A Lifetime of Reading: Sweet Marjoram: Notes & Essays by DeWitt Henry

A Lifetime of Reading: Sweet Marjoram: Notes & Essays by DeWitt Henry

by Michael Steffen

One of the many virtues of DeWitt Henry’s new book Sweet Marjoram (ISBN 978-1-941196-72-4, MadHat Press, 2018) is its liberally associative arrangement. It allows us, like our favorite books of lyrical poetry, once we’ve read it through and are on to this welcoming element, to open its pages where we will and just start reading. Skipping through a book is a good way to allow its individual passages to surprise us, to get by or around, in some cases, the author’s control freak editor and modesty, to get at the book’s heart, or “meat.” In the case of Sweet Marjoram, one may even on a first perusal jump to the 17th essay, “On Meat,” where our sources of fascination knock against our weaknesses and guilt.

—la carne, in Spanish and carne in Italian, echoing the Latin carn- or caro (flesh), as do carnal in English (having a relation to the body as opposed to the soul), carnival (a time of feasting and fleshly indulgence as opposed to Lent and fasting), carnivorous and carnivore…Among flora, the carnation is a flower as red as raw meat, as blood.

Meathead suggests more muscle than brains. Sexual organs are called meat… (Antony even calls Cleopatra cold leftovers on dead Ceasar’s trencher)... [page 94]

I’ve left ellipses instead of A1 sauce. The line of thought cools down in the course of the essay with sobering references to Benjamin Franklin and his pragmatic advice, “Rarely use Venery except for Health and Offspring; Never to Dullness, Weakness, or the Injury of your own or another’s Peace and Reputation,” Saint Augustine’s spiritual sense of love with allusion to another kind of “meat,” and further discussions involving Noah, Henry’s daughter, Tolstoy, a grad-student memoir of a friendly neighbor meat butcher, and more. In the wake of any one of the essays, on reflection, we marvel again and again at the variety of Henry’s sources and multiplicity of his angles of consideration on his subjects. The logo for NPR’s flagship news program, All things considered, would be a good subtitle for the book.

This is true, and so its opposite: an uneasiness at the seeming authorial absence, a lack of point of view, an omission of agenda, of logical or narrative sequence. Topics are announced in the titles: “On Weather,” “On Conscience,” “On Falling”…“On Privilege”…“On Cursing”… Henry’s meditations encompass a wide topical range, from the ordinary, “On Handshakes,” to the lofty, “On Dignity,” and the ironic, “On Folly.” A source of inspiration, it may soon dawn on the reader, lies in the 16th Century, in the French and English essayists Michel de Montaigne

(“Of sadness,” “Of friendship,” “Of cannibals”) and Francis Bacon (“Of Truth,” “Of Death,”

“Of Revenge”).

The epigraph of the book, taken from Shakespeare, citing the origin of the author’s title, is telling of this inspiration from the Renaissance, an age in its writers characterized by a spirit of the revival of classical philosophy and literature and its attitudes of open inquiry into all subjects, its copious and liberal curiosity. The title comes from a recognition scene in the beginning of the denouement of King Lear, as blinded Gloucester’s inward senses are being restored to him, and Lear is still simmering after the storm:

Lear: Ha! Give the word.

Edgar: Sweet marjoram.

Lear: Pass. (4.6.93-95)

“Sweet marjoram” (Marjoran hortensis) refers to a mint-like herb, which annotators believe was used as a medicinal cure for madness or mental illness. The title’s useful to its author also because it echoes the title of an earlier book, Sweet Dreams, a memoir of Henry’s youth and family, centered around his father who owned and operated a candy factory.

Literature and commonplace phrases and sayings serve as springboards for a good deal of the texts, offering a wide range in citations from the Bible to contemporary films, novels, essays and science, references of expressions spanning from early English, “Fair-weathered friend,” to our day’s greetings with fist bumps. Sven Birkerts praises the book’s display of “the accrued benefits of a lifetime of reading, teaching, viewing and thinking,” noting its “Shakespearian breadth of interest subjected to a steady inquiring pressure.”

