just never get the answers to.

There are also stories in Were We Awake not directly related to Sligo. In these there is a similar sense of unease or even dread, but I found myself wanting to get back to Sligo when reading them.

Like the characters in Were We Awake, as we get older, we continue to think about people we knew who died young, Mike, a kid I played basketball with in middle school who died of “a mysterious kidney ailment.” My best friend Richard from high school who died of early Alzheimer’s. There are no good answers to these questions but L.M. Brown gives us much to think about in the hidden stories she brings to light.

In Praise of Doug Holder's Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene/ Robert Murphy/Dos Madres Press

   




In Praise of Doug Holder's Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene:

BY ROBERT MURPHY--PUBLISHER OF DOS MADRES PRESS   https://www.dosmadres.com/

What is there not to like:  First of all, dear friends of literature and poetry, the online journal is beautiful. There is a richness about the visual aspect of Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene that is rarely matched. What is also rarely matched are the reviews that are a model of concision. (thank goodness there is such an entity that exists for the small press) As a publisher whose mission statement declares, "Dos Madres Press is dedicated to the belief that the small press is essential to the vitality of contemporary literature as a carrier of the new voice and new works by established poets, as well as the older, sometimes forgotten voices of the past. And in an ever more virtual world, to the creation of fine books pleasing to the eye and hand." I could not be more grateful. And as a writer myself of poetry, I have been blessed to have my own work come to be reviewed here. And then there is the added bonus, that even if a book is not reviewed they all go to the Endicott College's Halle Library collection founded by Doug Holder himself. So there is a place, an ever growing place that the work of the small press can call home.

So publisher's and poets, do send on your books for possible review here. In a world that can use all the best poetry has to offer, for as Dr. William Carlos Williams wrote, "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably everyday for lack / of what is found there." Find it you will in Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene, that "news" that is truly newsworthy - that always ineffable, but necessary something that makes all the difference in the world.

Special THANKS to all our ace reviewers who have made this site what it is--Dennis Daly, Wendell Smith, Mike Steffen, Gregory Wolos, Lawrence Kessenich, David P. Miller. Ed Meek and many others  over the 16 years of our existence.

Spreading Like Wild Flowers By Timothy Gager

Spreading Like Wild Flowers

By Timothy Gager

Big Table Publishing

Boston, MA & San Francisco, CA

www.bigtablepublishing.com

ISBN: 978-1-945917-58-5

52 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Well-titled and well-introduced, Timothy Gager’s new poetry collection, Spreading Wild Flowers, both celebrates and broods on everyday life and the persistence of a medieval-generated, but contemporary version, of a morally centered Everyman. Gager’s wiry verses come at you from all directions, each bloom well-rooted and well protected against predatory aesthetes and lackadaisical flower pickers. Lushness seems beside the point to this poet. Themes of hardscrabble continuity and day-to-day endurance drive these poems.

Good first poems are often set to convey a tone or emotion that engages the reader’s psyche with a key to the miscellany that follows. Gager’s initial piece, Concerto, does just that, while serving as a guidepost to the immediate. Listening to the plaintive and insistent music of a saxophone does not preclude the intrusion of an unwanted serpent. Spreading out reality’s old comforter with (presumably) his lover, Gager, not only seeks the raw enjoyment of an outdoor concert, but, concomitantly, confronts insidious threats to his best intentions,

I became lost in the bell curve,

which a saxophone’s note made

me contemplate: please stay present

because I found this watching out

for snakes is something celebrated.

Will you ponder a geometrical illusion?

Area and circumference?

The formulas? Always the formulas.

Bromley’s Funeral Home, Gager’s memento mori poem, staggers its reader like a sucker punch. The piece’s simplicity belies our poised acceptance or quiet response to the dearly departed. Our myths and well-meaning suppositions melt in the face of mortality’s starkness. Gager here contemplates a tatty funeral card and it’s not going well,

…your face creased

On a piece of wrinkled cardstock—you were

so young, but the memory so ancient,

Bromley inserted a few lines

from an ancient Catholic Prayer

printed over a cliched picture:

Heaven’s light beaming down.

Or is it shining up? I can’t question this,

or understand a damned thing

In his poem The Last Time I Saw You Gager reconciles or attempts to reconcile remembrances with his once “present” life. The poet’s persona recalls the horror of drug dependence in words seemingly dictated by the “loser bird’ in his head. All the while Gager punctuates this poetic anti-world of his with unpleasant smells (dead mice and acrid gas) and sounds (snorting and sniffing) heightening the piece’s earthiness. The poet mourns the loss of a lover, who has found a new kind of happiness in sobriety, with mixed emotions. Gager ends his narrative wonderfully underfoot with first rate imagery,

Six months later, I heard you lived in N’Orleans,  

married an unveiled version of me, with all my “yets”

still to come, worse than all those

wretched “nows.” I feel I can’t stop

from mourning you, or the sidewalks

from cracking, my stumble toes catching

that uneven place where elm roots

raise the concrete higher.

Revivals of the body and the spirit from near endings may well be the only miracles most flesh and blood humans will ever experience or witness. In his poem The Miracles of Recovery Gager dwells sparsely on the phenomena underlying these marvels. When survival happens the mind bends in unpretty ways. Blooms filled with life retreat to the basic, the necessary for sustenance. The organism shrinks to consolidate strength. The poet puts it this way,

Who would have thought salvation is no longer

found in the piss jars in old isolated bedrooms?  

the mind snaps

the body

quakes its resistance.

I am one step away from

being pushed

in a wheelchair

when my body fails

the mind

perhaps just wilts

as a petal, the rose might—

we are all stem, we salvage

ourselves from this withering.

Throughout this collection the poet exhibits a mix of raw images and damaged contemplations. It can get exhausting. In his poem Faith Gager reaches an oratorio of exhaustion, a creed of despair, or perhaps, more pointedly, an enlightenment. The poet contemplates,

I wonder why

everything has to be.

And I’ll never wonder,

if we will go on forever.

And I believe,

one day, I will close my eyes,

to pray—for nothing horrific to happen,

again and again until the very last breath.

Connections of a Bridge, Gager’s poem about new beginnings, moves in metaphoric wonderment from fear to hope. I especially like his stanzas on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, where illusion merges into realty until police intervention becomes necessary, and the Beverly-Salem Bridge, where the soft curve of the connector inspires remembrances of new love and upbeat anticipation. The poem opens as an anthem to all such thoroughfares,

I cannot look down from above,

driving eyes locked forward to

where I’m headed, water underneath..

The banks are afflicted with ugly

six-pack rings, oily vermin, and shopping carts.

But there’s also marshland with wild flowers,

a shadow spreading from her structure

shading ex-lover’s torn blankets. I miss

the beauty within these passages.

Ripped and torn in the world’s thorny bracken Timothy Gager has bridged his way out and across to the promised, but not perfect, land.  In the process he has delivered his readers a book of searing poetry and redemptive hope. Bravo!

Doug Holder Interviews poet Jake Tringali

Newton Free Library Poetry Series. Feb 11, 2020 7PM Open Mic

( Click on Picture to enlarge)

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.