Poet Jeffrey Thomson: Birdwatching in Wartime

Poet Jeffrey Thomson: Multi-Layered Poems from the Multi-Layered Rainforest



Jeffrey Thomson lives and works in Maine, but he has a great interest in the very Southern climes of the tropical rainforest. His latest collection of poetry is “Birdwatching in Wartime,” that deals with his trips to the tropics.


Jeffrey Thomson’s third book of poems, Renovation, was part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press (CMU) poetry series in 2005. His second collection of poems, The Country of Lost Sons, inaugurated a new poetry series from Parlor Press at Purdue University in February 2004, and his first book, The Halo Brace, was brought out in a limited edition letterpress version from Birch Brook Press in 1998. Winner of recent fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, he is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Maine, Farmington. He was an editor for From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great 2009 from Persea Books, 2009), along with Camille T. Dungy and Matt O'Donnell. I spoke with him on my TV show “Poet to Poet Writer to Writer” on Somerville Community Access TV.



Doug Holder: First off you quote the poet Elizabeth Bishop more than once. Is she a major influence?

Jeffrey Thomson: Absolutely. I was writing this book about the tropics, South America, and Central America. You can’t skip Elizabeth Bishop if you are doing that. But she has always been a focus of mine. I love her poems, the textural detail in her work, the way she builds the poem slowly with the accumulation of detail; the precision of language. There are two poems in here that have epigraphs from Bishop. One concerns her time in Brazil, in a sort of exile with her lover.


DH: Obviously your travels to the rainforest have informed many of the poems in your collection. Tell us about your experience there.

JT: In 2001 I took students down on a trip to Costa Rica. I was teaching at a private women’s college in Pennsylvania at that point. I took the students on a January trip when I didn’t know much about the country. I had been there only once. So when I took them there I hooked up with this guide, and I was just blown away. It is an amazing country in terms of what you can see. It is a country the size of West Virginia, and 25% of its land is in private reserve. This experience gave me the incentive to write these poems. One of the things about going into the rainforest is the multi- layered quality—it is so rich, there are so many plants, there are so many species, that there is always something behind what you are seeing. I have gone back six or seven times and continue to learn things.

DH: In the poem “Underwhelmed” you write of a presence, perhaps divine: “ under the splay- handed palms, under drinks glowering dark in/globes of glass, under the tender/humidity, the phosphorescent surf…” You seem to imply that the presence of God is under the trappings of the material world. If you closely observe nature, if you live close to it, is it not impossible to feel his or her presence?

Are you a religious person?

JT: I was raised in a very religious household, but I am not a believer anymore. I am an atheist. No, I don’t go out in the world and feel God’s presence. I feel the presence of the natural world. The natural world is so complex it is not understandable. There is always another layer…there is always something behind it.


DH: There are a lot of birds in this book. Do they give to, pardon the pun, “the flight of the imagination?”

JT: Birds are really interesting. I am a bird watcher. I especially like to watch them in the tropics.

DH: Woody Allen said that nature to him was “ birds eating worms, worms eating worms, it’s like a big restaurant. Do you feel that nature is a battlefield, like it is implied in the title poem: “Birdwatching in Wartime?"

JT: There is a level where nature is a battlefield. I didn’t want these poems to be the standard: I’m out in the world; I’m out in the wilderness, and then the epiphany. I’m not interested in that soft and cuddly type of nature. I don’t think nature is that way, particularly in the tropics. Everything seems poisonous, the trees have thorns, the insects have poison so the birds can’t eat them. There is this level where everything is at war with everything else. There is another level of war in “Birdwatching…” I was in Costa Rica in 2003, right before we were going to go to war in Iraq. I played up this tension of being out in the woods with birds, while very serious matters of life and death were going to happen out in the greater world. There is a level where the language of nature becomes corrupted by the language of war.

DH: Can you talk about the anthology “From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great” that you co-edited?

JT: There is this website http://fishousepoems.org that was started by my friend Matt O’Donnell. He wanted to feature emerging poets, and poets whose work sounded good when read out loud. There are a lot of young poets working in this genre. Since O’Donnell started this website there are almost 2,000 poems up. We define emerging poets as having a 2nd book or less before submission. Some of our poets have moved on and have made names for themselves like Tracy Smith and Major Jackson. For the print anthology we took the best from the website. The poems are not organized by poets, but by their sonic qualities.


Underwhelmed

Under the catastrophic dark,
the comet splintering the sky
with its ancient grief,
under the splay-handed palms,
under drinks glowering dark in
globes of glass, under the tender
humidity, the phosphorescent surf,
under the calls of night jars
chuckling up from the ground,
under the ticking aloe under the moon’s
absence, under, under, under.
Under the blinking stripes jets
write across the sky, under
stillness, the cabin pressure holding
steady, under the coned light
blanking out pages of gloss, under
the plunge of my love’s hair, under
her sadness and her eyes
startling as stars, under our lives,
the miscarried child left in the bowl,
underground, underwater, understory,
under the bougainvillea’s whorish musk,
under the coral’s forest of horn, under
God, undertow, underdog, under
everything there is a season,
under the absence of twilight,
under the beach’s grittle and bone,
under the words, startle, startle,
under the luxury of the table
so whitely laid, under
the candle’s light shaped
like a hanging blade, we tear
apart the body of the fish and leave
glistening ladders of bone.
---Jeffrey Thomson

Review, Finding Beauty, Selected Poems by Marine Robert Warden

Review, Finding Beauty, Selected Poems by Marine Robert Warden (Bellowing Ark Press, Seattle, Washington, 2009)

Review by Barbara Bialick


In Finding Beauty, you win the benefits of a life-experienced retired doctor in Riverside, California, who was born in 1927 and is a multi-published poet. His imagery is deep and mystical, and its lack of punctuation reflects his voice, which speaks with a certainty and also an irony. What he conveys is that we really can’t figure out the meaning of the present without a simultaneous awe of events from the movement of history. But nature’s beauty remains omnipresent.

The beginning of the book highlights close relatives. In “Mother”, he says,

“there was music inside you/that wanted to come out/so your hands played/with needles and leaves/substitute for black and white keys/…”

Unfortunately, back then, when he was six, he

“didn’t stop/to wonder what dreams you had”.

Then in “So”, he speaks about age:

“you are at the age now/where long-time friends disappear/and a big, black crow struts/on the back yard grass/arrogantly unaware…”

At all the various ages he covers in this collection, nature is noticeably on its own time and path. But nature is also a herald. In “For the Dead in Iraq” he needs look no farther than his back yard:

“there was a hoarse cry above our backyard/a hawk perhaps and all the gold finches/…sensed a dark shadow overhead/and fled leaving behind no songs/a single white feather fluttered to the grass”.

In one rare “doctor poem”, Warden thinks back to Chicago in 1954 where in the Black ghetto,

“I couldn’t forget the children/we delivered them by flashlights/in cold little basement flats/deep in the slums at Christmas time/…shivering ourselves/in our thin white student coats…”

Later in the book, the poetry is in tribute to his wife Lois. In “The Great Ground Swell”, “even this vast land…the ground swell rises higher and then/in all its magnificence the land/will genesis from the biblical void/the sea our Great Mother/gives birth to the land for us…/all part of a great ground swell/out of which you appeared”.

The last poems in the 71-page book, reach to comprehend

“the search for unobtainable beauty…”. “just as we grow older and change, the cord that holds us remains…”. And to this he concludes,

“from the unexpected/beautiful art is found…”.

--Barbara Bialick

Rick Moody to be a featured reader at the Somerville News Writers Festival Nov. 2009

Somerville, Mass.

Tim Gager, the cofounder of the Somerville News Writers Festival announced today that Rick Moody will be the featured fiction writer at the 7 year old festival. Several months ago Doug Holder, cofounder of the festival, said that poet Frank Bidart, Sam Cornish, Richard Hoffman, Tino Villanueva, and Tam Lin Neville will be the featured poets. Bidart will be awarded the Ibbetson Street Lifetime achievement award at the festival. Other fiction readers to be announced.



Life and work of Rick Moody:

Moody was born in New York City and grew up in several of the Connecticut suburbs, including Darien and New Canaan, where he later set stories and novels. He graduated from St. Paul's School in New Hampshire and Brown University.

He received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University in 1986; nearly two decades later he would criticize the program in an essay in The Atlantic Monthly.[1] Soon after finishing his thesis, he checked himself into a mental hospital for alcoholism.[2] Once sober and while working for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, he wrote his first novel, Garden State, about young people growing up in the industrial wasteland of northern New Jersey, where he was living at the time. In his introduction to a reprint of the novel, he called it the most "naked" thing he has written.[citation needed] Garden State won the Pushcart Editor's Choice Award.