While the choice of inclusion in the essays is arbitrary, though familiar, these are not “personal” essays, nor so much in academic terms thesis essays, for their lack of method and inclusion of biographical material. Announced topics are also freely digressed from, sometimes at ̊180 as in the essay “On Silence,” which more or less meditates on the impossibility of silence.

Buddhist teasers: The sound of one hand clapping. A tree falls in an empty forest. Sunyata.

There is no absence of sound, except for the deaf, who feel vibrations through the floor or other surfaces of touch.

Listen carefully, and even in scientifically designed anechoic chambers, in the absence of most sound, you’ll hear the roar and pulse of your own blood. (This, of course, is amplified in ultrasound exams of the heart, which, when I heard mine from a speaker, sounded like kicking in a bath, glug, wash, glug.

Our industrial and technological revolutions have increased ambient noise, especially in the cities… [page 15]

Again, the risk run in this manner of leaping from instance to instance is the impression it may leave the casual or unfamiliar reader that the author is writing simply to hear the ink blot from his pen, that he’s not getting to the point. Like Gertrude to Polonius, we may prove an itch to say, “More matter, with less art.” Or do we want to ask for More art, more structure…?

Maybe readers of today, used to clicking here and jumping from partially read story to partially glimpsed ad, will be very much at home in Henry’s paratactic discourse.

We are given fair warning on the title page these are not just essays, but “Notes & Essays.” Often “paragraphs” or separate units consist simply of one sentence. Or just a fragment.

Speak now, we say, or forever hold your peace.

Enfolding silence, thick silence, heavy; moments filled with silence.

Dead silence.

We mute the familiar, annoying commercial.

Philomela, the rape victim, tongue-less, hand-less.

Brier Rabbit and Tarbaby.

Hold your tongue.

Tongue-tied?…[page 16]

Passages like these can induce a sort of reader’s vertigo. What—where in…

Yet Henry stirs our curiosity in this difference from the bulk of writing which is very agenda- or purpose-driven. Harkening back to an age whose poet characterized the function of his art “to hold the mirror up to nature,” Henry’s writing attains in manner and example a wide scope and variety of our sources for thought. When these are juxtaposed, hovering, side by side, often intentionally for contrast—old/new, ordinary/exotic, common/lofty—the reward for the effort is comparative, a glimpse of objectivity and tolerance rather than a dedicated referential orthodoxy to justify some argument.

This has been one of the primary reasons for studying Michel de Montaigne in World Literature classes, often his essay “Of cannibals,” for its refutation that “other” people, the natives of what was then considered “Anarctic France” (Brazil), were inferior as humans to the seemingly infinitely more sophisticated Europeans who were at that time just discovering this new world and its inhabitants.

I am sorry that Lycurgus and Plato did not know of them; for it seems to me that what we actually see in these nations surpasses not only the pictures in which poets have idealized the golden age and all their inventions in imagining a happy state of man, but also the conceptions and the very desire of philosophy. They could not imagine a naturalness so pure and simple… [“Of cannibals”].

The essay “On Appetite” in Sweet Marjoram gives us the nutshell passage from Montaigne’s essay: “I am sorry that, seeing so clearly into their faults, we should be so blind to our own.” [page 77]

Henry, too, is aware of other lands and other people with their customs which differ sharply from our own. Not unlike Montaigne:

Islam discourages handshakes between men and women, probably to ensure chastity. In Switzerland, when an Imam’s sons recently refused to shake their teacher’s hand—a Swiss tradition—authorities imposed a $5,000 fine and provoked an international controversy… [page 11]

The discussion occurs in the essay “On Handshakes.” Ordinarily, the contrast, even conflict, between Muslim and Western customs and ethics would by far outweigh the simple gesture of a handshake. Instead of getting engulfed in all of that, Henry proceeds with his topic, to unearth a very contemporary Western oddity in the consideration of the gesture.

