Becoming the Sound of Bees By Marc Vincenz

Becoming the Sound of Bees

By Marc Vincenz

Ampersand Books

www.ampersand-books.com

ISBN: 978-0-9861370-0-6

91 Pages

 

Review by Dennis Daly

 

Over and beyond the pages of his new collection, Becoming the Sound of the Bees, Marc Vincenz’s poems swarm, transcending set structures and standard dimensions. Some pieces align to the right margin. Others crawl down the width of the book, accommodating elongated lines or spacing anomalies. Never placid, these verses seem to vibrate out filtered memories and existential queries from a multilayered cosmic buzz. The vertiginous reader would be well advised to focus on a nearby item of solidity (try a bookcase) as a necessary counterbalance to this noise that in harmony becomes silence, a sacred silence.

 

Stiff, salt-encrusted nautical images limn and define Marc Vincenz’s opening poem entitled Transmigration. The poet describes the movement toward rebirth and hope as a gravitation force conveying feelings and language and flaws. The poet details the anticipated moment of genesis,

 

… scars trace icons

of a recurring past, crystal heaped

 

in ions as fleas creep into our rags

and rats’ eyes quiver like insect eggs.

 

Voices are rigging and sails

that creak and snap, and through

 

knots and cracks above, the light,

finding little access, ceaselessly bemoans.

 

And when we emerge, some of us less

than half the men we once knew,

 

in one blinding flash, as dog greets master,

that curious light comes running.

 

Playing God or poet usually ends poorly. Vincenz in his poem Crank-Handled describes the unsightly process of creation in mechanized terms. Even those temperaments well suited to the process mostly fail. Abandoning the fabricated mess often is the best option. The poet cites the Neolithic Cucuteni culture, who developed a model of constant destruction and reformation in their densely urban, but ultimately nomadic, way of life. Vincenz brings his piece to a Frankenstein-like crescendo in a neat under-the-hood description of reverse engineering,

 

   Wrench-spinning, you insist nonetheless.

& not until you strip everything down to cogs, spokes,

sprockets & springs, exposing that frail skeleton,

a crude beast of brass. Miffed, stooped, stumped

over yourself, you discover your own speechlessness.

 

And then—course, I’ll give you full credit—you 

cough it up:  Nothing ever came from hydrocarbons.

What is it actually good for, if anything? & as you rid

your fingers of grease and muck, oily-gluey gunk,

it sputters & rumbles, moans & coughs &

for a tremulous moment it’s almost coming alive.

 

Out of the empyrean noise the poet in his piece, Yet Another Reincarnation, channels his muse/medium into being, bringing a certain omniscience to bear upon the temporal world. Time compresses radically and everyday subsistence takes a back seat to oracular rantings and ravings. Imaginings generate little miracles and demand complex preparations for the next iterations of new life. Vincenz opens the poem with business acumen,

 

I pay my soothsayer in hard-boiled eggs, chicken wings,

gristly claws, livers or gizzards—she believes in the due process

of tempests, visions of omniscient butterflies. An old woman

scrubbing floors portends violent crime or racketeering;

finch in hand, fraud or incest; beetle on the mantelpiece,

ill health. She snatches invisible lassos from the air, spins dizzy

larks above my head, everywhere she sees living dead,

centuries of men on the low road to the country fair, millennia

of citizens ensnared in menial tasks, plowing, sewing, reaping,

daydreaming; mostly she knows where lightning will hit,

who will combust …

 

I exist therefore I am, said Jean Paul Sartre famously. In his poem Weightlessness Vincenz picks up this thought and runs with it. Man acts in the midst of weather. Outside forces affect man’s acts, sometimes re-enforcing them, other times deterring them. Yet man must still make decisions, act on them, and be held responsible. In existential thought the problem of Cartesian duality does not exist. Vincenz seems to agree with this take.  Being is not just the starting point, it is the point. Even storm-tossed families afflicted with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and with daughters run amok are governed by these demonstrable but effervescent strictures. The poet puts it this way,

 

It is only in our decisions

that we are important.