In 2006, Arizona State Senator Thayer Verschoor cited complaints he had received about The Ice Storm as part of the reason he supported a measure allowing students to refuse assignments they find "personally offensive." Verschoor said that "There’s no defense of this book. I can’t believe that anyone would come up here and try to defend that kind of material," although eventually numerous professors did just that.[3]

His memoir The Black Veil (2002) won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. He has also received the Addison Metcalf Award, the Paris Review Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Conjunctions, Harper's, Details, The New York Times, and Grand Street.

Moody's most recent novel is The Diviners, released in 2005. Little, Brown and Company, the publisher of The Diviners, changed the cover after the galleys came out because women reacted negatively to it. The original cover showed a Conan the Barbarian-type image in technicolor orange; the new cover uses that same image, but frames it as a scene on a movie screen.[4] The Diviners was followed in 2007 by Right Livelihoods, a collection of three novellas published in Britain and Ireland as The Omega Force.

In addition to his fiction, Moody is a musician and composer. He belongs to a group called the Wingdale Community Singers, which he describes as performing "woebegone and slightly modernist folk music, of the very antique variety."[5] Moody composed the song "Free What's-his-name", performed by Fly Ashtray on their 1997 EP Flummoxed,[6] collaborated with One Ring Zero on the EP Rick Moody and One Ring Zero in 2004, and also contributed lyrics to One Ring Zero's albums As Smart As We Are and Memorandum.[7] In 2006, an essay by Moody was included in Sufjan Stevens's box-set Songs for Christmas.

When asked by the New York Times Book Review what he thought was the best book of American fiction from 1975 to 2000, Moody chose Grace Paley's The Collected Stories.[8]

Moody has taught at the State University of New York at Purchase and Bennington College. He lives in Brooklyn and Fishers Island.

Steerage by Bert Stern

Steerage, by Bert Stern
Ibbetson Street Press
http://ibbetsonpress.com
$15

Review by Miriam Levine

BURNING STARS, JADE SILK, CAMARROS

We’ve heard a lot about American individualism; and, in American literature, about writers like Melville, who have what one critic has called, the voice of “the imperial self,”: majestic, heroic, grand. In “Walden,” Thoreau, though a less imperial writer than Melville, still creates a narrator who lives heroically alone in his tiny cabin in the woods and sees few people. He’s a man without family. In actual life, Thoreau walked daily to Concord village to see his mother. In contrast Bert Stern writes about his deep connection to the living and dead. He sheds his ego and takes on the voices of his ancestors who immigrated to America from Eastern Europe. Though him, we hear his dead mother’s account of the voyage. The family is out to sea; order falls apart; the family loses its center. Sailing in limbo, his mother says, “Nobody talked. We could not look at the sea or the dead sky/ above us. We hung between these. We would be here always.”
In “Lotty is Born” Stern bears the weight of generations: “All suffered to bring me here to this room/ where I write, bigger than the house/ my mother was born in.” Beautifully, in fluid lines, he registers a dissolving self: “I am somebody’s dream . . . let them tell me if they can/ if I am recompense for what they endured.”
A descendent of those who in steerage endured the stink of “of seawater and piss, animals and human sweat,” Stern brings his ancestors into the light. His mother says, “my spirit was waiting for me, dancing on the shore.” The spirit is feminine, like the Shekinah: the principle of immanence, the divine showing itself. I’ve heard the Shekinah described metaphorically as a single green leaf that keeps falling to earth but is never seen to land. Stern refers to the Shekinah in “Hannah Remembers,” notable for its sense of shining, never-ending time: “Evenings that went on forever/ still unfolding.” In “Driving Home from Elizabethtown” the poet is gathered into transcendent light:

. . . I am ready to fall
with the turnings of poplar
and oak. Through the windshield
even the thin rain that takes on
gold light from the sun in its falling
is fuel for the burning.

Stern’s “Wait,” the long poem, which comprises part five of “Steerage,” is a triumph, sweet and mysterious. The Shekinah takes the form of a dying girl who lives inside the man Stern calls “Jacob.” “He called out to her as one might/ throw a flower at a star.” The girl keeps falling, imperiled, but she comes back to life: “she’s close as your skin, still humming her tune.” Stern gives the girl a voice: “She said this. The girl said this
now was always as it is now.” Nothing is lost. Time is eternal. The poem ends by connecting a tender earthly image—“the turnip’s sweet spheroid,/ its little tail”—with an image of fire and living water: burning stars and icicles dripping as if they were “breathing.”
Besides water-fire-falling-burning poems in which Stern invokes a self’s dissolving in radiant never-ending time, there are poems about closely observed everyday life. (I prefer the spirit-Shekinah and daily-life poems to the fable poems, “What the Teller Knows” and “Early autumn in the Mountains,” which seem unreal to me.) Stern writes about his neighbor, Kenny, a Vietnam war veteran; he watches him capably “sizing boards with a handsaw,/ setting them snug.” But at night, in his dreams, he keeps shooting at a girl who is “hardly a shadow.” He describes Kenny’ son, “washing his car,/ a black Camarro/ with V8 engine,” and the everyday of American life with its skateboards and televisions playing all night in store windows.
“Tea,” which I’ll quote in its entirety, demonstrates the lyrical beauty of Stern’s poems. Here, the feminine appears as a muse. “Tea” is also a love poem that recognizes the separateness of the beloved:

That clear song—
was it you while I slept,
slipping down in your jade
silk to feed the stove
with pine and drink your tea
alone, at down, as you like to do?

Stern could be describing his own clear song: tender, lyrical, beautifully phrased.

*Miriam Levine's most recent book is The Dark Opens, winner of the 2007 Autumn House Poetry Prize. She is the author of In Paterson, a novel, Devotion: A Memoir, three poetry collections, and A Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among many other places. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts writing fellowship and grants from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, she was a fellow at Yaddo, Hawthornden Castle, Le Château de Lavigny, Villa Montalvo, Fundación Valparaíso, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish and Doug Holder to Read in Brighton June 5, 2009.

(Sam Cornish)



( Doug Holder)



Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish and Ibbetson Street Press founder Doug Holder will be reading from their work at Cafenation June 5 2009 at 7PM 380 Washington St.
Brighton, Mass.





Poet, educator Sam Cornish

An underappreciated figure of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, poet Sam Cornish wrote about the urban African-American experience in a voice just as tough and realistic as that of any other black poet of the time. His poems, however, replace the enthusiastic self-expression and the experimental African-American idioms of much modern black poetry with a terse, precise style that at times found more admirers among white readers and publishers than among blacks. In a poem about the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King ("Death of Dr. King," 1971), Cornish depicted rage not in mounting cascades of language but in a devastating quick brushstroke: "we are mourning // our hands filled with bricks // a brother is dead."

Samuel James Cornish was born on December 22, 1935, in Baltimore, Maryland. He spent much of his life in the city, returning there even after beginning to find work and publication opportunities in the Boston area. After his father's death, he and his brother Herman Jr. were raised by his mother and grandmother. "These women raised us on two things: chicken and God," Cornish wrote in his autobiographical prose poem "Winters" (included in Generations, 1971). After one semester at Baltimore's Douglass High School, he dropped out. He later attended Booker T. Washington High School in Baltimore and took courses at Goddard College in Vermont and Northeastern University in Boston. For the most part, however, he was self-educated.

From 1958 to 1960 Cornish served in the United Stated Army Medical Corps. He returned to Baltimore and began to get acquainted with other creatively inclined people and to write poetry seriously himself, issuing his first small collection of poems, In This Corner, around 1961. His best-known publication, Generations, began life as a single poem in the early 1960s, grew to a 16-page pamphlet that Cornish published himself in 1964 (using the publisher name Beanbag Press), and finally became a full-length book. In 1965 Cornish began working at Baltimore's public library, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, as a writing specialist. He worked with children in that job, co-editing a magazine of children's writing called Chicory and compiling an anthology called Chicory: Young Voices from the Black Ghetto that the library issued through its 1960s-era Community Action Program.

Cornish continued to have a strong interest in the creative lives of children and wrote several children's books, including Your Hand in Mine (1970), which Black World called "a gem," noting that "the book is about a little boy who might have been Sam himself." By that time, Cornish had issued several more small volumes of poetry, known as chapbooks, under his Beanbag Press imprint. Traveling frequently between Baltimore and Boston, Cornish worked in several bookstores and at an insurance office in the Boston area and did editorial work for what was then the U.S. Office of Education in Washington. After marrying Jean Faxon (who had edited the first edition of Generations) in 1967, he returned to the Enoch Pratt Free Library for a year in 1968-69. In 1969 he took a post as a creative writing instructor at the Highland Park Free School in the Boston ghetto of Roxbury.

Although his poetry had attracted national attention as early as 1967, when he won a National Endowment for the Arts grant, Cornish's breakthrough occurred with the publication of the full-length Generations in 1971. The mostly short poems in that volume were organized into five sections ("Generations," "Slaves," "Family," "Malcolm," and "Others") that interwove Cornish's own family experiences with those of figures from African-American history. "Cornish shows that America has always been a land of crisis and social chaos," noted Jon Woodson in a Dictionary of Literary Biography essay. "His work is an individual's record of tragic events."



