David Blair Sounding the Whistle in his third book FRIENDS WITH DOGS

David Blair Sounding the Whistle in his third book FRIENDS WITH DOGS

article by Michael T Steffen

Reading David Blair’s poems is like lying in bed awake listening to the one who lies beside you talking in their sleep.

    There is a network
    of veins, nerves, and straw
    where there was potted nasturtium.

    Dental hygienists who misbehave
    come back as the numbers crunchers
    who remove salaried plaque,

    the 86ers going deep
    to scorch or freeze.        [“Vulcanists & Neptunists,” FWD, pp 38-9]

All of the terms are a little odd, which is difficult but also amusing. We leap, as Robert Bly would say, from potted plants, to the dentist and accounting, to sports and weather. What does “the 86ers” refer to? There is a European American Football team in Sweden called the Uppsala 86ers, which would make sense of “going deep” (throwing a long pass deep down field). General American readers will recognize the term “going deep” and have the research engines in their memories looking for an associate NFL team, say the 49ers. In this line of thought, on to Blair’s next line, you can “freeze” a linebacker by faking a run then throwing a long pass which, if successful, could be said to burn (“scorch”) a defensive back. Amid all of this talk of athletic dynamics, tactics and maneuvers, keep in mind the extremities of weather which climate change is causing our winters and summers. Poetry is at work when so much more is evoked than is actually stated. Great bargains take place between word count and reader.

FRIENDS WITH DOGS [ISBN 9781937679606/Sheep Meadow Press/P.O. Box 84/Rhinebeck, NY 12514], Blair’s third book of poems, lives up to the promise of his previous collections, in which the poet established his signature method in madness of evasive speech. “His music, his diction,” wrote A.D. Powell of Blair’s second book Ascension Days, “his refusal to use (ever) clichés, his syntax all drive his poems and their hearts forward.”

Thomas Lux amplified:

I have been reading Blair’s poems for about ten years now—struck always by his unique pitch and tone, the tensile muscularity of his syntax and vibrational accents. His diction is totally unboxed.

From this deliberate dismissal of clichés and coins and cousinages, mere gestures are made toward a grander scale, a finger on one’s cheek pointing at the sky, to refute determinism and fate, while acknowledging these mechanisms dangerously at play in our world. The poem “Festivals for Saints Lucy and Anthony” strike a plangent irony that reminds one (listen closely) of Ophelia singing over the virtues of herbs and flowers in her craze after Polonius’s death.

    The Book of Common Prayer
    gives such lovely presentation
    to the psalms, and the weird rites
    that developed for so many events
    …
    All through the North End,
    Jimmy Roselli kept singing Torah
    and ending in Koran verses
    across the neck of water
    between here and Charlestown
    …
    When people pin the ribbon pole
    with dollar bills with the trumpets
    annoying people until they pin more,
    bringing back indulgences is okay with me.

There is a pill (are pills) under Blair’s sugar of meanderings. To an aggressive, accusative and hypocritical world of solicitation, denying us so much in the way of authentic contact and purpose, there is adequacy in a response of denial, refusing sense made by the powers that be, returning everything originally to depict the oddness of how this feels rather than how it should seem okay. Satire, the theatre of the absurd, deigning to no obvious purpose or sense, happens upon a critical “usefulness” in its powerful disrespect and will to shock the censors and oppression crouching even in a free society.

The festivals evoked in the poem’s title are feast days or celebrations in honor of saints. Saint Lucy is petitioned for restoration of sight or vision. Saint Anthony is prayed to for help in recovering losses. The title of Blair’s second book, Ascension Days, with vocabulary in his earlier poems, have raised the notion of religion, an old world religion, in his poetry. His language can behave hermetically. Like Haley Joel Osment, the child in The Sixth Sense, Blair sees dead people: he sees Rabelais’ ghost in the erudite contemporary poet Tom Yuill—

    the poet from Old Dominion.
    “Yoo hoo,” he says, “Read more Wyatt. Read
    Sir Philip Sidney.”
    “Yoo hoo,” he says, “Buttermilk biscuits.
    Gravy. Monday Night Football.”
    [FWD, p. 60].

The fragmentary presentation of his poetry allows for vast silences and omissions. Whether Blair is devoted to religion we may not know by his poetry. That atrocities are being committed throughout the world in the name of Religion should weigh on every informed human being. This is a fact that reflects howsoever in the mirror of Blair’s presented discourse.

The conclusion of “Festivals for Saint Lucy & Saint Anthony” startlingly compresses the world confused in these gestures to the naïve sweet tooth of a child at such a festival, bound for the biochemical disaster of a blackout caused by a sugar rush:

    A kid won a box of Lemon Heads
    and a box of Alexander the Grape,
    and all the flavors of taffy,
    a watermelon Now & Later candy,
    a coconut oil smooth banana flavor
    that never leaves my mouth,
    that takes the wooden floor out
    from underneath our feet,
    that brings me to another level
    of unpeopled Wampanoag hill
    sadness first state park north of the city,
    where there is one chipmunk
    and about four pigeons left
    and a lot of woods,
    a sugar rush, then crash,
    graceful deficit
    in the distant Fells.

In the “rational world,” radical fundamentalism motivating violence is seen as the choice that justifies intervention. It is not Saint Lucy or Saint Anthony, any more than the 86ers going deep. It is a butterfly somewhere causing a hurricane elsewhere. The, say, Venus de Milo as an objective is not mentioned. Nor the fact that the world is consuming sources of energy on a daily basis like a kid loading himself with candy to the point of having a seizure at a religious festival.  As elsewhere in Blair’s poetry, just enough is said in this poem to make so much come tumbling out.