It’s not always about the matriarch, you’d said,

 

more often it’s about the habitable zone and what you make of it,

how primitive life forms

react to sunlight,

 

how dinosaurs eventually rise

from single cells,

how creatures like us

 

learn to take

wind, water, fire, and earth

shake and stir, and recreate life in test tubes.

 

Desires drive Vincenz’s protagonist, Ivan, onward. His protagonist’s muse or dead wife seems just out a reach. Her siren song transfigures man into boy again, bestows the youthfulness of wonder. She understands the sacred universal drone—the eternal beehive. Wasps and wild dogs momentarily interrupt their quest, but only momentarily. Other natural organisms wave them on. The poet mines his memory for queries and clues,

 

… the thrushling flutters on, dangles, bounces, wavering on twigs,

it’s then suddenly I realize, as we emerge from the undergrowth

 

sweating and dripping, scratched through our faces that Ivan, no

Buddhist, believes her to be the reincarnated spirit of his wife.

 

He asked me once: Did you eat your way into this life, like me?

Did you devour your share of the proceeds of your well intentions?

 

Or, did you live for something more like love or affections?

Those were the days he still made sense, now mostly little

 

matters, not the grass, nor the sky, there is no stirring

or yearning, & yet, with nothing left there was still more,

 

like the thrush, like the sunlight on ice, like the industry of bees.

 

A cache of caught sunlight in the realm of Being and Nothingness can make all the difference. Vincenz’s richly illuminated visions and commanding oracular verses in this momentous collection do just that.

The Sunday Poet: Kevin Gallagher

Kevin Gallagher

Kevin Gallagher is a political economist, poet, and publisher living in Greater Boston with his wife Kelly, their children Theo and Estelle, and Rexroth the family German Shepherd.  These poems are from Gallagher's new book, LOOM, published by MadHat Press.  Gallagher edits spoKe, a Boston-based annual of poetry and poetics, and works as a Professor of Global Development Policy at Boston University’s Pardee School for Global Studies. 

The Foot of Slave Power

                        Samuel May Jr., June 2, 1854

A body of troop with drawn swords

and a large force of police and marines

surrounded a hollow square

hemmed by a thick-set hedge of gleaming blades

and large brass field-piece with artillery--

loaded to the muzzle and more than ready.

In the midst of this walked Anthony Burns.

Fifty thousand rushed in all around them.

Fifty thousand carrying black coffins.

Companies of mounted horsemen rushed us,

dividing and scattering us for a time.

He has gone off to their tender mercies.

He has gone!  Boston lies bound hand and foot!

Slaves at the foot of Slave Power!

The Blood of ’76

Amos A. Lawrence, 1854

Three years ago I offered my support

to protect U.S. Marshals from the mob.

This time I prefer to see the court

razed than see this man’s newfound freedom robbed.

They marched him down State Street in procession.

Cavalry, artillery, and cannon.

U.S. troops before him and behind him.

He held his head up and marched like a man.

The windows on houses were filled with faces,

though the streets and alleys had all been cleared.

We thought Boston the safest of places,

that here freedom could never disappear.

We cannot stand that this was not a crime.

I have to tell you that it is high time.

August 9, 2016 Poet Alfred Nicol -- appears on Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer--Somerville Community Access TV

 See it live at 5PM  at http://scatvsomerville.org  Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer

Alfred Nicol

 

Alfred Nicol’s third full-length book of poetry, Animal Psalms, was published in March, 2016 by Able Muse Press. Designed and meticulously edited by Alex Pepple, the book has received glowing recommendations from several of our finest contemporary poets, including David Ferry, winner of the 2012 National Book Award, who wrote, “Dear reader, I’ve fallen in love with this book, and that will happen to you too.”

Nicol’s previous collection, Elegy for Everyone, published in 2009, was chosen for the first Anita Dorn Memorial Prize as “a work of complex vision and stylistic mastery.” He received the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award for an earlier volume, Winter Light, of which Jay Parini, biographer of Robert Frost, said, “This is certainly among the finest new volumes of poetry I have read in years.”
Alfred Nicol has written the lyrics for nine original compositions by classical/flamenco guitarist John Tavano. The CD, released in January, 2015, is titled The Subtle Thread.

