Field of Wanting – Poems of Desire by Wanda Phipps

Field of Wanting – Poems of Desire
by Wanda Phipps
Blaze VOX {books}
Buffalo, NY
Copyright 2008
139 pages

Review by Lo Galluccio

A long-time admirer of Wanda Phipps’ poetry and voice, since first catching her at the Marathon Day Reading at St. Mark’s Church, I eagerly devoured her latest tour de Force, “Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire” released this year on Blaze VOX {books}. She is gifted with a powerful writer’s imagination and a lovely voice which articulates such pieces as “Heaven and Earth” and “Desire,” interwoven with doubled voicings, rhythmic breathing and spare instrumentation. As an example of her capacity to enchant with concrete ephemera, you can check out the first track on her Myspace page (www.myspace.com/wandaphhippsband) and hear a lush reverberating guitar under her softly declared words:

“I’m heaven over fire, fire under heaven. I’m heaven into eleven:
two plus eleven seconds of heaven.”

The pink and the shimmering white in “Desire” seem like floating pieces of divine candy you can almost taste but would rather spare.

Wanda and I share a similar background that spans the theatre arts world and writing (both prose and poetry) – Wanda having studied at Naropa, after theater school, and incorporating a kind of free-associative, open and broken phrasing style which sculpts thoughts that scan her monitor second by second.

Her poetry has been published over 100 times in a variety of publications, including several anthologies. A denizen of New York City – the City which marks much of her verse like a maze-like tattoo – she’s also curated several readings and performance series at the renowned Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, as well as other New York venues.

In 2004, Soft Skull Press released her full-length poetry book, “Wake up Calls: 66 Morning Poems” which rivaled, from a contemporary and female angle, Frank O’Hara’s famous “Lunch Poems.” The author successfully undertook to capture her own state of mind upon waking, on 66 successive mornings. The results are poems that refresh in their hybrid revelations, daily task-lists and sensory detail. This book put Wanda on the poetry map as a serious literary voice, one with both a learned and maverick’s approach to verse; one who’d been around and mentored; one who was still experimenting with how she wanted to paint.

Her latest collection is part anthology and part new works, some written under the influence of the break up of a long-term relationship with a live-in soul-mate and collaborator. Anyone who’s loved, labored and lost knows the agony of wanting to somehow pay tribute, kick the despoiler in the teeth, and run like hell, all in the same fell swoop. Phipps’ language wand casts such a powerfully luminous spectrum of colors that nothing feels bitter-black, rotten or remorseful in this collection. Nothing seems concocted in a frenzied rush to win, either. All seem like newly bred creatures; part of a poet’s evolutionary schema.

“Field of Wanting” contains nine sections – each honing to the mode and mood and particular style of its poetry zone: sonnets, prose-poetry paragraphs, numbered blues, and short-haiku like slivers, along with more traditional free-verse. In the opening poem, from “Your Last Illusion,” she writes a kind of prelude:

I am pure madness
If I yell and scream and bleed
Is that pure enough? is that raw enough?
If I wear my sensitivity like a crown
Is it a tool?
can I touch you with my frailty?
touch you with my vulnerability?
Is my weakness
my strength?

p. 13
“A Purist at Heart”

She continues with a series of 19 modern sonnets (inspired by Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets)—also called “Your Last Illusion” or “Break Up Sonnets” – each 14 lines, not rhyming.


12
.
So you left, you bastard, so what?
I’m ready to include the world
through with internal wars
weather’s clear
and lies are angels in the snow
best be off and running babe
one messy satellite still hovers
you are the one and only blinking muscle
God’s a shining fuck
step on your own toes to keep someone
else from beating you to it
the bathtub isn’t long enough for four
don’t dream now float
it’s best with Sunday morning peaches.

p. 21


In “Suddenly Everything” Phipps in her poem “Galloping Personas” touches on a villanelle-like repetition scheme (without writing a proper villanelle) using the noun phrase “golden blouse” alternately as distraction and conceptual device. :

She begins:

“So the mask remains baffling
say hello to the mask
a new way of being a “Person”
or a hurricaine Cordelia in Biloxi beauty
there’s a mountain out my window.”
and you must wear a golden blouse.”