In addition to religious customs, there are also health and safety concerns. Handshakes spread germs. No one shook on deals with the germaphobe Howard Hughes. Supermarkets offer wipes to sanitize shopping cart handles as a precaution against epidemics of flu or AIDS. Dentists and doctors wear latex gloves… [page 11]

Here we have a case where Henry’s stylistic boldness of laying instance out after instance comes into a powerful statement, revealing virtue in the madness of his method. In a sense, it is writing as showing rather than telling. These things, the conservative manner of Muslims, Howard Hughes’s mania over germs, today’s assimilation of that mania into expected, habitual use of sanitary wipes and latex gloves, our somewhat de-humanizing (don’t touch me!) scientific awareness, all emerge from the discourse as evoked in our daily experience. The author has done little more than arrange the images and notions together under the marginal awareness of our hands and how we use them. Terrible importance is trivialized. The simple unassuming takes on poetic weight, even to the point of farcical proportions. The ant is a centaur in its dragon world, wrote Ezra Pound. Or, more recently, The feet of an ant make their own sound on the earth—Jane Hirshfield.

Sometimes, as with questions of handshakes, social attitudes shift swiftly, within one’s lifetime. Other beckoning changes can take generations.

Medieval nobles were celebrated by gisants, sculpted on their coffin lids… The knight lies at rest in full armor… On the Smith College campus, I loved Leonard Baskin’s gisant of a factory worker in this traditional pose, reclining on a slab, pot-bellied, care- and work-worn, aged, but noble also in his way… [page 21]

By disregarding temporal as well as spatial and topical parameters, the Renaissance/Henry essay assumes the power to see History, what is beyond our ordinary senses, reminding us of our society’s roots in revolution. Baskin’s gisant, elevating a common worker, may be a memorial for Democracy and its valuation of the individual, or for Communism and its proposed elevation of the working class. There are spoilers of both systems of government which are not included in Baskin’s sculpture. Further in the book, in the essay “On Privilege,” Henry will make mention of how “the redistribution of wealth under Communism privileged bureaucrats, commissars, and Stalin.” [page 28]

If America’s foundations hold up ideals for our aspirations, our history is not without its ironies.

All men are created equal, writes the slave-owning husband and father, Thomas Jefferson, philosopher, scientist, architect, statesman, politician, patrician. [page 25]

As to himself? I noted when writing about Sweet Dreams the paradoxical unselfishness—for a memoirist—of DeWitt’s manner, with a diligent regard for those around him. He bears himself with personal objectivity. It persists in Sweet Marjoram, with references to himself coming off as a sociological type:

Male and white, straight, employed and able-bodied, I should mind my manners, consider others, and reexamine my attitudes towards “difference.” [page 27, “On Privilege”]

Quietly siding with Harold Bloom’s notion, with respect to literature, of the Western Cannon, Henry entertains the opposing view:

Here is Terry Eagleton: “There is no such thing as a literary work or tradition which is valuable in itself… ‘Value’ is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations…” [page 27]

But Henry also goes about quietly defending the values of a humanist body of writing by citing and so including Toni Morrison (“A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only ‘universal’ but also ‘race-free’ risks lobotomizing that literature…” [page 28]) and Albert Camus (“Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live: in fact, for the humiliated. [page 28])

The tendency—altruism, evasiveness—belies Henry’s fondness for commonplace language, and his persistent eye for his nuclear others. From “On Appetite”:

Your eyes are bigger than your stomach. Biting off more than you chew. Clean your plate. I binge on wafer-thin Pringles, unable to eat just one. It’s better to eat smaller portions more often than to stuff yourself. Our oldest brother Jack, however, the only naturally thin one in our family, came home for Thanksgiving from his life 2000 miles away. He did the carving. We marveled while he out-ate all of us, three or four portions of turkey, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and even the roasted vegetables. [page 74]

It is one of the foodier-for-thought books I’ve come across recently. Henry wins our regard for settling into this tradition of essay writing, and our admiration for making the genre useful as his own to unlock a lot of needed conversation for our times.