To a great extent, the day-to-day world we live in “makes sense” because it is what we have learned to live with, ways accumulated and assimilated with progress in time. It is the world we frequent daily. One necessary step for the artist and poet, in order to get a good look at things around, in order to begin to speak relevantly about it, is somehow to get outside of that world, get somehow to a vantage point, on a hill, for a good while, to be able to see it for himself or herself. To varying degrees, poets bring this cultivated alienation to readers, with their purpose of showing us something we cannot normally see yet that is true, so probable to how we imagine life, that we say “this really speaks to me.”

Defying logic and expected sequences, Blair, while “restless,” often achieves an a-temporal or out-of-ordinary-time feel, the around-going-nowhere motion of a river mill wheel, a simultaneity of collages, a moving stillness.

David Rivard in Boston Review isolated a line of Blair’s, “Nothing can remain horizontal or vertical for long,” calling this the poet’s “mini ars poetica.” The riverhead of the statement may be Heraclitus’ The only constant is change. It comes by way of one of David’s tamer or more focused meditations, from Ascension Days, on inspiration, in the figure and under the title of “AMELIA EARHART”, who like the Virgin Mary did not suffer a witnessed death. The famous American “aviatrix,” as David designates her (with a wink that is both bawdry and submissive to the suffix, evoking the Dominatrix of erotica) serves stunningly as a displacement of the Virgin Mother who according to certain traditions is said not to have suffered death but to have been assumed into heaven, lost up in the air in flight, off the radar and our maps, entering into the needful and copious domains of our speculation and wonder.

A little beyond midstream in the poem, Blair embellishes Earhart with suggestions of another great woman from American history, Eleanor Roosevelt, with a marvelous double entendre on the word “dam”, in one sense for the construction with a reservoir that harnesses energy from a river (recalling the era of the New Deal), and “dam” in the sense of a grand lady, the diminutive of “Madam” or “Madame”.
     The lines go,

    It’s possible that she was always bundled
    muscle, nerve and horse sense.
    Standing rigidly against rivers like a dam
    named after a president is a dubious way to be,
    but I can imagine Amelia fascinated by toasters
    and Christmas lights, the large blue bulbs,
    and the terrifying orange coils
    and the way the toaster cord feels like the root
    of a plant when attracted to earthen recesses,
    and I can imagine a blue bathrobe for her
    in the endless morning before anything.

There is merely a suggestive allusion to Mary in the poem. We might remember that blue is Mary’s color, blue of the serene sky. And that Amelia’s bathrobe imagined in David’s poem is blue. A verbal association is possible with the Day of the Assumption, which is commonly confused with Christ’s Ascension, offering an explanation as to the plural in the title of this wonderful book, Ascension Days, published in 2007 by Del Sol Press.

The poetry of David Blair, for all of its oddity and difficulty, strikes us as something we cannot put down or turn away from. It’s likely we are not terribly sure about what it is he is saying to us on a first or maybe not even a second reading, yet we get a keen sense that it is undeniable and essential.
David Blair will be reading at the Cervena Barva Press studio on Thursday March 31st at  7 pm with Lloyd Schwartz and Joseph Torra.

Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Reading at the Whittier House

Ibbetson St. Poetry Reading

March 21, 2016 Edith Maxwell

Ibbetson St. Poetry Reading


On April 13^th at 7:00PM the Whittier Home Association hosts an evening of poetry presented by the Ibbetson Street poets at the Whittier Home, 86 Friend St. Amesbury, MA. There is no charge but donations will be gratefully accepted.
The Ibbetson Street Press was founded in 1998 in Somerville, MA by Doug Holder, Richard Wilhelm and Dianne Robitaille. The Press publishes collections of poetry, and the literary journal Ibbetson Street. Ibbetson Street is now affiliated with Endicott College in Beverly, MA.
Doug Holder of Ibbetson House said, “We are pleased to be able to have our poets read at the historic Whittier Home & Museum in Amesbury, MA onApril 13th, 2016 at 7:00pm. We would like to thank Lainie Senechal, the Poet Laureate of Amesbury, the Whittier Home Association, and the Amesbury Cultural Council for making this happen.”
The following poets will read at the event: Lainie Senechal, Amesbury’s Poet Laureate; Harris Gardner, founder of the Boston National Poetry Festival, and Poetry Editor of Ibbetson;  Steve Glines, the Design Editor for Ibbetson Street and the publisher of the Wilderness House Press; Gloria Mindock, a celebrated poet as well as the publisher of the Cervena Barva Press; Michael Todd Steffen, Director of the Hastings Room Reading Series in Cambridge, MA; Michael Goodwin,  a creative writing student from Endicott College in Beverly, MA; Denis Daly, author of the poetry collection The Custom House; and Doug Holder, publisher of Ibbetson Street.
Please call the Whittier Home at 978-388-1337 for reservations.

The Sunday Poet: Carla Schwartz

Carla Schwartz is a poet, filmmaker, photographer, and lyricist. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fulcrum, Common Ground Review, Cactus Heart, First-Literary Journal East, Switched-on Gutenberg, Wordgathering, Naugatuck River Review, Stone Highway Review, Boston Poetry Magazine, Literary Juice, Solstice Magazine, Ibbetson Street Magazine, Emerge Literary Journal, Enizagam, Equinox, and 05401, among others. Her book, Mother, One More Thing is available through WordTech  and Turning Point Books (2014). Her poem, In Defense of Peaches, was a Massachusetts Poetry Foundation Poem of the Moment. Her poem, Late for Dinner, was a semi-finalist for the Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest. Her video work incorporates poetry, documentary,  and instructional videos. Her youtube videos have had hundreds of thousands of views. She has performed and read her work in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Carla is also a professional writer with a doctoral degree from Princeton University. Learn more at her website at carlapoet.com.