In 2011 Nicol contributed a sequence of dream-notations to a book of images created by his sister, the artist Elise Nicol: the collaboration is titled Second Hand Second Mind. In 2009 Nicol, Tavano and poet Rhina Espaillat recorded the CD Melopoeia (poetry recited with musical accompaniment).
A member of the Powow River Poets since 1999, Nicol edited The Powow River Anthology, published in 2006.

Nicol’s poems have appeared in Poetry, The New England Review, Dark Horse, First Things, Atlanta Review, Commonweal, The Formalist, The Hopkins Review, and other literary journals, as well as in Contemporary Poetry of New England and other anthologies.

Whiteness of Bone By Gloria Mindock

Whiteness of Bone

By Gloria Mindock

Glass Lyre Press

Glenview, Illinois

www.GlassLyrePress.com

ISBN: 978-1-941783-19-1

81 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Certain extraordinary people absorb the world’s suffering and cruelty; they identify with the victims of inhumanity so closely that at times they seem to transfigure themselves into exemplars of those unfortunates. Faith healers, saints, mystics all possess a measure of this quality. In hagiography think of Francis of Assisi, Theresa of Avila, and stigmatics like Padre Pio. On the secular side, singular artists also manifest this imaginative and creative trait in different, but no less extreme, forms—including and especially poets.

Gloria Mindock, one of these versifiers of villainy, pens her narrated atrocities with a radiating light of white hot indignation. She aims to shame us all for not listening to the piercing screams of child-sufferers and the horrified protestations of adult innocents against imminent barbarity. Like Cassandra, the poet predicts future savagery and devastation, and, like that prophetess, she feels ignored. From Mindock’s opening poem, In a Dark World, her obsessive need to voice the world’s Manichean reality and her sense of crushing injustice drives each poetic commentary. The poet questions her own worthiness in the heart of this piece,

Day after day, death happens…

despite the sun coming out to

show the blue of the sky.

Beauty and ugliness in battle—

Light and dark in battle—

Each day, a tug of war and each day,

each side wins somewhere in the world.

You told me I was light in a dark world.

Why did you do this?

Do you know something I don’t?

Railing against bestiality is, in a sense, railing against human nature, since humans are, at least in part, beasts too. Altruists, such as Mindock, want to invent a civilization of angels, who answer to the golden rule rather than base instinct. It’s unattainable, of course, but quite necessary in the long evolution of mankind’s soul. The poet in her opening stanza of Call describes our present state,

Pounding, beating…

Possessing the prey, like an

animal with no cares but survival.

This is what we do to each other.

Some defeat is on purpose and the power,

spills out of the soul.

Blood tries to swallow the world.

Mindock intimates that the end is near in her apocalyptic poem entitled End. Her persona plays hide and seek in little-girl fashion, waiting for the missiles to strike. Personal death powers these words, but total annihilation also seems expected. For the dead, these conclusions are, indeed, synonymous. Mindock’s persona channels a fiery fate,

My hands are together as I wait, but first

I must put on a pretty dress.

People are weeping, not me.

I welcome the heat disintegrating my body.

It is time to slide down to the floor,

feel the rush around me.

Nothing remains…

State terrorism casts its shadow within Mindock’s poems. In her poem Missing she effectively calls criminal governments to task by conjuring up apparitions of the villagers who “died with grace” to bear witness to the horrors. The Disappeared understand that the poet’s words embody their existence once more in mnemonic sympathy,

They can hear me speak. Their hearts beat

faster and they understand.

They feel my breath—

This is not un-human.

Overhead birds sing about what they saw.

It is not joyful chirping.

This evening, there is a big light shining

from the countryside.

It is my fault, I lit the match so

the world could see, remember.

The military killed them.