Green Midnight By Stuart Bartow

Green Midnight

By Stuart Bartow

Dos Madres Press

Loveland, Ohio

www.dosmadres.com

ISBN: 978-1-948017-12-1

69 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Breeziness in poetry has its advantages. Stuart Bartow draws one into his new book, Green Midnight, with an easy, light touch. Martian cat women, New Age vampires, cannibal Sirens, and quacking ravens open the collection by amusing and baiting the unwary reader as he or she drifts inexorably into the poet’s sublime and deepening hive of nowhere and everywhere.

Bartow’s opening piece coyly mulls over the source of artistic inspiration, his muse, and the tenuousness of that normally one-way line of communication. The poet asks,

… Who needs to make

a poem every day

when one has real work to do,

shoveling snow, washing dishes,

drinking? And doesn’t she

have other things to do, like

tend to her other loves,

that mountain in Greece, the wind

at 4 a. m., the Milky Way?

In the last line of this poem, Bartow divulges the unlisted shared phone number of dual petulant muses, the whisperers of love and lyric poetry, and for those, like myself, who often have trouble contacting either of them, it is easily worth the price of the book.

Merging cosmology with biology in a wonderfully crafted villanelle entitled Without the Stars, Bartow looks at life in a pantheistical and hopeful way. He dwells on our deeper universal knowledge that we can and should waken, its causes, and the happiness that often ensues with this conjuration. The piece concludes wonderfully,

Without the stars there’d be no us.

We can watch the stellar gusts,

can rue the meteors we’ve missed,

still not forgetting we are stardust

that somehow makes us know the stars enough,

the knowing enough to conjure bliss.

We know without the stars there would not be us,

all of us made of ancient stardust.

Do Not Open After Dusk is my favorite poem in this collection. It delineates a coffee shop with a magical door into our own imaginations. Not unreasonably, there is a warning sign. Although the entrance into this dusky world offers mere mortals visionary status, it comes with a catch. The door, once used, disappears. Bartow introduces his Twilight Zone in this way,

… Of course the sign was about fear

but I always like to open portals

to see dusk, to go out into

space and time between

like William Blake, who,

in sunrise and set,

saw a golden chorus singing.

I, too, have dreamt

of opening that door

to meet something on the other side…

More than a few of Bartow’s poems are about birds. These pieces are chock full of curious detail, often setting up stunning metaphoric constructions. One of the best the poet entitles Carolina Wrens. Consider this detail that the poet uses before setting up (later in the poem) his poetic trap,

They thrive when winters are mild

but heavy snow and cold

can devastate them. They like

woodland thickets, ravines,

rocky slopes covered with brush.

Their eggs, usually five, are white

with brown spots. Rich brown above,

buff or yellow chests, these wrens

have a distinct white line

above and behind the eyes.

In his poem Invisible Bartow deals with the nature of ghosts and then speculates on their psychology. He restates with images Shakespeare’s oft quoted, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” and continues down that path of inquiry. Here is one of the poet’s speculations, the first sentence of which terrifies me,

Perhaps ghosts can view their own lost lives the way actors

Watch movies in which they star, flawed performances

that cannot be changed, long ago released to the world’s

audiences. Maybe through fissures, cracks in time, ghosts

might break a window, turn a clock’s arm, make a foot-

print, but the beauty is in invisibility. It must feel strange

when people walk through you, a brief rush, erotic.

Some poems are just “cool.” Bartow’s Midnight at the 24-Hour Laundromat in Corinth, New York is one such piece. After the reader figures out who the skipper is of this poetically-fueled, cosmic submarine, the poem continues thusly,

Without, the Adirondacks loom,

sonar forces immense around the sub.

The engines of the dryers cruise on

while the washers’ portals sing song

an ocean’s madness. The sub is on chart

through the frozen mountains and beyond

to the infinite sea of stars.

A monk-like world of activity inside of a tree’s womb stirs up a philosophical buzz on perfection and infinity in Bartow’s poem entitled Wild Hive. Single-minded bees, encouraging one another with songs of praise, produce a dynamo of ferocious sweetness. This ancient fable reverberates with measured metaphor and unpredictable menace. Follow the effervescent verbs,

… Who conducts their hymns,

Gregorians gone mad, fiercely

composing bee-wine. Their oratory churns

electric, mind of guardians, bristled with stingers.