Doug Holder

Doug Holder was born in Manhattan, N.Y. on July 5, 1955. A small press activist, he founded the Ibbetson Street Press in the winter of 1998 in Somerville, Mass. He has published over 50 books of poetry of local and national poets and 25 issues of the literary journal Ibbetson Street. Holder is the arts/editor for The Somerville News, a co-founder of "The Somerville News Writers Festival," and is the curator of the "Newton Free Library Poetry Series" in Newton, Mass. His recorderd interviews with contemporary poets are archived at the Harvard and the University of Buffalo libraries, as well as Poet's House in NYC. In Dec. of 2007 he was a guest of the Voices Israel Literary organization and lead workshops and gave readings in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. Holder's own articles and poetry have appeared in several anthologies including: Inside the Outside: An Anthology of Avant-Garde American Poets (Presa Press) Greatest Hits: twelve years of Compost Magazine (Zephyr Press) and America's Favorite Poems edited by Robert Pinsky. His work has also appeared in such magazines as: Rattle, Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics and Poetry, The Home Planet News, Hazmat, The Boston Globe Magazine, Caesura, Sahara, Raintown Review, Poesy, Small Press Review, Artword Quarterly, Manifold (U.K.), Microbe ( Belguim),The Café Review, the new renaissance, Quercus Review, Northeast Corridor, and many others. His two recent poetry collections are: "Of All The Meals I Had Before..." ( Cervena Barva Press- 2007 ) and "No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain" ( sunyoutside-2007). His collection "THE MAN IN THE BOOTH IN THE MIDTOWN TUNNEL" was released in the summer of 2008 by the Cervena Barva Press. It was a pick of the month in the Small Press Review (July/August 2008). In 2009 he released a collection of interviews: " From the Paris of New England: Interviews with Poets and Writers." It was selected for a New and Noteworthy Book on NEW PAGES. His poetry and prose has been translated into French and Spanish. He holds an M.A. in Literature from Harvard University.

An Sokolovska: A Somerville Writer/Activist Who Ponders The War Between the Sexes.

An Sokolovska: A Somerville Writer/Activist Who Ponders The War Between the Sexes.


It is not unusual for me to run into interesting people at my perch in the Sherman Café in Union Square. One of the folks I have talked with over the years is Activist/Writer/Academic, An Sokolovska. An is a Social Scientist trained at Boston University and Brandeis in the 1960’s and 1970’s. During this era she did field work and taught. She told me: “ I lived through the ‘cultural revolution’, academic joblessness, cultural disorientation, and I finally took financial shelter in the construction industry despite years of advanced study." But Sokolovska didn’t divorce her self from the “academic clay” and her intellectual interests were still in play. The question she asked many decades ago while working on her PhD was: “Why do men and women have difficulties with each other?" She said: “ We are an old species. We are a reproductive species. We have been together for a millennium, from a time before language. Why should we have so many problems? Why hasn’t it been sorted out?

Sokolovska, in the course of her studies, looked back and saw two relationships that go back to the dawn of time. One is the mother/child, the other is the male/female. The mother/child relationship is long lasting. The male/female bond is of shorter duration. Women have different survival skills than men. Children are born in a social matrix of men and women and live close to nature. But boys grow up and leave this society, and join different groups of men. For the man to be accepted by his male cohorts he has to reject what he left behind in the matrix. As a result the male has a fear of the part of him that is drawn back to the matrix. This is where the fear of women originates.

When Sokolovska used to teach she asked her students both male and female, many working class veterans, to observe each other’s interactions in the world, and with their peers. Sokolovska feels that if people have knowledge of each other they will drop the “masks” and stop misrepresenting themselves. From this harmony of the sexes will hopefully arise.

Sokolovska said we live in a time when conquest and war seem to be the way of the world. Naturally, this affects interactions between men and women. She feels it is essential that we take the time to truly understand our differences in order for relationships to be less contentious.

I asked her how literature—poetry, informs this discussion. She replied: “ I believe if something is true it has already been expressed in poetry and art. Poetry reveals emotional truth. The ideas, if they are true, should be found in some fashion in poetry and literature.”

Sokolovska used a quote from the late poet Wallace Stevens to illustrate the male-female connection:

“ A man and a woman are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird are one.” (From “Thirteen Ways to Look at a Blackbird.”)


Sokolovska offered a poem of her own to illustrate her points:

The Honorific Title
________________________________________________
(honorific: "1. Conferring or conveying honor 2. Belonging to
or constituting a
class of grammatical forms used in speaking to or about a social
superior -"
Webster's 9th)


Why should I call you "Man"

before you have understood me?

Why, seeing your crazy terror of me - "The Other."


I have been observing you in the green thickets

for a long time. I know you are running, keeping secret, afraid.

Why would I call you Man?


I call Man that quiet place

the smell of the lake the earth sun-warming

long flutterings of air


There it is safe. I manage to be

Small then very large I am altering

Transforming like a berry or a flower.


None of this Man fears for it is home.

The One and Only Human Galaxy by Elizabeth Swados

The One and Only Human Galaxy by Elizabeth Swados. ( Hanging Loose Press, NY) 2009. $18.


It’s a debut poetry collection, but hardly at the hand of a beginner! Elizabeth Swados, author of The One and Only Human Galaxy, a poetic biography of Harry Houdini, has composed, written and directed acclaimed plays, dance scores, nonfiction books, novels, and children’s books for some 30 years, in the U.S. and abroad. You can tell from the first poem, “An Elephant as Unwilling Performer and Prologue”, that she can write tightly edited and mysterious, symbolic imagery that gives the reader a sense of an intriguing story ahead.

She starts with what I call Act I, where she defines Houdini as a Jewish man whose rabbi father is “disappointed” in him. Rather than rely on God, “the one I depend on/is myself/I am the arm that pulls me from the grave…”, says Houdini. But he also relies on his wife, Bess, during his early years as a magician, escape artist, and illusionist. She says in “Bess As Slave”, “It’s your clock I wind/your hours I keep/…I am one box folded inside another box…” He himself then continues in “Houdini Gives Orders to Bess”, “When I die, burn my tricks and illusions. /So if you marry, Bess, he must not steal my elephant,/water box, velvet cape/…or curl inside my trunk/for that would be adultery/…blasphemy…/I’ll come back with demons protecting me/and I will cut him in two”!

Houdini’s “Private God” gives “the right card…a gift from Houdini’s God…”
But in the next chunk of the 133-page book, which could be called Act II (perfection),he admits “There is no true magic/without pain/no escape without initial panic…” He’s a built and wounded body, in fact “I am Crime”… “My skin already scabbed from/the last tension/pull in/suck in/steal air/no one can keep me/…keys held in my teeth,/picks embedded in my scalp…” In short, he uses Hindu breathing to “pull my diaphragm against my spine. (Kill half of yourself and/the other half slips through”).

But some of these poems could be mistaken for a playwright’s stage directions to get the actor to describe and present Harry the legend. Then she’ll blend in a “cacoon of chains” and other good poetry images. The emotional Harry is shown in “After Mama Dies”:“You are squeezed by grief/ and strangled by grief /and hammered by grief/Get upside down with grief/enclosed in grief that keeps you there forever/like an iron womb.”

A possible Act III could begin with the book title, “The One and Only Human Galaxy”: Harry says “I’ve Arrived”; “You won’t forget my name (and picture).” I personally had to stop and take a rest before I could go on reading the emotional and kabalistic (mystical) poem “Mother”: “It’s my name up there like the Hebrew alphabet…forms a ladder on which I can/wrestle off the angels, the ones who will have you/instead of me…”

Harry is clearly very full of himself: “I’m made of cells and each cell is/a star that burns/in whipping circles/like the ring of fire outside Eden’s gate./I will shine into a future/that is unimaginable. I am possibility/transformed into action…”
But as Harry gets on in years of notoriety, he gets startled by other people’s fame.
Edison invents a telephone, but Houdini wants one he can use to call his dead mother…Then come an influx of “spiritualists,” women who do shows about talking to the dead. He is apparently very threatened by them, not just that they do popular shows, but that they give the concept of “Performance” a bad name.

Houdini, the fabulous fraud, makes it “The Holy Battle”: “You who claim to heal and save, communicating/with the dead…/are a danger as bad/as poison sold as medicine…/ cheap perfume on which/poor innocents choke…”

Before the poet expounds her epilogue—as mysterious as the prologue…Harry warns us he will “die on my own terms/here I am, death,/flip a coin/but remember every magician/has one coin with two heads/and another with two tails…”

I’ll leave you to figure out the epilogue on your own. You should grab this book and read it if you’d like a good poetic narrative, especially one whose cover photo shows Houdini hanging perilously from a scaffolding by his feet. I usually think of a poet’s first poetry book as a chapbook of stories from one’s childhood, but Elizabeth Swados is of course a playwright, and she keeps you riveted by her book with the power of poetic story telling.