Whiteness of Bone, the title poem, fluctuates between objective reflection and emotional response. Mindock rationalizes that war and genocide are always with mankind. Cruelty grows out of nature. Slaughter seems almost ritual. The poet repeats in this poem and others the image of blood flowing into the ground as if the earth demands this as a sacramental sacrifice. She also channels the dead, her heart bursting with a pointed compassion. Mindock’s dual identity forges a poignant conversation of conscience. The piece concludes with her conversation culling a new identity from moldering bodies,

All the bones saturate the ground.

One can learn about the life and death of the

dead by holding them.

I hear you, know you, there is no vacancy

in my heart as your life closes in.

the whiteness of bone, I caress, kiss and

retrieve your memories for a better life.

Brutalized countries often cannot escape the cycles of revenge and murder. Common people pay a terrible price from both contending sides and many seek refuge. El Salvador emerged from a 12 year war into a hair-trigger existence, the martyrdom of Archbishop Oscar Romero still shining brightly in that country’s collective consciousness. Mindock uses this background in her piece entitled Escape to chronicle the flight of many Salvadorian people to the United States. The poet describes her role,

… hidden in trucks.

Travelling falls into place with rosary beads

in their hands, each bead a prayer to Romero.

Living is a taste I really want for them.

Escaping, a betrayal to El Salvador but

the pavement to a new life is calling.

In America, they have a dialogue

with themselves.

Crying and mourning, loss, a way of life

until the joy of a new oxygen takes over.

Meanwhile, I speak for them. Putting my hand

again on their soil… taking the role of angel, anointing their

foreheads with the soul of a dead one…

Mindock’s poems give witness to an earthly hell. Her collection cries to heaven. Readers of good will, take notice.

Death of a Salesman. By Arthur Miller. Vokes Players. Wayland, Mass. Directed by John Barrett

 "I don't say he's a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person."
― Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman




Death of A Salesman. By Arthur Miller. Vokes Players. Wayland, Mass. Directed by John Barrett

Willy Loman , the tragic hero in Arthur Millers “ Death of a Salesman” is captured by this quote from his wife Linda. Loman, a long-in-the-tooth salesman whose shoe shine has lost its luster, and has a handshake that went firm to limp, may have not amounted to hill of a beans in the play, but he remains a powerful symbol of lives of quiet and in this case not so quiet desperation. He is an icon of the nightmare that hides behind the sizzle but no steak billboard of the American Dream. Loman makes his sales pitch to mocking laughter, to rolling eyes, as he completes the last half of the roller coaster ride to oblivion.

Robert Zawistowski, who plays Loman like a clinically depressed Falstaff, has mastered the body language, the stoop, the perpetual sweat on the brow, the speech, of a defeated man.

This play is directed by John Barrett and is true to the original. I have seen television and film adaptions with Lee J. Cobb, and Dustin Hoffman, that were marvelously produced. I have never seen the play on stage. But—the stage has an intimacy—the feel of the press of the flesh, the texture that can't be captured in another medium.

Biff, the wayward son of Loman is expertly played by Bill Stambaugh. Stambaugh interprets the character as a tightly coiled—powder keg of a man, stunted to a degree by his father and his own limitations. Deanna Swan, who plays Linda, Willy's wife, is the definition of long suffering. Her smile seems like a brittle pop-- a thin scrim to the unfolding tragedy.

The last scene in the play, at Loman's funeral, was particularly striking. The lighting designer Dan Clawson ( and I always noticed lighting because my brother Donald Holder is a Tony Award -winning lighting designer), has affected a melancholy line up of silhouettes over Willy's grave-- a somber Greek Chorus that left a chill down my spine.

The Vokes Players, in this production, have contributed to a night of theatre that I will long remember.


*** Doug Holder is the arts/editor of The Somerville Times, and teaches writing at Endicott College and Bunker Hill Community College.