More than the sky, the wind’s robots,

they concoct ambrosia for the prophets

that is the same gold as their bodies,

fly like grooms into the flowers and wallow

like messengers gone drunk. Then, propelling body

as compass, return to that aerial cathedral,

that clandestine brain, and with an alchemy

of spittle and pollen create combs soaked

in amber, smelt the earth down to its essence

of honey…

It’s morning—about 4 a.m.—as I finish my first read-through of this marvelous, portent-laden collection. The wafts and brief puffs of late night zephyrs have steadied and deepened to gale force, like Bartow’s poems. The curtains flap wildly. Is this applause, or just the perfect background for this review

The Sunday Poet: Linda Maria Steele

 

 

Linda Maria Steele is a teacher, writer and visual artist. She is the author of Meet Me in My Cape Cod Kitchen She has three children. She originally wrote 'tending a tender heart' for one of her daughter's after her daughter called while on a trip to California. You can see more of her work at www.lindamariasteele.com

 

 

Tending a Tender Heart 

In the end all we can really do is make a way for ourselves inside of ourselves.

We can wish and hope and pray things will turn out a certain way. And yet, all we have are the birds that call to us at dawn, the glimmer of light we notice at water's edge or the admiration we feel toward the rising moon.

If we're patient enough and remember to love our heart with our own tender hearts, that may be just enough to take us all the way home.

Newton Free Library Poetry Series Sept 11, 2018 Susan Eisenberg, David Blair. Marguerite Guzman Bouvard

(Click on to enlarge)

Sam Cornish First Boston Poet Laureate Passes at 82

White Storm by Gary Metras

 

White Storm

Gary Metras

Presa Press

Rockford, IL

Copyright © 2018 Gary Metras

ISBN: 978-0-9965026-9-6

81 pages, softbound, $15.95

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Gary Metras is best known as editor, publisher and printer of Adastra Press.  He is also known as an essayist and reviewer-- certainly as a superior fly fisherman-- and as a grandfather. But he is, perhaps, best known as an award-winning poet and the Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA.

Metras’s most recent poetry collection is White Storm, which covers the full range of his multi-faceted poetic talent--  this includes a number of titles such as “Robert Frost’s Chair,” “Pausing With Tchaikovsky,” “Listening to the Poet Laureate on NPR” as well as poems on “The Anecdote of the Chihuahuas,” “Chicken Fingers,” “A Hiker” and many more.

In “Torino” one would think the title refers to Ford’s former automobile which Clint Eastwood drives in his movie “Gran Torino.” But no, the poem takes place in Italy and may or may not explain religious history and legend.

This far north we see no Roman ruins

but downtown is torn up. Piles

of fractured asphalt and cement, trucks

queuing, men shouting, steel beams

awaiting use. In the distance, blue alps.

In a few years this city will shine

with Olympians and the crowds will not

know the dust and rubble we walk

to find the small church with the Shroud

of Jesus, where a handful of worshipers kneel

in pews. Tourists flash their cameras. We see

in the worn cloth the shape of a man,

face and arms, legs and buttock, his life

leaked onto this sheet. Is this our God,

mere stains on cloth like a rumor of joy?

The guide says this is only a copy, then points

to where the real Shroud rests behind

bulletproof glass, sealed in a metal box,

a treasure for the ages. She says

science disproves the cloth’s age, but

people believe, free to think as they will.

Metras’s “The World in Reflection” presents a pessimistic view of what could be, instead of what could be seen another way--  happy, and joyful.

The dirty clouds flare yellow and orange

with city bouncing over the black

mountain into our quiet valley.

If this was somewhere else in the ord,

think fire and murder ruling over there,

that, amid such destruction and death,

no one making love, no one

snoring sleep’s sweet oblivion,

that people couldn’t be laughing in parties,

that there were no parties,

not one single thing to celebrate,

and none were driving home after dancing

in clubs, music still hot in their blood,

the night’s light aglow in their eyes.