--Barbara Bialick

FRESH GRASS: 32 Independent Poets

I just got the latest anthology from the PRESA PRESS. PRESA has been described as a "Who's Who of small press poets with substantial reputations." ( Phil Wagner, Iconoclast) Eric Greinke founded this press. From the introduction:

"This anthology presents generous selections from the works of the most frequently published contributers to issue 1-8 of PRESA. During the first four years of Presa, a canon of poets emerged. They rose like cream to the top of our cups, not only through their contributions to PRESA, but in their participation in the independent literary scene. These are poets with established reputations whose work has been published primarily in the best indie literary journals as Bogg, Chiron Review, Gargoyle,Hazmat Review,Home Planet News, Iconoclast, The New York Quarterly, Poesy and Rattle, as well as in numerous smaller magazines of equal quality such as Barbaric Yawp, Big Scream, Free Verse,& Ibbetson Street. Webzines such as Napalm Health Spa, The Pedestal and Wilderness House Literary Review spread their seeds to fertilize around the globe."

Contributors

John Amen
Antler
Guy Beining
Alan Catlin
David Chorlton
Kirby Congdon
David Cope
John Elsberg
Jean Esteve
Michael Flannagan
Hugh Fox
Eric Greinke John Grey
Carol Hamilton
Doug Holder
Robert K. Johnson
Arthur W. Knight
Ronnie M. Lane
Donald Lev
Lyn Lifshin
Ellaraine Lockie
Gerald Locklin
B.Z. Niditch
Simon Perchik
Charles P. Ries
Lynne Savitt
Harry Smith
Jared Smith
Spiel
Joseph Verrilli
Nathan Whitting
AD Winans


To order go to http://presapress.com

The Incurable Sensibility of David Huerta: Before Saying Any of the Great Words, David Huerta, Selected Poems, translated by Mark Schafer.

The Incurable Sensibility of David Huerta: Before Saying Any of the Great Words, David Huerta, Selected Poems, translated by Mark Schafer.

article by Michael Todd Steffen



Alive with play, bold, crazy, surprising yet lacking much correlation with common experience, smacking somewhat of the improbable, the language of David Huerta’s poetry as rendered by Mark Schafer makes you want to say, “amazing… incurable.” It is a poetry primarily interested in linguistic exposition, and it dazzles us with oxymoronic expressions like “intolerant composure” and juxtapositions of the concrete with the abstract—

But he knew how
to drag her into a swoon, into the grim
daybreaks of stupefaction.

These instances come from the poem “Pathological Beings,” the title itself betraying another characteristic of Huerta’s poetry, a defiance and boldness with deference and silence, which has a stunning, snappy effect. There is some (comic) relief in poking intelligent fun at people’s misery, if not for a lack of solemnity and sympathy. But then what poet makes herself entirely herself without defining lacks? It is what the poet gives us that is important, and Huerta has published nineteen books of poetry and won all of Mexico’s major literary awards. Shake a finger at that.
Huerta’s early poetry heralds him, the son of the acclaimed Mexican poet Efrain Huerta, as “a smart young poet whose work revealed a voracious reading of poetic traditions across many centuries and several languages” (Translator’s Note). That unresolved arpeggio of a vast reader’s culture is sounded in the first poem, “Fumbling through the heart of music,” with the embellished image of the drowned sailor:

I remembered Phlebas
—ears besieged by mounds of seaweed,
open eyes drifting weightless
toward the rock tattooed with reflections,
fish like rats around his body…

Shafer gives us eight samples of Huerta’s early poetry, leading to sections of the monumental poem bespeaking the impossibility of finality or definition inherent in Huerta’s sensibility, entitled Incurable, “the longest poem in Mexican history,” which the Translator’s Note goes on to describe as having “confounded many readers and astonished all. Some read it as a poem, others as a novel, and still others as a kind of fractured self-portrait.” The translator might have mentioned among the influences to this poem the most obvious one, Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself. While Huerta’s language sparks with post-modern fireworks, ideas and terminology, the main of it, its trunk of subject and syntax, the expressiveness in long lines, is essentially Whitmanesque.

The stuff of the self, an Orphic descent into desire,
a touch of what spills over, neither center nor handle,
a well bounded by the north of words and the hellish or Egyptian south
of the repressed, deferred, postponed, abandoned in the horrific
gardens of the past (from Chapter I).

And again,

The heavenly bodies
above and this body I know because it is my own, the drops
that trickle from me, the spilled virtues I mention to no one,
the evolutions of my body in an abandoned bed, my fingers
in the urgent darkness… (Chapter VII).

If with the shadows of anguish, irony, doubt and argument, Shafer’s selections of Incurable read as a celebration of Huerta’s self extended (transcended) to the cosmos about him, that is also himself, the mind merged or collided with all it has experienced.
Mark Shafer has done brilliant work in bringing this major Mexican poet into English. The organization of the book has a simple coherence for readers at their first encounter with what is, should you dig deeper, a dauntingly labyrinthine and copious body of writing. More than just the words, Shafer has translated the poetry of Huerta into smooth English—

But she knew what untoward
and tenacious manner would confound him (“Pathological Beings”).

Before Saying Any of the Great Words is well worth the feather in your hat and the read, a mind-hunt of zaniness and intelligence that makes you want to keep turning the pages.


Before Saying Any of the Great Words/David Huerta/Selected Poems
translated by Mark Schafer
$20.00
Copper Canyon Press
P.O. Box 271
Port Townsend, WA 98368
www.coppercanyonpress.org

How To Train A Rock. Paul Steven Stone.

How To Train A Rock. Paul Steven Stone. (Blind Elephant Press) (Cambridge, Mass.) $15.

Paul Steven Stone, the author of the novel “ Or So It Seems,” has just released a collection of columns he wrote for the Scituate Mariner, a local costal Massachusetts paper. The columns deal with Stone’s recurrent theme in his work: what is and how do we handle this thing called life? Now this isn’t a self-help or self-important collection. Stone is too much the Bronx kibitzer for that. The column has a style that can only be described as a comic, Twilight Zone-like showcase of Stone’s views on the world and the players on its stage.

In these Bernie Madoff days I was interested to read “ In-Transit Report of Henry J. Worthmore, Jr. Here Stone writes about a Madoff-like clone:


“ Born to money, child of privilege and class, member of the bar, Henry J. Worthmore, Jr. unfortunately squandered all opportunities for growth, brotherhood and the pursuit of truth offered to him in a lifetime. Ill-disposed to use his considerable assets or high social standing for the good of others, he became a human sucking-and-eating machine, amassing a great fortune, expensive holdings, and a life devoid of friends or congeniality. His funeral drew a large crowd, though relief and celebration were more in evidence than mourning.


And Stone is equally adept at waxing poetic in his evocative little piece “ Pretty White Gloves.” Here the frostbitten hands of a homeless man become a frozen metaphor for white gloves and a happier place and time:

“Just like the marine office he once was, just like the sweet innocent daughter he once knew, just like the young man grown suddenly old on a frozen sidewalk, his hands are beautiful and special in a way these strangers will never understand.

“White gloves,” he insists proudly.
“Pretty White Gloves.”

Ah, an O’Henry taste of irony…I like that flavor.

Stone, the Director of Advertising at W. B. Mason in Boston, riffs on the advantages of adversity, the murder of a temp worker, and of all things how to train a rock. This is a book that has a light style, and can be read in the course of an evening, or in tasty snippets over a few weeks. Keep it on your bed table…read it when you are able!

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update

A New Imprint of the Wilderness House Literary Review releases new book "Deer" by Susan Tepper

Steve Glines announces the debut of the Wilderness House Press, the book publishing arm of the Wilderness Literary Review http://whlreview.com . Their first title is a collection of short fiction "Deer" by Susan Tepper ( to be available this month)









Nothing is off-limits in Susan Tepper’s stories, yet not a single sentence feels gratuitous. Each of the tales that make up DEER exists as its own world, endowed with so potent a presence that one feels one has witnessed a truth unfold in the reading. Gladly our minds stretch wide to catch her fictions and weave them into our new reality.
Eric Darton, Free City


In her debut story collection DEER, Susan Tepper takes us into the forest of her imagination, shining a light on a pack of off-kilter characters caught in unusual and compelling circumstances. Tepper is one of the most original voices in fiction I've heard in quite a while. While reading her loopy-beautiful dark narratives, I was reminded of the first time I read Denis Johnson. Yes, she's that good. This is a writer to watch!
Jamie Cat Callan, The Writer’s Toolbox & French Women Don’t Sleep Alone


Susan Tepper creates brilliant, quirky, unpredictable worlds in her story collection DEER. Whether set in the Italian countryside, a post-modern house in the Hamptons, or backstage at a community theatre, they teeter between the familiar and the extreme, the peculiar and the poignant, and her characters, brimming as they are with eccentricities, never let us forget how deeply human they are at their core.
Ellen Litman, The Last Chicken in America

BRIDGET GALWAY: From the Bohemian digs of Provincetown: To The Paris of New England: Somerville, Mass.