The Sunday Poet: Jennifer Matthews

Poet/Musician  Jennifer Matthews

Jennifer Matthews is an accomplished poet, photographer, and singer/songwriter. Her poetry has appeared in the Midway Journal, Lyrical Somerville, Ibbetson Street and many others. To find out more about Matthews go to: Jennifer Matthews

When we are One

Singing with the choir, we are born into this life

some of us raise hell and fire

some of us just dust

and the years go by like passing moments

when we are one, we are beautiful

in this world we tame the fires

we start the fires we breathe the fires

I wonder if we all are lilies, lilies open hearts desires

and the years go by like passing moments

when we are one, we are beautiful

even when you think, you're falling apart

you are stronger then the weight of your heart

and when you think your falling apart

don't be fooled by desire, reach for something higher

maybe we are exploding stars, exploding stars

maybe we are the greatest part, the greatest part

and the years go by like passing moments

when we are one, we are beautiful

Kathleen Spivack Speaks about "Unspeakable Things"

Kathleen Spivack with Doug Holder at the Cafe Juliet in Somerville, Mass.

KATHLEEN SPIVACK is an award-winning writer. She studied with Robert Lowell and remained friends with him for eighteen years, and is the author of many books, among them Moments of Past Happiness, A History of Yearning, and With Robert Lowell and His Circle. She has had residencies at the Radcliffe Institute, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the American Academy in Rome, and has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Commission. She teaches in Boston and Paris. Here latest book is a novel " Unspeakable Things" According to Spivack's website it is: " A strange, haunting novel about survival and love in all its forms; about sexual awakenings and dark secrets; about European refugee intellectuals who have fled Hitler’s armies with their dreams intact and who have come to an elusive new (American) 'can do, will do' world they cannot seem to find. A novel steeped in surreal storytelling and beautiful music that transports its half-broken souls—and us—to another realm of the senses." 

The setting: the early 1940s, New York—city of refuge, city of hope, with the specter of a red-hot Europe at war.


I spoke to Spivack on my Somerville Community Access TV show: Poet to Poet :Writer to Writer.  http://poettopoetwritertowriter.blogspot.com

 Kathleen Spivack Speaks about "Unspeakable Things

With Doug Holder

Doug Holder: Can you tell me about the genesis of this first novel that you have written?

Kathleen Spivack: I had written two other novels before but I threw them out. I didn't show them to anybody because I thought they were horrible. I didn't want them to be around. When I was teaching in Paris—my friends wanted me to stay and they wanted me to apply for the Fulbright. A Fulbright Scholarship is funded by American universities-- not French-- so this took a lot of pressure off me. So I got the Fulbright, and I wrote three pages, and those three pages became a novel.

Doug Holder: How much of this novel was inspired by your own immigrant family?

Kathleen Spivack: A lot. When my family came to this country they were incredibly poor. We all lived in a one room apartment. My family came from Austria, Russia and Germany. They seemed to be coming from all over. I often had to share my bed with an old lady. Now, a lot of my people had been through the concentration camps. And a lot of them had lost family. They were pretty broken people. Getting back to this old lady who my character of the “Rat” is based.--she was a woman who came out of the camps and experienced incredible hardship. She would tell me stories in the middle of the night. The “Rat” would tell her story over and over again to the young girl she shared the bed with.

Doug Holder: The “ Rat” in your novel is a hunchback woman with a beautiful face. She was the objection of affection of Rasputin, a doctor, and others...

Kathleen Spivack: Yes—this woman that I slept with told me that she “Sold herself to Rasputin.." I listened to her—terrified by the whole story. And she said: “ Then we did unspeakable things.” She didn't go into detail...I was a kid.

Doug Holder: You have very graphic scenes of the sexual liaison between the Rat and Rasputin.

Kathleen Spivack: I imagined what she might have done with him. I think I went a bit overboard. (Laugh). But in reality she was beautiful and compelling. Yet she had whiskers and was hunched over...but she definitely had something about her.

Doug Holder:  Tell us about Herbert your main character.