Comment se Faire

The theatre was near the Grand Place,

convenient for moules et frites

and a short walk to the train, afterward.

This cinema revealed its beauty on entering —

balconies, red carpet,

moldings on the ceiling.

Ushers and restroom attendants expected tips.

My first day in Brussels,

I held my bags tight.

I took my place in the middle of the middle,

an empty row, where I could spread my bags

on the seat to my right.

Comment Faire l’Amour avec un Negre sans se Fatiguer,

a Canadian film, sparsely attended —

the unemployed, the retired, and me, a tourist.

I focused on the tongue I was not native to,

and the Montreal neighborhoods I knew —

Carré St. Louis, Rue St. Denis,

when, of all the open seats,

a man selected the one next to my stuff.

I bristled and swung them over to my left.

Another man moved in then,

on that side, and I was sandwiched,

my bags between my legs,

while Man Number 1 moved to the seat next to mine,

and Number 2 closed in on my left.

I stayed put, rather than get up and move.

When my row mates began to pant and rub,

and I tensed my grip on my camera, my purse,

my neck craned like a stargazer.

 

Before intermission, the men left.

I remained fixed until the end,

when I walked away from my small death.

THE BOSTON NATIONAL POETRY MONTH FESTIVAL 2016

 I am happy to report that in this year's poetry festival a number of Somerville poets will be reading, including:

     

Harris Gardner

Lucy Holstedt

Kirk Etherton

State Representative Denise Provost

 Lloyd Schwartz 

 Ifeanyi Menkiti

 Gloria Mindock

 Alexander Levering Kern.

 Doug Holder

                                                         

This year's Boston National Poetry Month Festival is April 7-10 at  the Boston Public Library, and Northeastern University. This will be the annual Festival's 16th year.Participants include major prize-winning poets, international musicians, plus college and high school students.

Also featured are four current Massachusetts' Poets Laureate (representing Boston, Brookline, Arlington, and Amesbury), and Boston's former Poet Laureate, Sam Cornish.All events are free and open to the public.

The Festival begins Thursday evening, with the second annual poetry slam competition: teams from six Boston-area high schools are participating. Friday, April 10, the Festival features 10 prominent "Keynote Poets," including winners of the Mass. Book Award and National Book Award, NEA recipients and more, in an afternoon reading.

Friday evening marks the third annual "Poetry Set to Music and Dance" event, produced by Lucy Holstedt, professor at Berklee College of Music. Special guests include National Poetry Slam winner Regie O. Gibson, performing with Berklee musicians. There will also be a premier of The Middle East, written for the world-renowned Middle East Restaurants & Nightclubs of Central Square, Cambridge and featuring Ethan Mackler on electric bass.

Saturday and Sunday feature more than 50 established and emerging poets, poetry with music, a panel discussion on "Craft and Publishing," and open mics on both days. A few of the notable poets include: Rep. Denise Provost; Pulitzer Prize-Winning critic Lloyd Schwartz; Richard Hoffman (Sr. Writer-In-Residence at Emerson College); and January O'Neil of Salem State University.

Learn more at: bostonnationalpoetry.org

Manual By Richard Berengarten

Manual
By Richard Berengarten
Shearsman Books
Bristol, United Kingdom
www.shearsman.com
ISBN: 978-1-84861-321-6
78 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

A psalter of sorts, Richard Berengarten’s Manual reaches out to the tangible barriers of tangled brush and creosoted borders and reaches in to the foam-tossed mysteries which underlie human consciousness. He prays for connection. Holding the book spine down, ready to open, the front and back covers constitute a subtly shaded set of praying hands a la Albrecht Durer. Receptive palms then appear as one accesses the book’s internals. The hands are the hands of an artisan and suggest a metaphoric expression of a poet’s fusion with his muse.

Divided into five sections of twenty poems, each poem made up of two five line stanzas, with two additional framing pieces in front and back, the book flows with variations of perceptive images, a wonderful lyricism, and a joyful, if anxious, cohesion.

One continuous theme that tugs with angst through these luminous lines is an artistic critique of mortality and its bedeviling and absurd reality that man must confront. Berengarten sets up the proposition three poems into the first section,

…how caringly
he tucked and folded chisel into marble
to free those moulded fingers from the rock
that would have locked them   still and undiscovered
in solid dark   like prehistoric bones

had not his own hands risen and in patience
spoken to stone by touch and by their probing
subtle persuasion   coaxed those perfect fingers
out of their sheaths   and for surrounding stone
substituted charged air   and vision   and history.

Then the poet completes the argument at the end of the very next piece,

… cuffed on either side
by death’s invisible officers

They would like to thread a needle
But can’t pick up anything
They can’t even pluck a string
Trembling at the edges of empty pockets
They fumble for non-existent keys.

Not that a canny and vigorous humanity doesn’t have to answer for the evil doings of these very same hands that are the tools of divine creation. Berengarten ticks off a list of shame in poem 15 of the first section,

Respected fellows and allies of these hands
have coolly signed death warrants then dined
inspected slaves in quarries mines foundries
designed gaols torture rooms extermination chambers
issued instructions to builders and surveyors

pulled first triggers on victims over ditches
personally slit throats and kicked the dying in.