(Joyce S. Galway-- at Tennessee Williams apartment)

Provincetown Banner File Photo

BRIDGET GALWAY: From the Bohemian digs of Provincetown: To The Paris of New England: Somerville, Mass.

By Doug Holder

An artist friend of mine Bridget Galway lives in my neck of the woods in the Union Sq. vicinity of Somerville, Mass. Well we got to talking, and as it is my habit, I asked her about her background. She directed me to her website: http://www.geocities.com/bkgalway and her accomplished portfolio of paintings, one of which is a portrait of the Beat Generation writer William Borroughs. (I plan to use it on the front cover of the next Ibbetson Street, my literary journal). Bridget told me she moved from Provincetown to Somerville a few years ago and she wanted to connect with the arts community here, so I invited her to the literary group the Bagel Bards in Davis Square. Galway told me she was caring for her late mother, a long-time resident of P-Town, and dyed-in-the-wool Boheme. Joyce Galway (Galway's late mother) moved to Provincetown in 1953, and took part in that fecund artistic milieu that once existed there until gentrification and massive influxes of tourists changed its character.


I included a note from Bridget Galway about her interesting background, and a short piece by her late mother Joyce. (Edited for space considerations)













BRIDGET GALWAY:



For 3 years since I have moved here from Provincetown, I have thought about responding to your email postings. I am an unpublished poet, never ventured to try. I am a visual artist as well. Some of my art is feature on the Island of Ibiza's web site which is http://www.ibizatimes.blogspot.com. My father was the writer Stephen Seley; mainly published in the 40's and 50's, at that time he was written up in the New York Times for two books “Baxter Bernstein ", published by Scibner's, and “The Cradle Will Fall", published by Hartcourt, Brace and Company. My Uncle Jason Seley, a sculptor, became the Dean of Cornell after heading the art department for many years, my cousin Kate Seley who lives in Madrid, premiered the Spanish presentation of " The Vagina Monologues." I continue to correspond with Peter Kinsley, an English writer, whose most recent book is" Bogged Down In the County Lyric." He was a good friend of my Father's, who is a character in that book. You can also find him on the Ibiza web site, as well as other writers. If nothing else is derived from this correspondence, I know you will find that web site interesting. I have a rich history of being surrounded by writers and artist all my life. Tennessee Williams was best man at my Mother's and Stepfather's Wedding. Harry Kemp (Provincetown Vagabond Poet) was a good friend of my Father's. He dedicated his book the "Cradle Will Fall," to him. My life has evolved from my early years in Greenwich Village, to Provincetown. I have read my poetry on WOMR radio Poets Corner in Provincetown.


JOYCE GALWAY

I arrived in Provincetown with my five month-old son Dennis and his father, Fritz Memorial Day, 1953. Fitz drove a truck full of several families' summer possessions and was paid for delivery of same. He then deposited me and the child at our shop (Custom Made Sandals by Fitzgerald) cum living quarters, corner of Pleasant and Commercial, across the street from Cookie's Tap, which is at present Galarani's. It was a very different time. A real sense of community existed although the world itself wasn't overworked as it is today…

The natives, Portuguese to you, the summer people, and the groups of renegades of every description known as artists coexisted wonderfully. Oh those beach parties with great buckets of muscles etc. contributed by John Gaspe!

The artist Ghandi Brody had a studio behind some storefront on Commercial ... I spent the days I did not work drawing peoples' feet on stiff white paper, on the beach in front of Flyers' Boat Yard with Steve Seeley, a writer from the city and of course the baby. Steve eventually took off for Ibiza but not before he became the father of my daughter, Bridget, who fortunately or unfortunately follows the bohemian strains of her parents and is now a Provincetown artist. Some afternoons I modeled for Hans Hoffman. (Noted Abstract Expressionist). Life was amusing with moments of enlightened brilliance as the various characters came and went throughout the season.


...there were days in the sun... a town of sexual freedoms, exchanging of ideas, music, and if one was lucky enough to know someone as Manny Zorro, early morning fishing trips on his boat, going out in pre-dawn fog. One mixed with such a diversity of people...it was possible to meet idols of literature, struggling artists, and famous persons such as Harry Kemp. Life in Provincetown was easy, fluid as the beauty that surrounds it, and after living here 31 years never lost its pull on my senses.

... I relish the gorgeous days of spring, summer, and autumn, and the soft orange full moon nights.

Somerville Printer Shelley Barandes Makes You Read the “Fine” Print.

( Left Becca Wasilewsai. Right Shelley Barandes)
Photo by Dianne Robitaille


Somerville Printer Shelley Barandes Makes You Read the “Fine” Print.

By Doug Holder

It was a stormy afternoon when my wife Dianne Robitaille and I made a trip to an off the beaten path factory building on Windsor St. in Somerville, Mass. We slowly walked up a winding staircase, smelling the faint hint of chocolate from Taza Stone-Ground Chocolate, a business housed in the factory. Our destination? Albertine Press. As you might know I am a publisher, and I’m a sucker for anything that has to do with printing, etc… A few years back I interviewed Gary Metras of the Adastra Press, who has a small but well-respected poetry press that prints books and chapbooks with Letterpress printing. Letterpress is basically an “antique” printing method which became obsolete a few decades ago with the arrival of desktop publishing. Unlike the stuff you get from Kinko’s or their ilk the old fashioned Letterpress method is elegant and fairly expensive. It leaves an impression in the paper ( and on the customer hopefully!), and according to Shelley Barandes, the owner of this enterprise, it is very much in demand, especially for the young Somerville couple looking for finely printed wedding invitations and related stationary.

Barandes, who is a graduate of Columbia University, studied Letterpress at the Printing Center in Book Arts in New York City. The Albertine Press was birthed in 2005 in the city of Lynn, Mass. Later Barandes moved her press to Somerville and has no regrets. Barandes, a resident of the Republic of Cambridge, loves our city and is actively involved with the arts community. She told me that the rent at the factory is reasonable, and she sells her greeting cards, etc…at a number of local venues like the Magpie Gallery. Although her bread and butter are marriage-related printing she does a brisk business in business cards, and designer greeting cards. The greeting cards are noted for their minimalist splashes of words and phrases on their fronts. Barandes said: “ I like to keep it simple.’

Barandes said that Letterpress printing has been taken up by a new breed of young women and this is evidenced by the eager students who take classes in the art she offers.

Barandes once entertained the idea of a career in architecture, but found the work institutional and banal. Her press allows her to be more creative.

In this climate of recession Barandes said: “Business is there. People have a great awareness of where things come from. They love things produced locally, rather than massed produced in China.”
Later, this young printer introduced me to her print room manager Becca Wasilewsai. She presides over a Sturbridge Village-like group of antique presses. Wasilewsai, a talented printmaker, described the Letterpress process to this clueless layman. Barandes and Wasilewsai are not total Luddites however. They do use the computer in the fine tuning of their artistic printing.

Generally Albertine does small press runs of a few hundred, but it is not unusual to do runs over 500 as well. The machines like the Vandercook Proof Press are not being made anymore so they are handled with the utmost care. Parts are very difficult if not impossible to replace, Brandes said.

In the background Barandes’ husband, a PhD candidate at Harvard University tended to the couple’s new baby. It seems that Barandes’ life is full of creations: both biological and artistic. She invites you to drop by the studio. For information go to http://www.albertinepress.com

The Red Line by Elizabeth Kirschner

* I will be doing a reading with Elizabeth Kirschner in the fall.---Doug Holder/ Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene founder.


THE RED LINE

By Elizabeth Kirschner

Early morn and my eyes are like gun slits, swollen almost shut from the non-stop torrential weeping I did last night. Too much brain pain. Brain pain that knocks me off my feet, sometimes escalating at the speed of light until I’m hit with a bout of psychosis. Called “episodes” as if they were a popular TV series, I go far away from the world and into one where wolves are devouring my brains or demons are throttling me, choking me halfway to death.

These states of psychic intensity are what have landed me for the past five years in the psych ward behind the red line that’s six feet in front of the locked door that only visitors can cross, not patients. Red line like a goal one must get into in order to win the game. Red line from which I watched my then husband cross and go through the locked door, his shirt a small sail, his posture like that of a wounded God.

My first grand entrance into the psych ward coincided with my first psychic break. I went from being in a state of what I call classical despair, as though it were an art form, into the hellish belief that I was a dust baby, blown hither and yon, then switched in a moment long enough for my demons to snap their fingers, into the violent schema wherein I was wrestling with God in piss and shit in a sewer hole with the lid shut tight.

That first incident, over five years ago, happened on my son’s eleventh birthday. In delirium, I argued with my husband, told him I needed to make the birthday dinner and bake the cake before I would go anywhere. The kitchen knife held a strange allure, something to cut and be cut with, but off I went to the ER, a crazed Madam, a loony-tunes mother and wife.