In Derry, NH Metras was fascinated by Robert Frost’s chair and pictured in his mind what the great poet did or did not do on this piece of furniture. It is on the road of the mind that Metras traveled with Frost’s chair, a poem similar in style to the work of Billy Collins.

Robert Frost’s Chair

He would rest his elbows and the writing desk he made

on the flat maple-wood arms

of the chair a few feet

from the living room stove.

He sank into the gold and green

flowery cushion, like sitting

in a meadow in August

as goldenrod bloom.

From the impression he left

in the seat, you can tell

he chose the way less traveled and journeyed

miles and miles in that chair.

The hay unmowed,

the wall unmended,

cows to milk at midnight,

but the notebooks fat,

leaking words all over

the sun washed carpet

Finally, there is Metras’s memorial to a woman. Probably very few know who she is, yet she is immortalized in song:

Believing in Eyes

Lucy O’Donnell Vodden 1963-2009

So there’s Lucy, dying sadly in middle age.

None of her friends ever believed

there were diamonds in her eyes. But there were,

When he first saw them in the class room,

little Julian Lennon painted them as stars.

And his father wrote that song.

He believed in those eyes, those diamonds.

They were shining in my wife’s eyes

that first dance in high school.

And in my daughter’s when she first held

her daughter in the hospital.

And in my granddaughter’s eyes

that time we rolled on the floor, singing,

giggling. So let us praise all the women

who ever showed us that joy, that hope,

which men by ourselves can’t know.

There is always something enthralling about Gary Metras’s poetry. Perhaps it is the optimism within the pessimism. Perhaps vice versa. Maybe it is the accessibility to his work. Whatever it is, White Storm is readable and enjoyable, worth a place on your bookshelf.

________________

Zvi A. Sesling

Reviewer for Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

Author, The Lynching of Leo Frank and War Zones (forthcoming from Nixes Mate Books)

Editor, Muddy River Poetry Review

Editor, Bagel Bards Anthology 7,8 & 12

Spare Change News Poems: An Anthology of Homeless People and those Touched by Homelessness--Edited by Marc Goldfinger and Lee Varon

Spare Change News Poems: An Anthology of Homeless People and those Touched by Homelessness
Editors: Lee Varon and Mark Goldfinger
Ibbetson Street Press ( 2018)
http://ibbetsonpress.com

Review by Doug Holder

In the introduction to the new anthology Spare Change News Poems... editors Lee Varon and Marc Golfinger write:

" The Spare Change News newspaper was founded in 1992 by a group of homeless individuals and a housed advocate. Since its inception, Spare Change News has worked to elevate the voices of the homeless and economically disadvantaged people in the Boston Area.

In these pages you will find the poetry of many people who are who are homeless, or who have been touched by homelessness in some way. You will find the poetry of veterans, of those with mental health issues, or those struggling with substance abuse disorder. You will find poems written by incarcerated or formerly incarcerated  people."

Personally-- I have a real connection to the paper not only for its laudable mission of giving the homeless a voice (and in some cases a chance to make a living by selling the paper),  but years ago I was an arts reporter under the managing editor at the time Linda Larson--and assisted the poetry editor Don DiVecchio. I worked closely with late assistant editor Cynthia Baron, and former editor Marc Goldinger, as well. I learned a lot during my tenure with all these people.  That being said, the poetry you will find in this anthology is not New Yorker-style work. It can be raw as the streets, visceral,  heartbreaking and even heartwarming.

There are many fine poets, with fine poems in this collection like: Martin Espada, Marge Piercy,  Alexis Ivy, the late Sarah Hannah and many more. In a poem by the editor Lee Varon  titled "Colleen,"  the poet uses colors to vividly portray a young woman doomed by her torrid love affair with heroin:

Heroin is white
      but your lips are blue
and blue is seeping into the room
where you passed out last week,
the room
where your head hit the floor,
blue dust is wafting from the ceiling,
oozing froom the floorboards...