But even evil can generate transformative moments of valor. Consider these lines from the first section, poem 20,

Hands of heroes dug tunnels under electric
Perimeter fences surrounding floodlit camps
And before the margin of the treeline tugged
Fellows out free to get away at least some
Distance a little distance through the snows

The poet as medium opens channels of contact between the dead and the living. This very book crackles with the electricity of potential life. Future readers, not presently alive, may share its stresses and beats. Even the dead are drawn to the beat. They have secrets and want to return. Poem 10 of the second section intimates as much,

… my bare hands
on the stretched skin membrane the thundering
of the massed dead pursues me everywhere
from the cavern they are holed up in and I know
each one of them is trying to clutch and crawl

along the endless tunnel through the unopenable
gate back up into this world and the closest
any of them can come to that impermeable threshold
is in the hollow echo of my hands drumming

One of my favorite images Berengarten sets in his book’s third section, poem 3. The poet depicts old sailors playing a game of backgammon. It has infinity stamped all over it. It also strikes a defiant pose against the imperativeness of death, clothing the protagonists in the colorless garb of nondescriptness and routine, playing life’s game—presumably over and over.  Here’s part of the description of these extraordinary knights of civilization,

Little they know or care about pasts or futures
who once chugged out past overhanging islands
and caught shoalfuls of fish in their long nets

Islands reached stony fingers out to grab them
Hidden rocks and reefs sharpened their nails
Waves grew claws to slash at them and snatch them
Darkness itself unleashed invisible talons
and now they sit outside the café like ordinary men

Although individual humans queue up to cross over the great divide between life and death, their dreams continue on through the centuries. Imagination, derived from the lower regions of self, has its way by directing the creative instincts and inhabiting the hands that hold a chisel or brush. This resulting art or totem stores the societal energy that feeds the continuity of love’s cipher in an alternative, but no less real, existence. Berengarten puts it this way,

With hands prepared to see, I reach, therefore
past all that intervenes, so find the mark.
Hands fill all space between us with their labor.

However minuscule the gap between,
However close, however intimate—
Her face, though known too well, remains unseen,
And that space, never less than infinite,
Means my search, knowing-by-touch, must last forever

Inexorably the book twists and turns toward a Homeric vision of “loved ones” clamoring for the attention due them. The substance of these apparitions seems suspect.  The poet speaks to one ghost with not a little regret. Holding a pair of welcoming hands in the fifth section’s poem 11, he laments,

Betrayals, blames, shames, and many contrived lies
textured our time together. Since we shan’t meet
again in the flesh, are these apparitions
reminders of garnered loss, or compensations
for wished-for states we carelessly tossed away?

Dedicated to Berengarten’s mother, the book ends in the mirrored second frame piece with remembrances of that same mother gleaned from his own hand movements. The poet says,

I find you in those gestures
I used to see you making, which
now, without my reckoning,

Bloom again out of my own hands,
as though yours, tenacious
had grown grains of your own
ways of doing and achieving things.

 He sees her within himself and, by sleight-of-hand, she lives again. They connect. And we connect. Thus the dexterous Berengarten manipulates destiny into his magical poetry.

Poet Jennifer Barber and her “Works on Paper.”

Jennifer Barber

Poet Jennifer Barber and her “ New Works on Paper.”

Interview with Doug Holder

Poet Jennifer Barber is the founder of Salamander magazine based at Suffolk University in Boston, and the author of a number of poetry collections. Her latest collection is “Works on Paper.” We discusses her new book and other aspects of her rich and varied career on my Somerville Community Access TV show: “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: Salamander used to be based at your home. Now it has been at Suffolk University in Boston for a number of years. How have things changed for the magazine since its transition?

Jennifer Barber: Well-- my dining room table has been cleared of manuscripts. We can actually eat on it. Being at Suffolk has been great for us in a number of ways. I have a managing editor who helps me now. We have a budget from Suffolk—that makes things much more stable. And of course office space makes a big difference.

When I started the magazine I had recently graduated from the MFA program at Columbia University. I loved the work of my fellow students but I did not see any of it in journals at the time. So I started the journal to see their work more often. We started out mostly with writers from New York and New England. Now it has expanded and we get work from around the country.

DH: Who do you have in the current issue?

JB: We have selections from Martha's Collins new poetry collection “Admit One: An American Scrapbook.” We have two poems from Gail Mazur who founded the Blacksmith House Poetry Series. We have an emphasis however on newer writers. One that comes into mind is Jessica Greenbaum—she regularly appears in The New Yorker.

DH: Has the magazine helped your career in any way?

JB: I think it has helped my writing. As you know, when you edit a journal you see a lot of manuscripts. At one point I think I was letting myself get away with things stylistically. So after seeing some really fine manuscripts, I was inspired to make my work stronger. I started the magazine when my son was very young, and I was isolated from a lot of writers in the area. So through the magazine I became friends with poets like Fred Marchant—the founder of the Poetry Center at Suffolk University.

DH: I have noticed you won a grant from the St. Botolph Foundation for translation.

JB Yes. I translated the work of Emilio Prados-- a contemporary of Lorca. After the Spanish Civil War he went to Mexico. He published his own work and those of his contemporaries. I loved his work--especially the poems about the Southern landscape of Spain. In general, I love Romance Languages. Back in the 80s I lived in Spain with my husband, who is a translator and fiction writer. So I was immersed in the culture and language.