I had been in just about every emergency room in Boston prior to that December day where the light was so severely cold it felt shrill. Seizures brought me there, seizures which I experienced countless times for four long years before they stopped and the madness erupted. And now, for over five years, the psychotic breaks have occurred, volcanic in nature, way too many times, some of which landed me back in the ER or the psych ward.

The lock-up, the nuthouse. So just what is life like behind the red line? Surely it merits being called an inferno. Surely it’s like living in a void slit in the side of time. It is a kind of incarceration where all the patients are players in a tragedy of Shakespearean proportion. It’s a haunted tunnel in which one hears anonymous screams or a wax museum, each of us rigid with pain. The “us” being a community of dying souls—the demented, tormented thrust into hell holes that are gaping wounds, the only comfort being that there is an “us.” None of us are alone—one patient walks the hallways hours on end, another caves into the lair of despair, still another talks out loud to no one, making elaborate plans—when to get one’s hair done or buy tickets to go to symphony—this “us” is a “we” and thus we share a huge common denominator; we are all touched in the head, a little kooky, or most politely, a bit too eccentric to exist anywhere else except behind the red line.

It’s just one more way of being devastated. That my first hospitalization occurred on my beloved son’s birthday is a heartbreak I will carry until I die. O how I longed to be back in the maternity ward laboring to give birth instead of wanting to create my own demise. How many times have I crowned on the cusp of death wherein the only word I can muster and master is die? I want to orchestrate my own death, I have written or said far too often, my only motto: annihilate the violated because my brand of madness is the result of severe childhood abuse committed by both of my parents. Abuse I buried in a cavern so deep I lived in a coma of unconsciousness that exploded into concussions of consciousness that came not prior to, but after my initial hospitalization. This much I know: abuse is taboo and I have been thoroughly schooled in the drama of trauma and know, as well, what it’s like to be was partially dead in the head for almost five decades.

That day in December I was, of course, in the ER for hours moving in and out of psychosis. Monkeys walked out of walls, a den of lions was ensnared beneath my bed which I told my biologist husband to tell them to go away. He did so, calmly, firmly, but imagine his terror at seeing his Elizabeth gone completely out of her mind.

Late that night I was finally admitted after being given a neurological test, one that I knew by rote from the seizure years. Then came the body check, the patting up and done like a cop searching for weapons. Off came my wedding ring, my good earrings. My hastily packed bag was thoroughly checked for sharps, cords, anything that could do me in even though I was already done in.

I had to wait for hours for my bedtime meds, was put on a new one called Risperadol which was meant to be “psychic glue.” I was just another Humpty Dumpty fallen from the wall and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put me back together again, but the new med did. Eons later, I’m now on three times as much of Risperadol and take three tabs of it whenever I have a psychic break and must wait while literally screaming my bloody head off until the drug kicks in. Once I was in a state so severe and prolonged, I downed a dozen tabs, landed in the psych ward again because I had taken an accidental overdose.

The first time I was admitted, voluntarily, I was given a private room, much to my relief. I cried myself to sleep in the wee hours while clutching my son’s favorite teddy bear. This bear has come with me every time I’ve been hospitalized as a kind of surrogate son. That son, as well as my doctor and dog keep me on, however precariously, on terra firma, that is until the next quake of madness hits me putting me once again on the verge of psychic extinction.

In the unit, the keepers and the kept are separated by a tidal abyss. The keepers check the kept every ten minutes round the clock, hand out the meds and make sure they’re taken, take one’s pulse and temperature every morning, have the keys that might let one free, but are used to lock the locked up ones in the shower where razors are verboten. They guard the halls and every morning, precisely at 4:00 a.m., I would awaken, pace the small stretch of hallway between my room and the guards until the community room opened at 6:00. Then I could go make tea, quietly pad back to bed in the flannel nightgown I wore morning, noon and night, and read the mythic Aneid in mythic madness.

The first morning I was there, I paced around the bed, then ended standing up on it, terrified, because I was sure the floor was swarming with poison insects whose bites could kill me. My Dantesque hell realm of insanity has put me in a minefield because I never know when I might land on a one and be blown away in pain so acute my only wish is a death wish.

Life among the deranged has had an equalizing effect. I often saw my agony reflected in someone else’s eyes such that I wanted to give that fellow sufferer a hug, but no touching was allowed in the unit. There are rules to be followed, a very strict list. If a rule was broken, one was sent, like a naughty child, to his or her room for very long time-outs. One man, a tailor, was never allowed to leave his room. He stood in the doorway during all his waking hours like a broken scarecrow and once I was scolded for talking with him. Upon my release, I gave him the rest of my paper and a pencil that I had scribbled fragments of poems on so he could draw suits and dresses. His look of gratitude was so profound I only wanted to sob.

In the lock-up the kept are kept busy by their keepers. One is not allowed was not allowed to stay in bed all day. In the morning we were counted before we could eat breakfast, then we went to groups all day and finally gather in the community room come evening to go round the circle and report one positive thing that had happened that day.

I remember crying a lot. I remember hiding quarters in a sock so I could make calls out on one of the two phones on the ward. I remember staring out the suicide-proof window in my room longing to fall to the pavement below. I was haunted by all the other half-mad, self-destructive poets—Lowell, Sexton, Berryman, Plath—and felt a sort of camaraderie with their ghosts. I felt that same camaraderie with the other patients. We were in it together, all taken out of the world because we were suicidal, crazed, debilitated—in short, not fit for society.

We had our own society. We were colleagues passing each other in the hallway, working together in groups, telling each other the specifics of whatever form of mental illness that kept us behind the red line. Mine was, is Borderline Personality Disorder, a diagnosis I didn’t know until after my release, one that came out of a survey test hundreds of questions long that I took soon after my arrival. It is a mood disorder, biologically-based that’s exacerbated by childhood trauma. One, two years after my first hospitalization, I remembered the primitive, primary truma, that is, of my mother whacking the back of my head with a baseball bat when I was three or four years old. I remember hitting the floor which had black and white tiles like a chessboard, me the pawn, she the ruthless queen holding me in checkmate. Years after that, while in an episode of great intensity, I recalled how my father decapitated my life-size doll in my playhouse, then told me that’s what would happen to me if I didn’t comply with him. These memories and other assorted, horrific ones, buried deeper than deep, are what made my childhood blocked out with blackouts and are what lead me to life behind the red line.

Being suicidal is what kept me in the lock-up. It is a holding tank, a halfway house between life and death, a hang out for lost souls, broken people, a cuckoo limbo. If I know what it’s like to be kept, then Somerville-based poet, Doug Holder, who has worked at a psychiatric hospital in the Boston area for years, knows what it’s like to be a keeper, or more kindly, a caregiver. Hence we share a particular knowledge, the flipped sides of a single coin and plan to give readings together, thus creating a dialogue, a crucial one about what it’s like to be at either end of the spectrum of life in the unit.

That I survived my childhood is a miracle. That God has put a pen in my hand is another one. I have written in line after line about the hellish dimensions of my illness and of life in the unit. I should have used red ink, blood-red, to ink the lines that have resulted in two collections of poetry. The first, My Life as a Doll, brought out by Autumn House Press in May ’08, is my survivor’s tale, a memoir in verse about my mother’s violence. The second book, not yet out but someday, one day will be, also by Autumn House is titled The Fire Bones and it chronicles my father’s sexual abuse. It is meant to be the companion book to My Life as a Doll.

Red lines then as scaffolding for my particular horror story. Yesterday, in the strangest of places—a car dealership—there was a huge poster that read, “Thou Shalt Seek the Red Line.” Eerie to find it there, to ponder its meaning, yet a vision soon came to me while walking by the sea of a red line encircling the earth with the whole human race, hand-in-hand, toeing it. Every one of us is susceptible to life behind that red line, many have crossed it either as the kept, the keepers or their loved ones and have felt just how universal suffering is. Let’s stand together then on the red line, linked by the beautiful ruins of our common humanity, by the faithful failings of flesh and by the brutal truths that tutor us until we break open and earn our angel wings so we can take flight from fright, lift up and lift off as free spirits in the grace that transforms us from being lost to that of being found.

~~Elizabeth Kirschner at e.kirschner1@gmail.com and www.elizabethkirschner.com.

Two Poets: A Psychiatric Patient/ A Mental Health Worker/ The Keeper/The Kept/ A Reading

PRESS RELEASE: THE RED LINE: Two Poets: A Psychiatric Patient/ A Mental Health Worker/ The Keeper/The Kept/ A Reading



Two poets with a common knowledge. Two points of view from a shared experience—the kept and the keeper—of life in the psych ward. Both know what it’s like to be behind the red line six feet from the locked door of the unit. One could cross over it, go home, the other could not. Hence poet Elizabeth Kirschner as one of the kept. Hence poet Doug Holder as one of the keepers. Two separate books—My Life as a Doll—by Kirschner brought out by Autumn House Press and From the Back Bay to the Back Ward

by Holder, Ibbeston Press, a pick of the month in the Small Press Review.