In Martin Espada's poem " How We Could Haved Lived and Died This Way," Espada quotes Whitman,

Not songs of loyalty alone are these,
but songs of insurrection also,
For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel the world
over.

Here in hardscrabble detail Espada, like Whitman, takes it all in-and sings a song for the marginal rebels who survive or don't survive the vagaries of the street:

I see the dark -skinned bodies falling in the street as their ancestors fell
before the whip and steel, the last blood pooling, the last breath spitting.
I see the immigrant street vendor flashing his wallet to the cops,
shot so many times there are bullet holes in the side of his feet....
I see the man hawking
a fistful of cigarettes, the cop's chokehold that makes his wheezing
lungs stop wheezing forever. I am in the crowd, at the window,
kneeling beside the body left on the asphalt for hours, covered in a sheet.

From reading this poetry it is evident that there is tragedy, and beauty on these mean streets  and perhaps. ..salvation.


There will be a reading at Porter Square Books in Cambridge  7PM  Aug 22

To order the book go to:  http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress

THE SCREENING: GROLIER POETRY DOCUMENTARY: REGENT THEATRE: AUG 25

PLEASE CLICK ON PICTURE TO ENLARGE

The Sunday Poet: Meg Smith

Poet Meg Smith

Meg Smith is a poet, journalist, dancer and events producer living in Lowell, Mass.

Her poems have appeared in The Cafe Review, Poetry Bay, Astropoetica, Illumen, Dreams & Nightmares, the Dwarf Stars anthology of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association and many more.

As a journalist, her coverage has been in honored by the New England Newspaper And Press Association, including first place awards for coverage of racial and ethnic issues, and coverage of religion.

She is a past board member of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! and produces the Edgar Allan Poe Show, honoring Poe's presence in Lowell, Mass. She recently published a second book of poetry, Dear Deepest Ghost, available on Amazon.

The Amulet

For keeping,

on a Cairo balcony

overlooking

gardens of satellite dishes

rooftop flowers

and rose-colored dusk

calling, chanting.

I know

every life here.

I hold this, close,

wearing, to signify,

everything copper,

everything in a diminishing sun.

The Hastings Room Reading Series Presents: Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading: August 29th 7PM Tobin, Buchinger, Vincenz

Seamus Heaney Memorial Reading

The Hastings Room Reading Series presents   August 29th  7PM

Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone.

The china cups were very white and big—

An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug…

“Clearances” from The Haw Lantern

W i t h g u e s t r e a d e r s—

Daniel Tobin is the author of eight books of poems, most recently of The Stone in the Air, his suite

of versions from the German of Paul Celan (Salmon Poetry, 2018). The translation is called “lucid and lyrical” by Stephan Schneider. Tobin’s many honors include the Julia Ward Howe Award, The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, "The Discovery/​The Nation Award,"the Robert Frost Fellowship, and creative writing fellowships in poetry from the National Endowmentfor the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Mary Buchinger is the author of three books of poetry, most recently e i n f ü h l u n g/in feeling (Main Street Rag, 2018) and Aerialist (2015, Gold Wake). Her poetry was chosen for the Raining Poetry Project on Boston sidewalks and will be permanently installed in the city of Cambridge, where she has served as a Cambridge Poetry Ambassador. She’s been a featured reader at the Library of Congress and is President of the New England Poetry Club (founded by Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Conrad Aiken).

Marc Vincenz has published twelve books of poetry, including, most recently, Becoming the Sound of Bees (Ampersand Press, 2016), Leaning into the Infinite (Dos Madres Press, 2018) and The Syndicate of Water & Light (Station Hill, 2018). He is also a prolific translator and has translated from the German, Romanian and French. His work has received fellowships and grants from the Swiss Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. 


 7pm at Christ Church ,O Garden Street--just outside of Harvard Square..