DH: Are you competitive with your husband?

JB: No—not now anyway. We critique each others work. And he never questions the time and commitment I put into writing because he is a writer himself.

DH: I noticed your new collection is dedicated to your late father?

JB: Yes—he passed in 2014. In his later years he took classes on poetry. He was in the lighting business for many years. But he had many interests that he pursued. I remember that we had a lot of books around our house and my mom used to read to us all the time.

DH: You got your MFA at Columbia University. Who did you study with? Who made an impression on you?

JB: Well I took workshops with Dan Halpern, and Stanley Kunitz to name a few. I really love Stanley. He was inspiring... he got to the essence of poetry.

DH: Has poetry changed you?

JB: When I was young Emily Dickinson really had an effect on me. I loved her intensity... what she did with a few short lines.

DH: You seem to be hyper-aware in your poems. I saw that in a number of poems in your collection—one that concerned a falcon that was killing a pigeon, and another about the anticipation of the onset of rain.

JB: I am very aware—the rain, nature, etc... I think it is part of being a poet.

Newton Free Library Poetry Series: January Gil O'Neil, Barbara Helfott Hyett, Nicole Terez Dutton April 12, 2016

( Click on to enlarge)

The Sunday Poet: Helen Bar- Lev

 

 

Helen Bar-Lev

 

 

 

 

In The Course of Contradictions

The electrician leaves the house

with safety switches that shock and

fuses that don’t work

The mover promises he’ll come tomorrow

but leaves her sitting on the cartons

until the muse moves him

The contractor doesn’t do half the work

he promised but doubles his prices

with the confidence of the righteous

The enemy declares a cease-fire

but continues to bombard us

with rockets and katyushas

so at night she lies awake

and gets through the days on tranquilizers

but it’s all somehow expected isn’t it?

par for the course of living on this planet

But he who today declared forever love

compared her to saints and angels

tomorrow will scream

with the vengeance of a hurricane,

the anger of a tsunami

From this contradiction

she can never recover

© 12.2006 Helen Bar-Lev

Helen is the assistant to the President of Voices Israel, an artist, and poet. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. 

www.helenbarlev.com

The Work of the Body Poems by Jill Kelly Koren

The Work of the Body
Poems by Jill Kelly Koren
(Dos Madres Press, 2015)

Review by Denise Provost


I confess that I’m drawn in by book titles, and that Jill Kelly Koren’s recent publication had me wondering, what is the work of the body? The cover art suggested a lush physicality: on a cluttered dressing table, a female figurine shown twice, its half-draped back mirror-reflected. Will the “work of the body” written here prove to be a hot-house hedonism?

The answer is that in these pages, work is work. Bodies fight gravity (“which never tires,” notes the narrator of Inside Out) - and they lose. They bleed, and age, and sicken. They muse, and mourn; they clear out the belongings of past generations, and they reproduce.

The epigrams in this volume make clear that Kelly Koren is singing the body electric, and that she means work in many senses, the literal sense being prominent. As if to establish the bona fides of her framing of this collection, the poet has arranged each chapter under a heading which is a law of physics. I confess I was concerned that this approach – frankly ambitious – might prove to be precious, or contrived.

Yet Kelly Koren pulls it off. Her poems, most of which are meditations on the small episodes of domestic life, manage to connect physicality and physics. They start with particular moments, like the butterfly emerging from a hollow shell in Winter Hatch:

My two-year-old son toddles toward it.
Don’t touch it, my brother warns.
I won’t, Sonny says…
…unaware that the Swallowtail
will not survive the week….

There is momentary interaction of these lives. The sun traces the passage of the hours, leaving the narrator “[t]ired of all the brilliance…,” and reflecting that, “[w]e are all on our way/to somewhere else.” This thought is so lightly expressed that it might as well be the Swallowtail.

Kelly Koren treads potentially treacherous territory in this book, populated with her children, parents, husband, extended family (living and not), and the imagined lives of others. A poem like Yard Sale Day, for instance, might have turned sentimental in less skilled hands:

The house where my father grew up
has upchucked its contents
onto the old horse field….
a life undone, bared for the hunters
of bargains to claim….

The poem, though, while tender, never becomes mawkish. It – and presumably the poet – inhabit a space where emotion can be laid bare and examined, but not distorted, or used for other ends:

He closes another deal,
then weaves his way back
through the forest of furniture,
voice low and serious now:
Don’t write a poem about this, okay?

It’s an impressive equilibrium to keep, and one that Kelly Koren boldly pursues. Some of us would only read “the latest mother-on-child/atrocity in the newspaper,” and shudder. Kelly Koren goes there, in The Ache, imagining infanticide from the inside:

Something has happened to my child!
She also means: something has happened to me.
I have done something
so unspeakable
that only prayer
or the edge of a knife
can answer.

She takes on a similar theme in Icarus Bounced, exploring the chemical (hence physical) disarray of post-partum psychosis:

What better way to kill
anxiety than to extinguish
its source? Spare the broken-winged
bird a life of low flight?

It occurs to me that one of Kelly Koren’s past lives, as a gymnast, might help explain her willingness to take risks in her literary work. Some of the risks she takes are with edgy material, but many of her risks consist of taking on topics so ordinary that they challenge preconceptions of what poems can be made of. For instance, The Work of the Body starts with the poem Tooth, Fairy, in which a six-year-old drops a pulled tooth down the drain:

I lose everything!
his sobbed refrain,
and I can do nothing but sit with him
on the red futon and marvel
at the completeness of his grief.