The lock-up, the ward. One reading. So just what goes on behind the red line? Kirschner’s book, nominated for the Lenore Marshall Prize, is a survivor’s tale, a memoir in verse which has devoted one of its four sections, “Tra-la-la,” to depicting in detail the Dantesque inferno of the unit. The other three are a harrowing account of the childhood abuse that later erupted into terrifying flights into madness which have led and still lead her to life behind the red line, that holding tank of the damned.



Here’s one excerpt from “Tra-la-la:”



O what a scanty things I was that winter



of winters when hellbent angels wanted to mate

with me, but I was an absentee and dreams



lunged out of me like rabid dogs and my scent—

burnt match, cursed cinder—trailed me



like a smoky mood. I abandoned myself

in the unit where there were no sharps, where



there were no cords, where I was checked

every ten minutes and my pulse was stolen.



Or this one from Holder’s exacting portraits of the kept:



She is on guard

for the vulpine machinations

of the silent, incessant voices

chattering in her cortex

a murderous Greek chorus

slapping at the hollows

of her skull.



from: “Lost Girl on the Psychiatric Ward”



Two distinct voices /The Poetry Reading/ Sept 9, 2009 7PM Porter Square Books Cambridge, Mass

Open Letters by Carolyn Gregory (Review by Lo Galluccio)

Open Letters

By Carolyn Gregory

Copyright @ 2008

Windmill Editions

82 pages



Carolyn Gregory creates a collection reverberating with greens that are hot and cool, with waters that signal renewal, with metamorphosed stories from everyday work life and poems to friends who she can’t let escape her vision and devotion. Gregory is not a “language” poet but there is not dearth of texture, metaphor or color in her texts. One of my favorite poems in the book is “Siren,” a Plath-like ode to solitude and demons held at bay or rather, put away, but still palpable, like the pain in “the middle of her back.” The Siren appears at night, with her “lover snoring lightly in a dream” – thus, of no help.


“Smiling, she mentioned the empty bottles

hidden in my closet.

She praised the narcotic, alcohol.

Perfumed poppies tumbled from her red lips

and fell across my blanket.

My back throbbed.

The moon grew big in its black egg cup”

p.2


The Siren it seems, is part of Gregory herself, the poet in her, the artist that awakens in the mysterious dark, and can lure sailors to their deaths. It is as if her double has appeared in the room reminding her of how she has become what she is. The Siren is also dangerous and must be let out.


“Instead, I opened the window

and let her float out

as ghosts do,

taking the pain with her

though I knew she’d be back.”



p. 3


In “Sea Wish” it is a tumbling dark green lake or ocean which Gregory swims and finds “in the space between the waves” her muse, her lover. This becomes a vision of a real couple whose “wife bobs in the green, fifty yards off.” As a happy Shakespearean play, the couple will lie beside each other, happy, “one cool as a seal.” And Gregory affirms that:


“Her arm will wrap his back

as the waves tumble nearby,

as unbroken as love should not be broken

if there are vows of constancy and good faith.”

p. 9


In a surrealist mode, Gregory offers the poem, “El Station Interior”

Wherein two men and a woman wait as snow falls for a train that never arrives.

One senses a Hopper-esque feel of the 40’s in her descriptions, a Chicago of the mind. It is a poem about a kind of mundane repetition, when one is going nowhere, dressed, nevertheless, for work and the City:


“Nothing moves through the turnstile.

No one joins these three at the elevated.

They have waited at this spot

every day for twenty years or

maybe fifty….


Steam drapes the glass panels

Of the exits

As the falling snow dissolves.”


P 10


For some reason this scene reminds me of an ART play about two women and a man in hell with only a Porter to help them in a slanting room, or about the day in Chicago when I walked out into the frost to see a sea of dead pigeons on the lawn. One could say it leaves one with a sense of disturbance or unease, but like in Hopper, the matte aloofness of the figures leaves them, also, somehow alone.


Gregory’s poems always sustain with graceful detail and emotional balance – never cliff-hang or become too precious or baroque. In this sense she walks a taut line between deep sentiment and keen observation.


There are a string of “office poems” in which she delves with sarcastic wit into the weird plane and painful hierarchy of the work-world. In “Office Mother” the mother is literally the son’s – or ship’s Captain’s – protector. In prim gray she watches over the fax and opens the door as her son tries to command his post. Beyond duty,


“She prays quietly all is right

for her son, the captain,

head of the crew,

throwing emails into Outlook,

and quelling rebellion.”

P 29


In taking on the voice of Robert Mapplethorpe, well known in New York circles as artist, sculptor and close friend of Patti Smith until his death in 1989, she paints some brilliant imagery starting out with the wry line: “Sure, I’ve always said that what’s erotic lives in the eye of the beholder.” Well, Patti Smith was much more than a “college kid “clutching a tiger lily” in his photos. They were close mates, confidantes and deeply influenced each other’s work. Besides, Patti Smith never went to college in the conventional sense but ran away from home to the Chelsea Hotel at a ripe young age. (See recent bio-pic “Dream of Life.”) Her ode to him, “The Coral Sea” – a poetical picture book – came out a few years ago. That’s my one bone to pick with this portrait of Mapplethorpe’s thinking and his art.


“My brown-toned irises open

like the body under light,

The red orchid flares like a sex badge

on palmetto spikes.”


It’s fun to pretend to get inside his head as his audience looks upon his work:


“My black nude leans on a pedestal,

curved muscles frozen in time.

Because he was so beautiful,

I loved him

But do the onlookers understand?” p 13


And,


In ending his ghost ruminates:


“Looking down from death,

it’s hard to say what

these gallery people really think.

They see William Burroughs and Laurie Anderson,

they recognize Andy Warhol

by his pale vacant stare

but most of them ignore my humor and despair,

shocked instead by water sports.”


P 14

This is a rich collection, carefully crafted, and filled with beauty and wit.


There are far too many good poems to mention, but among my other favorites are “Hands,” “The Sea with No End,” “Raga,” and “The Night the Church Burned.” Carolyn Gregory works earnestly and patiently on her craft, with less bravado and compulsion than most poets poison themselves with. It is to her extreme credit that she has produced a whole book of wondrous treats.



Lo Galluccio

Ibbetson St. Press


Lo’s next chapbook, “Not for Amnesia” is due out in the summer on Propaganda Press.

"Scenes From A Good Life" by Paul Kareem Taylor

“Scenes from a Good Life”

$15.00

Tebot Bach, Huntington Beach, CA

http://tebotbach.org/aboutus.html

Review by Rene Schwiesow


In the beginning there was the moon and the sea and it is from this that “Scenes from a Good Life” springs.


Paul Kareem Tayyar an Iranian-American poet whose first book, “Everyday Magic,” was nominated for a Pushcart in 2007, takes us on a journey through a relationship with humanity.


He lulls us into receptiveness in “New World Moonlight,” waking us up in a new city as we stand alongside him observing the moon. And we find ourselves identifying with a man experiencing anonymity and the opportunity for the birth of beginnings.


His new life will be like here,

In this world where the moon

looks back at him, where the

night seems to go on forever,

where the only thing he knows

is that he knows no one,

except the moon and the sea.


After stretching our attention into wakefulness, Tayyer deftly takes us on a themed excursion from cotton candy escapades with his father to memories of a grandmother. Her fingertips, like the fingertips of so many homemakers, no longer felt the burn of hot plates as she served her family humming the tune of a blessed life, to the proof of the power of prayer in a Kirk Gibson homerun.


Later he speaks of mermaids and Loch Ness, of Bigfoot and aliens. He reminds us that a life lived in logic leaves little room for the dreams.


“You’re such a dreamer,” she chides

me, still surprised that I, responsible

in nearly all aspects of my life, can

be so wildly prey to the most fantastic

of myths.


It is the illogical, the enigma, that can often draw us into relationship and Tayyer closes the deal easily.


But, though she would never admit

this, I think she likes this part of

me, this seriousness I have when I tell her

Martin Sheen was right when he,

back in the 70’s, declared his backyard

an available haven for spaceships.


When he finishes with


It shows that I have not surrendered

entirely to the logic and order of life


we’re standing in ovation to the need to see beyond the eclipse to the fantasies in life that burnish reality’s edges with light.


By the end of the book we are pleasantly weary from the images that have allowed us to view a little piece of our self through his writing. And we put the book aside, pull up the covers, and drift away remembering


When it ends the road slips back into what it always was,

a mirror for the rider to find himself within


Good-night Moon, indeed.

***Rene Schwiesow co-owns an online poetry forum (www.poemtrain.com) and is a co-host for The Art of Words: Mike Amado Memorial Poetry Series in Plymouth, MA. She is the author of Beginnings Beget Beginnings and A Year in the Quilt. Rene can be reached at duetsdove@yahoo.com.

Within The Grand Scheme Joseph Veronneau, Snow in the Forecast by Dave L. Tickel, Poughkeepsie Icehouse // Reviews by Irene Koronas

Within The Grand Scheme
Joseph Veronneau
2009 Propaganda Press
alt.current @ gmail. com
$7 includes shipping in U.S.