The Sunday Poet: Susan Tepper

Susan Tepper is the author of seven published books of fiction and poetry. Her most recent title “Monte Carlo Days & Nights” is a Novella set in the South of France. For more please visit her website at www.susantepper.com

Petal by Petal

The moon has settled down

to dust, and the sadness

of time overwhelms

your eyes—

Each morning

blurring

an otherwise unobstructed view

they scarcely open

Despite the beauty of

the day

beckoning

beyond window shades—

O darkness

scrape away what you can

gouge them ‘til they open wide

Letting in deliverance petal by petal.

Doug Holder Interviews Marc Goldfinger and Lee Varon editors of Spare Ch...

Jesus in the Ghost Room by Rusty Barnes

 

Jesus in the Ghost Room

by Rusty Barnes

Copyright © 2017 Rusty Barnes

Nixes Mate Books

Allston, MA

ISBN 978-0-9991882-7-9

Softbound, 63 pages, $9.95

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Rusty Barnes’ poetry is cold, hard, raw. That is exactly what makes it an engaging read. It is about Rusty Barnes … at times Rusty and his late father. Barnes is also warm, soft and polished. His poems are down-to-earth, easily accessible.

In “Arrow-Fishing” he recounts his days fishing in what was once fairly deep water and how animals get the best of the quarry he was after.

Arrow-Fishing

The pond has become marsh now

but when it was waist deep I would

go to the middle in the depths

of much to arrow-fish for the huge gold-

fish my landlord had stocked years

before. I remember brining the bow

to my eye and sighting like a gun7

along the top of my thumb the string

tense in my fingers and the feeling

as I Barnes f I were going under. I remember

overshooting as I adjusted my shot

for refraction. I didn’t make that one

but eventually the heard heart of the world

won out and the goldfish became bones

on the bank killed by coon or mink.

But I love the tense thrill of the shot still

I have only to close my eyes to recall.

As in his other poems, Barnes reflects on his past and in this poem, “Circus,” he recalls

some aspects of those days.

Circus

If the Ringling Brothers were alive today

they wouldn’t know how to begin.

Freak shows today are everywhere

if you know where to look,

there on the common field of life

with the tattooed and the pierced,

the extraordinarily hairy together

with the unfunny and the trolls

who try to ruin it for everyone who

is not so jaded. I can see the tents in

my mind, the huge spikes that serve

as pegs and the groups of rope fest=

ooned with elephant shit and stale popcorn.

It is pur magic and we only have so much.

What makes Rusty Barnes interesting is that many of us have, “been there, done that,” but have not seen it in the way Barnes portrays it in this book.

In “My Father’s Hip: 1972 Flood” Barnes provides insight into not only his childhood and tenderness toward his father, but his daughter as well. He recalls an important moment in his life despite the dangers he encountered.

One day the crick rose a couple feet

after three days steady rain that brought

logs ramming into rocks and a couple

dead dogs floating in the brown spume.

My dad lifted me up and brought me

to the very edge of the eroded banks

that with every rainstorm came just

a little closer to our house. I don’t recall

what he said to me but I felt safe next

to his gritty cheek and the typical cigarette.

Beside me my brother Joes jumped from foot

to foot excited as all hell to be a branch

in that raging water. He slipped down

the bank screaming but dad never lost

a beat still holding me he whipped around

and caught my brother by the back

out pretty heavily once he was safe

but sitting on his hip in the driving rain

I felt overcome by my smallness.

Like all kids I returned to the site

of the scene 30 years later, dipping my

young daughter’s feet in that same water.

These are examples of Barnes’s recollections of life. In particular his poetry recollects memories of his father, the death of his uncle and his leaning on his loving wife for support.

Barnes grew up in rural Appalachia. He weaves those years with his life in the Boston, MA area into a book of poetry that moves along at a rapid, always interesting pace,

with many poetic stories not soon forgotten.

_______________________________________________

Zvi A. Sesling, author of The Lynching of Leo Frank

and the forthcoming War Zones (Nixes Mate Books)

Publisher & Editor of Muddy River Poetry Review

and Editor of Bagel Bard Anthologies 7,8 & 12

Poet Laureate, Brookline, MA