This poem’s epigram is from Elizabeth Bishop: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Like the doomed butterfly in Winter Hatch, and the dispersed heirlooms of Yard Sale Day, teeth, and other body parts, and the mortal lives of generations keep proving themselves to be on their way “to somewhere else.”

“Faced with the prospect of moving,” somewhere else, the narrator of Green Atlas inventories every plant in an “unruly patch of Earth,” with pertinent advice:

Along the fence, you’ll find
Dwarf Arbor Vitae and holly
but the honeysuckle will take over
if you let it, and you might, just to
smell that knee-knocking sweet-sweet smolder….
The Work of the Body provides its own inventory, of sorts. The landscape of mothering, daugthering, nurturing, comforting, creating, and taking the moral measure of the world are all here. You may find that its unassuming poems do take over a part of your own consciousness, and smolder there long after you’ve put the book down.

Ibbetson Street #38

Ibbetson Street #38

Somerville, Mass.: Ibbetson Street Press, 2015.

$10

ISBN 978-1-329-66814-0

www.ibbetsonpress.com

Reviewed by David P. Miller

The November 2015 issue of Ibbetson Street offers poetry and prose featuring a wide variety of styles, approaches, subject matters, and moods. (Disclaimer: two of my own poems have appeared in past issues, but nothing of mine appears here.) It would require a most lengthy, and patience-testing, review to cover everything. In addition to those discussed here, notable contributions include poems by Marge Piercy and Ted Kooser, an elegy for Hugh Fox by Eric Greinke and Glenna Luschei, and a review by Lawrence Kessenich of Charlotte Gordon’s study, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley. We are also fortunate to have “Douceur,” a poem by Haitian poet Ida Faubert, with a translation by Boston Poet Laureate Danielle Legros Georges. This is part of an ongoing project (see http://www.friendsofsouthendlibrary.org/2013/09/danielle-legros-georgess-reading-of-her-recent-work-ranged-far-and-wide-including-translations-from-the-french-of-haitian-poet-ida-faubert/).

I was interested in “Aglets” by Gary Metras even before I knew what aglets were. It turns out that an aglet is altogether commonplace: it’s the “small plastic or metal sheath typically used on each end of a shoelace, cord, or drawstring,” according to some website or other. So most everyone I know handles them every day. Metras begins with two references to aglets, which spark a series of free associations: from a quoted “inelegant” pun, to a trout’s leap scattering water droplets in the sun, to jewels atop a pool table, somehow landing us with a turtle in a tree.

Tomas O’Leary’s “Dining Out With Our Zombie” is a hilarious kind-of-shaggy-dog story. It’s premised on a highly open-minded family who not only takes a zombie into their home, but even takes him out to eat in a very liberal-minded neighborhood indeed: “But with ribs and pasta smothered in sauce / and a cheering family circled around, our zombie / assumes a transcendent grace, which gives / added charm to the famously tolerant eatery.” Of course, this is also a ploy in the service of training their house guest away from human brains: “down to cauliflower, which had the right look.” And by the end (the shaggy dog moment), this might only be a way of marking time: “We know the climate’s changing as he eats. / Why skimp on raw gestures, bereft of good will, / while the world grows warm enough to toast us all?”

“The Teacher’s Prayer” by Afaa Michael Weaver is, for me, one of the standout selections in this Ibbetson Street issue. Weaver, who teaches at Simmons College, testifies movingly to the depth of responsibility and self-questioning felt by anyone who takes seriously the complexity and ambiguity of the teacher’s challenge. Here is the incessant circling of the mind and its sometimes painful leaps to doubt and memory, even in the middle of one instant of intended purpose. One brief selection may suggest the extent of this work:

& they are all so young, and something hurts in all

of where my joints connect, where the memories and dreams of my life

are connected with locking tubes and cylinders filled with jelly,

and it is another day without a Motrin, because I take pain

over side effects whenever possible, so I begin the questioning,

ask myself how I came to be a man who teaches women how to make

the world something they can trust will given them what they need

on their own terms, and I see my mother in her old slippers

and blue house dress, the one my father and I put in the trash

In “Casa de la Luz,” Krikor Der Hohannesian provides a sharply recalled vigil at the death of a family member, after an apparent period of separation. It begins with the abrupt declaration, “Nothing more could be done, so / on a bright desert morning they came,” although as things develop the “they” might be hospice personnel, loved ones, or anyone outside the skin of the dying. The speaker feels like a stranger in the environment, musing on the feral cats, marijuana plants, and four vintage Volkswagens. The moment of death is given an image that take the deceased’s final breath, suggests his passage outside the body, and ends ambiguously, without punctuation: “Sun-up, three loud breaths, then / silence, a settled hush, a wisp of a breeze / flutters the curtains. You, unfettered, / a fresh memory stripped of its flesh”

The Fukushima, Japan, nuclear disaster may seem geographically remote to most of us on the U.S. East Coast, but it is closer than we’re willing to acknowledge, as evidenced by Teisha Dawn Twomey’s “They’re Not That Unusual.” An unsettled vagueness pervades the poem, beginning with its “Meanwhile, mutant daisies grow” and compounded in “Or so I read that day I had the nightmare for the first time” and later “… or so I read or heard somewhere // about the two-headed daisies or daughter / or was it just a single girl, one only stem // to the flowers I continue to string / individually in my nightmares.” An always-almost-present disaster, however much out of sight, will link the reality of mutant daisies and a dream of mutant daughters. The poem’s title might refer to two-headed daisies, but given that there is no “away” from radiation, might it not come in time to refer to two-headed girls?