Reviews by Irene Koronas




The poems are split into two themes; morose, (with good reason,) and relating specific relationships (with good reason)

“where her imperfection lies,
at the bottom of her pantleg
the one who claimed
that I was the first to
undress her…”

yet and but, yet still, Veronneau combines his poetic process, his way of expressions, with a tenderness that marries rant relative to morose relationships, a three some, a three way street, a three legged dog?

“…at the time
I was content to grip the waistline,
drag them down a bit, ass-revealed,
and undo myself in an equally dark light
that confined us between
the doorway of learning
and of what was given.”

The Grand Scheme is a small marvel, full of clarity and directness the reader will find intimate.

Again and again, propaganda press presents to the public the most wonderful chapbooks, poets, and writings, and this chapbook is another exceptional view into the unknown. Unknown in the sense that Veronneau gives his poems the punch, or slap across the back, a wake-up, surreal, rock and roll…

“The one imagines him, tap dancing
his way to the sky, stepping
into the falling snow like
shredded milk glass…”

Another must read, another perfect book of poems, another one to buy.




SNOW IN THE FORECAST
Dave L. Tickel
2009 Propaganda Press
alt.current @ gmail.com
$2 includes shipping in US

The voice in ‘snow in the Forecast’, is young, feisty, rebellious and smacks at the truth of being who the poet, characterizes, as, ‘the other’, the person who records the age lived in, in the exact present, even if not now. each poem is refreshingly on the edge, jumping off and bouncing into view the pages turn easily, one poem after the other, informs the reader about what is going on in the apartment next door or at least with that kid down the block. we listen, peek through the key hole, put a clear glass against the door and begin to understand the murmurings behind the walls. you won’t be disappointed if you buy this small book of poems.

“…I didn’t win any
awards, I wasn’t a
teacher/student at the college. Kurt
Vonnegut and
Ken Kesey

in the night auditorium on
the rock & roll stage…”





Poughkeepsie Icehouse
Anthony G. Herles
2009 Propaganda Press
alt-current. com
$7 includes shipping U.S.

It’s like this, a couple enter the breakfast restaurant, make as much noise as possible; scrap the chairs across the hard tile floor, and loudly announce their presence. He talks about his intelligent observations, she speaks quietly about nothing in particular, just asking questions, to keep the focus off herself.

This is not the theme of this small book of short stories, but it is the reaction I get on opening the book and reading the first page. I am privy to what is usually private. the reader becomes captive to the stories, more or less, like eating pancakes, but, it is that ease drop, over easy eggs on toast, which entices me. I’m there and the story happens without the characters knowing I’m there. Herles is a story teller. He is handing us a slice of bread, buttered on one side.

Buy this book. The book will teach the reader what short stories can become.. There are four perfectly told, in repeatable form, stories, to chew on. No matter how you like your eggs or pancakes, guaranteed, you’ll eat with relish, all four tales and will want more.

“I never liked dogs, but when Mr. Wilson died,
I took Scraps.
Wilson (we never called him Mr. Wilson) had just backed his old Ford pickup to the dock for his usual order of five cakes of ice (300 pound blocks of ice), seven bags of crushed ice, and twelve bags of ice cubes. After turning off the motor, Wilson had a fatal heart attack and fell forward onto his steering wheel. The weight of his chest made the horn blow, but not too loud. Scraps, who was on the seat next to him, barked some, but not much and not very loud…”

Philip B. Burnham Jr.: A Poet with a classical education who writes about ice cream.

Philip B. Burnham Jr.: A Poet with a classical education who writes about ice cream.

Philip Burnham may have graduated Harvard, and acquired a PhD in Medieval History, but he still revels in the ordinary as well as the extraordinary in his work. Burnham, an educator at area secondary schools and Colleges for many years, writes as well about Baseball, Boston’s Redline and the search for ice cream as he does about a rarefied piece of art, or the mysteries of the universe. Burnham has published two poetry collections with Somerville’s Ibbetson Street Press: “Sailing From Boston,” “Housekeeping,” as well as a collection from the Cervena Barva Press: “Careful Scattering,” among others. His poetry has appeared in numerous publications, and has been read on “Writer’s Almanac” on National Public radio. I spoke with Burnham on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”


Doug Holder: You say your poetry is structured in a way to create an ordered explanation of the world. Why is this necessary?

Philip Burnham: I think when I look at the world I try to make sense of it. When I write a poem it’s an attempt to take a little corner of my experience and reflect on it in some way. Hopefully I will understand it better and perhaps provide a window for someone else to understand it better.

DH: Is life unknowable?

PB: Some of it is unknowable. Ultimately the next few hours, tomorrow is unknowable. Love is indefinable, not unknowable.

DH: You started writing again after a long hiatus after the death of your wife. I remember you attended a workshop I was giving in Newton, Mass.

PB: For me it was a wonderful thing to come into your class. I think one of the things that may happen with you when your partner dies is there is a tremendous sense of isolation. One of the ways of working the isolation out is to write. But another way was to share that writing with other people. I wanted to find out if it was just my ranting and raving about my grief, of if it was something that struck a chord with other people.

DH: You were a poet in your younger days, right?

PB: In the 60’s and 70’s I wrote poetry that was accepted by a number of magazines. I think in my fantasy world I thought I would be a poet. But during this time I had a family to support and a life to lead, and I thought poetry wasn’t going to do it. I was more conservative then about taking a risk, and making a lifetime out of it. I knew people who did make a lifetime out of it, and they were teachers. I wasn’t in that breed.


DH: Do you regret the road you didn’t take?

PB: Well, the road not taken… (sigh)… you either make the leap of faith or not. I think I thought I was going to make a better researcher and scholar than a poet. That was really not true. I became a teacher. I taught high school and college. I taught history not poetry. In class I had the kids read things with cultural manifestations of different time periods. Every year we memorized the first 18 lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for instance. The kids loved it. They thought they were lead into a secret room.


DH: You have a classical education. Do you think that is needed to become a poet?

PB: I don’t think you have to have that exposure to be a poet. That exposure made me who I am. I had an “old” education for a new time. I have a greater appreciation for earlier poetry, than an appreciation for new poetry. I feel more comfortable with old forms. It is not what most people are into these days.

DH: Do you do a lot of revision? When do you give up on a poem?

PB: I don’t think I have ever written a poem that I didn’t revise. I have written poems that have come out quickly, in say 4 or 5 drafts. I always suspect that there are some things I can say better, so I try to go back. As I read it through I try to see if it sounds as natural as I want it to sound. And if it doesn’t I try to see what new words I can use that will make it more natural. Eight to twelve drafts is not surprising. It’s been said that poetry is never finished, it is just abandoned.

DH: You wrote a series of poems that are set on a Boston’s Redline subway that travels from the outskirts of Cambridge, all the way out to the suburbs of Braintree, Mass. You have scenes from different stages of your life, and all involve the pursuit of ice cream. What is the germ of the idea for this conceit?

PB: When you are in the subway, especially when you are a child, you look around and there are all these strange people. They are not people you see in your house or necessarily in your neighborhood. They are people in the city. Taking this form of transportation is magic for a kid. This might be your first exotic experience with public transportation—traveling in this enigmatic tube. I remember when I was a child in Cambridge, Mass. during WWII, no one had a car. There were very few cars on the street. People couldn’t afford them; we were just past the Great Depression, besides there was gas rationing. So we always took the subway. Later I remember visiting my future wife at Wheaton College via the subway. So the subway has been a way of measuring moments in my life.

You can’t look directly at people in the subway. But you can see their reflections in the window. You can also see yourself. So I saw myself growing up and changing on the subway.

DH: How about the ice cream?

PB: The ice cream got in there when as a child I took the Redline to Harvard Sq. and then took the yellow trolleys on Mass. Ave. Our stop in Cambridge was right outside the ice cream parlor Brigham’s. So the poem wasn’t only about the Redline, but how ice cream makes an entrance into my life at different times.


Assignment #1: Write a poem about Baseball and God
By Philip E. Burnham, Jr (Read on NPR’s Writer’s Almanac)
And on the ninth day, God
In His infinite playfulness
Grass green grass, sky blue sky,
Separated the infield from the outfield,
Formed a skin of clay,
Assigned bases of safety
On cardinal points of the compass
Circling the mountain of deliverance,
Fashioned a wandering moon
From a horse, a string and a gum tree,
Tempered weapons of ash,
Made gloves from the golden skin of sacrificial bulls,
Set stars alight in the Milky Way,
Divided the descendants of Cain and Abel into contenders,
Declared time out, time in, stepped back,
And thundered over all of creation:
"Play ball!"


"Assignment #1: Write a poem about Baseball and God" by Philip E. Burnham, Jr. from Housekeeping: Poems Out of the Ordinary. © Ibbetson Street Press, 2005. Reprinted with permission