Kathleen Spivack: My main character was based on my grandfather—Herbert. The reality was that during World War ll in New York City none of us could get a job. My mother managed to secure something. She would send the kids to the New York Public Library with my grandfathers. In the winter libraries had heat. One of the reasons that Marx used the British Museum in London was because it had heat. My grandfather was a minister of finance and commerce in Austria. He had been trying to raise funds to get people out of Austria, and the library was a place where people cut deals, etc... My dad was a decoder during the War, just like Herbert's son was in the book.

Doug Holder: The character of Felix was a bizarre one. In the book he pleasured himself in front of a picture of Hitler.

Kathleen Spivack: You have to remember the book is based on fact and fiction. Felix is a true villain. He is based on our family pediatrician back then. He delivered my mother. Like Felix, he called his child charges “ bad girls” and threatened to have them “ turned them into liverwurst.”

Doug Holder: I always find coffee shops, libraries, etc... as a gathering place for eccentrics. You use the New York Public Library and the Automat in your book. I remember writing a poem: “The Eccentrics of the Reading Room: Boston Public Library,” that was published in a number of places.

Kathleen Spivack: These refugees met in public places like the Automat. My grandfather met in the periodical room—the newspapers were on rolls—the children in the novel sit all day and wait for Herbert to be done with his business.

Doug Holder: There seemed to be a dose of Magic Realism in your book.

Kathleen Spivack: There is an element. The book was somewhat based on German Expressionism. I didn't think of it as Magic Realism. It was useful to write this way.

Doug Holder: There was a recurring subtext in the novel of the Old World of Europe vs the New World of America. There is a lot of music in the story as well.

Kathleen Spivack: My parents were civil servants in Austria, and they loved music. I went to Oberlin and I was a cellist. I think music is the heart of the book. I write to music. I set the book up in a symphonic structure. My son was very into the saxophone—and he would sleep with his instrument. I used this in the novel—where a group of musicians sleep with their instruments to the neglect of their wives. I did a lot of research into the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for this book. My book is full of music, and so is my life.

Neila, Evening Song: Last Poems of Yvan Goll Translated by Donald Wellman

Neila, Evening Song:

Last Poems of Yvan Goll

Translated by Donald Wellman

Spuyten Duyvil

New York, NY

Copyright © 2016 by Donald Wellman

93 pages, softbound, $15

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Unreal as mist in the silent machinery of night

Your face flies past with moon sails

O Neila, blue offering-smoke

The red songs of the father resound in your mouth

A golden animal horn of fervor

Announces you to fate

I hear rustling in your dark magic

The old seas of midnight

I know, you’re no daughter of man

Unearthly you, beyond blood

Neila, the scent of jasmine signifies you

When it announces the spirits of the deep

Thus begins Donald Wellman’s translation of Yvan Goll who straddled the worlds of German Expressionism and French Surrealism, whose life was disrupted and changed by Nazi Germany and bound to the intellectual scene of New York City.  Diagnosed with lukemia in 1945, he died five years later-- less known than other poets, nearly forgotten until Wellman’s excellent translation.

In “Death-Chemistry” we see Goll’s fear of death in its many manifestations. His work here combines the surreal with  anguish and tenderness and an inevitable slow ending :

   

In the alembic of the dream

You turn yellow red yellow

Fever blossom

And belladonna of anxiety

On the slopes of darkness

Blood’s night-chemistry

Reeling puss-cup

Dewy with tears

That drain her worn-out sleep

Breathe slowly you sick ones

At the wounded wall

Birds from ashes settle themselves on your hands

On your fragile fingers

The last day crumbles

For those who enjoy both expressionist and surreal poetry, Goll provides ample works for which Donald Wellman has provided inspired translations. As the blurb on the back cover states [Goll’s poetry] is “…a work of restless paranoia and gripping intensity.”  

To engage Goll’s work is to resurrect a poet whose work should not be forgotten and deserves its place not only among those who were forced from their native lands by the Nazis, but whose work outlives those who tried to destroy them.

__________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer for Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

Author,  Fire Tongue, King of the Jungle and  Across Stones of Bad Dreams

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Publisher, Muddy River Books

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthologies 7& 8