Kathleen Aguero’s “Night Beckons” reads to me like a curiously detailed set of images of inner stasis. Although “Night beckons like an empty staircase / promising to lead where you didn’t know / you wanted to go,” the speaker doesn’t seem to move. She stays with a whole set of blockages, perhaps preferring some kind of collapse: “Maybe you want the house in flames.” There is day as well as night, but it seems no better: “Day, the familiar hazard. / Night, the vacant dream.”

Charles Coe spins a whole series of meditations from a single sound in a historic jazz recording in “A Woman Laughs.” The title sound was captured in 1961, during a performance by the Bill Evans Trio. It’s likely that most listeners either barely notice this laugh, or let it go without thought, but Coe takes it further. He first puts the “jarring, even sacrilegious” sound in its context: “But then again, a jazz club’s not a concert hall, / listeners in polite rows, knees together, / waiting to cough in the space between movements.” He then imagines many of the possible “worlds within worlds” that might also have been associated with the moment:

In one world,

A man who follows Evans from gig to gig

sits at the bar alone, transfixed,

ice melting in the forgotten drink.

In one world,

The bartender counts his cash

while dreaming of the waitress’ embrace.

What would we also learn from our infinite number of daily moments, if we could reflect on them in this way?

The story of a family finding itself in sudden danger is at the heart of “Lost on the Little Island” by Alexander Levering Kern. A father and two children are threatened with stranding on an island far from the mainland after the son cuts his foot. Kern brings the reader to the heart of the story by structuring it entirely as a set of rhetorical questions, mostly beginning with “If I told you” and concluding with an appeal to the reader to enter the situation, for example:

If I told you that invading species curl their tongues

that chokeberry and poison oak lie in wait

would you walk this path with me?

Although the story is told “as if,” as the poem unfolds its actuality becomes clear. We don’t know the extent of actual danger the family faced, but we do understand their perception, which is reality enough.

In “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” Lyn Lifshin unfolds a complex series of memories, framed by a single moment in a ballroom dance studio that ricochets back to her mother’s final days. The song (by Stevie Wonder) was both played in the studio and a favorite of the mother, linked too to the daughter’s phone-home or the lack of one:

waiting for another call

from me, already becoming

a balloon pulling away, getting

smaller and not the girl in college

with curls and still white teeth

getting so many calls and dates

the other women wrote,

wrote, “Frieda, give us a chance,

No one can get to us.”

And the memory of the studio moment “in a tall dark stranger’s / beautiful arms, will soon become / a half remembered mirage,” as has every other association with the same song. (Or with anything.)

The overwhelming barrage of bad movies swallows everything, like a black hole or “the ganged living dead,” as Michael Todd Steffen tells us in “Bad Movies.” Even the sensible ones in these productions “cannot escape their roles,” and neither apparently can we, as bad movies are warped images of “our tilted lives” or perhaps vice versa. The world of the bad movie invades the holiday weekend and makes it an overstuffed thing: “torpid, overfed, / Indulging the star-studded team of special / Forces, another dirty dozen of them.” There’s not even relief in “wholly accidental glimpses” of naked actors in these films, as they are of course “bad actors.”

Pui Ying Wong’s “The Wind Takes Off” speaks of an understanding of the intricate relation between the living and the dead. Or rather, of one living person’s conflicted relationship with her dead, “my dead.” Is she solicitous enough, she wonders? “I cause them worries. / I know because I worried for them / when they were living.” Does she bear enough responsibility for them, even past grief? “Some days go by / and I wonder if I miss them enough.” Somehow, she hears her dead “chuckle” and say no: “like the wind they have gone far and do not need my grief.” This brief meditation exemplifies the potential for poetry to express much with comparatively little, allowing us unexpected breadth for our own reflections.

The Sunday Poet: Tomas O'Leary

Tomas O'Leary

Way Back Before the Drones

We were roaring drunk when they nailed us

in some jolly swill of an alehouse, our

raucous songs of butchery having

unmasked us as favoring the wrong bloody side.

Selective murder all over the realm, that

was all we'd been up to, and these snakes

we were having a hellish high time with

go smashing our heads on the stone bar

and spilling our drink all over! You're goddamned

right we're offended, we've proper commission

to cleanse your nice hovels of elements

inimical to fair trade, our mutual boon.

All we done's for the sake of us all.

We're like priests on a sacred assignment

slicing throats for the greater good.

We demand to be treated as innocent murderers,

ushered down from this scaffold on which

we seem suddenly now to be standing.

We sense you're slow to grasp the pith,

but read our credentials, you morons, can't you see

we're just top-secret hunt-and-kill sorts

who got a bit drunk and sang bold songs?

What court of reason would claim we're to pay for killings

uncertainly counted, and all for the blessings of commerce?

These nooses pose a serious affront

to the good will our sovereign governments had

achieved before this unfortunate misinterpretation

of our endeavors to rid you of evil.

Activist diplomats, that's all we are, with families

we're to return to, that's the law.

Don't make the mistake you're about to make. . .

Ah shit, you're making it! . . .

The traps are sprung, we drop straight down,

no time till our necks are snapped,

split second at best for a speck of sass

at them bastards that sent us: Immunity my ass!


Tomas O'Leary's third full-length collection of poetry, A Prayer for Everyone is just out from Ilora Press. Of the poems in this volume, X.J. Kennedy said, "I relished their verve, their cheerful strain of Irish blasphemy. And Rhymer's Horoscope is the best poem about poetry I've read in years." O'Leary's previous books are Fool at the Funeral and The Devil Take a Crooked House, both from Lynx House Press. O’Leary holds an MFA in poetry and an MA in expressive therapies and taught for years, and for years has worked with people who have Alzheimer's. He plays Irish accordion, sings on key, doodles artistically, and translates poetry from the Spanish.

The Caretaker’s Lament Poetry by Elisabeth Weiss

The Caretaker’s Lament
Poetry by Elisabeth Weiss
Finishing Line Press
Georgetown, Kentucky
www.finishinglinepress.com
ISBN: 978-1-62229-971-3
30 Pages
$14.49

Review by Dennis Daly

Desperation, whether quiet or raucous, drives conventional people into themselves, denying the obvious, and seeking out alternative universes of everyday predictability. Often these driven-down souls never re-emerge into the sweet but terrifying land of gingerbread houses littering the dread highways of leveraged sanity.

Conventional, however, does not describe poet Elisabeth Weiss. In The Caretaker’s Lament, her sublime little chapbook, she turns every emotional swing, every vulnerability into an artistic medium of clarity, melded together by fierce family love and a determined vision of final reconciliation.

Weiss and her siblings presumably balanced paralyzing humiliation with purposeful practicality in dealing with a double curse of parental madness. The poet’s persona speaks of a mother’s descent into despair in her intense poem entitled Home Repairs.  The heart of the poem captures the pathos,

Roots grew gnarled around eroded pipes.

Icicles crashed to the slate path.
Repairmen showed pity
or they never came back.

No one ever considered
uprooting the trees
so that light would enter our house
and we could see past the ruddy vines

into other houses on the block 
where people came and went
without too much thought.

We slept head to toe on the sagging porch
afraid to call the ambulance and watch her strapped.
We begged the police not to hurt her.

The poet’s piece Buck Fever questions the breadth and duration of damage done to her father’s soul in battle. This age-old lament has haunted literature since Sophocles wrote Ajax. From the letters home to the hair-trigger explosiveness, Weiss compellingly describes her father’s disorder. She opens her poem on the homefront,  

Think of the soldier whose war took place at home,
years after his tour
after his Chevy station wagon door
slammed over a cliff
after he cut his wrist
to make sure blood still flowed
under the ice of the dam.

What do we do with the wounded body?

Those who killed are also injured
and consigned to guilt at being left.
How long can a body convalesce?

In the title poem, The Caretaker’s Lament, Weiss celebrates the eternal connection between mother and daughter. Through the years love has deepened, despite the mother’s disease, not dissolved. The poet incorporates the mother into her artistic framework and acknowledges from the depth of her nature an overriding maternal worth. First person singular becomes first person plural. The piece opens with mother and daughter exchanging roles and actions which border on sacramental,

O mother of my sucking thumb
wedged into a body
bipolar and dumb
struck with loss of thought
O Lydia of the fallen, sick,
Wounded, coffee-eyed beauty

I dress your fluid limp limbs
shower your baby hair and blow it fine
kiss your hammered toes
with powder and place your feet in soles
strong enough to hold your weight and mine.

We stand outside of time
climbing the jagged ridge
of what memory allows …

My favorite poem in this collection Weiss entitles The Four-in-Hand. It works by repetition and a crafty use of juxtaposition and it works very well. The second line repeats as the next stanza’s first line. The last line repeats as the next stanza’s third line. A Windsor knot is juxtaposed with the Hindenburg disaster and the protagonist father/soldier. Madness with its own logic claims its due as the piece concludes strangely but effectively,

he thought that was it.

Take the wide side around the neck, tighten a bit.
The mind goes in and the mind goes out.
He thought that was it.
Sparks jumped from the fabric to the frame.

The mind goes in and the mind goes out.
My father reads only headlines now.
Sparks jumped from the fabric to the flame.
Nothing will ever be the same.

My father reads only headlines now.
A mushroom shaped flame burst into bloom.
Nothing will ever be the same.
Adjust the narrow slide through the loop.

As a kid I hated this parentally imposed formal knot: too big, too elaborate, too noose-like. Perfect for this poem though!

Set in a hospice The Coughing Man, a simple dirge of death and dignity, did not draw me immediately in. But once in, I didn’t want to leave.  Nearing death mingles with life forces. The absurdity of music, food, and games culminate in a philosophical meditation on the stark incongruity of humanity’s fate with its worldly attachments and hopeful aspirations. Innocence sets the stage with a question,

The coughing man’s grandchildren
play hide and seek

behind and under your bed curtains.
Why is he asleep? they ask.

Because he is tired.
Because he has done his work.

Like my Papi, they tell me.
I nod my head, later hold

their shaking mother
In my arms.

What are we to do
with the knowledge

that fails to comfort
if you love this world?

Love’s Ambiguity and a ghostly reconciliation share an emotional poignancy during the dreamed funeral rites in What the Dead Want, the last poem of this collection before the epilogue. The poet’s father chooses a shaded spot of eternity, while the mother begins to fade. A burial takes place, or an incorporation of kinship that replays itself over and over. Here the poet digs toward her essence,

If the ground is moist,
the stones unearth easily.
If the ground is dry
we must use leverage.
It is only way it works.

My bones ache
inhabiting the thick air around us.
In slow motion
The thawk! of the shovel
Reaches the inner core.
I could dream myself awake but why?
I have missed them.

Elisabeth Weiss fashioned her intensely personal poems with deep value, authentic narrative grace and real courage. But, beyond that, her verve absolutely astonishes