And ends:

“songs of a baffling mask
experiencing persons of great beauty
by love’s window in a golden blouse”

p. 34-35

In “Hours” she creates 12 pieces that combine hallucinatory pop culture visions with an almost home-spun delivery of the world around her:

Fourth Hour

“she was late
for a meeting
with her therapist
found Linda Evans
in her bathroom
ripping her shower curtain
and she kept trying
to piece it back together
but Linda kept ripping it
into neat little squares.”

p. 48

Fifth Hour

“it’s raining today
they say snow soon
I need boots
I love those black barked trees
bare and soaking wet
branches like lace
against Chelsea lofts
my hour’s over”

p 49

What leaves me grounded and breathless within Wanda’s wondrous matrix of poems is her equally balanced formal intelligence and wild-child juxtapositions of disparities.

In the Section “Womb Dreams” a poem called, “Talks with a Stranger” (including a few words by Jorge Luis Borges) entices with:

“I’m in the voice before zero
I’m in the macaroni
I’m in the calculator
I’m in the refrigerator.”


“Velocity = Delta D
Change in Distance
Over
Change in Time
Delta T
p. 112


In a deliciously erotic riff in her final section, “Gray Fox Woman” Wanda slips into an ode to a double who is also herself:

“kiss my shaved cunt
and bow to its beauty
introduce me to Dangerous
the woman in the spiderwebbed dress
the wild child filling her mouth
by the newspaper stand

let me watch you
unroll my fishnet stockings slowly
let me wait until you scream
because men do make noise when they fuck
but only as a form of worship.”

p. 124


Wanda will be appearing at The Living Theatre in NYC on July 28th. For more information check out her website: www.mindhoney.com and www.blazevox.org.

An investment in buying this book on Amazon.com or from the publisher is well worth your ducats. As Grace Slick once wailed: “Feed your head!”


Lo Galluccio is a vocal artist and poet whose prose-poem/memoir, “Sarasota VII” will be out on Cervana Barva Press in fall of 2008. www.myspace.com/lolagalluccio

Strange News (poems) by Lawrence Kessenich

Strange News (poems)

by Lawrence Kessenich

Pudding House Chapbook Series

ISBN 1-58998-6690-5

www.puddinghouse.com

© 2008 $10.00




“Strange News” by Lawrence Kessenich takes news factoids to a place of

metaphor that borderlines on urban legend while elaborating on

poetic editorialization. The language is familiar, the images well crafted.

Kessenich places his personal stamp on current and obscure stories such as

Japanese children born in Myanmar, David Belasco’s infamous theater-apartment,

and an Oregon woman arrested for dialing 911 and asking for the cutest cop.

These snippets supply the nub which delivers the poem, often presented

in dramatic monologue.




In Slow Burn, epigram: “Cook pleads guilty in Bed and Breakfast killing spree” -

the water boils for a love-struck B&B cook/owner who is seduced by a girl

named Lila, “ . . . the coquette of my graduate/ writing class, . . .

head full of impossible dreams . . .”

And after Lila lounging around in the garden sipping iced coffee and swimming

naked in the quarry, periodically “screwing” the male guests, the speaker,

(who, is being very much victimized) realizes that she knows she has him,

“ . . . wrapped around her/ little finger”.

Sticking to the title, the speaker finds a revolver and concludes:

“I liked / the way it made me feel/ as if I were a man again.”




Aside from the humorous, Kessenich maneuvers into darker thought-streams.

His Poem “Death Wish” is a flat-out, telling-it-like-it-is catalog of world images,

“twisted streets of Baghdad” and suicide bombers blooming “Bloody roses . . .”.

Images of a world, Kessenich says, we “pretend does not exist . . .”

The final lines portray in words a gesture of hands being thrown up in the air:

“Perhaps it’s time

to sweep the shards of broken

test tubes from the laboratory

table, watch them glitter through

the air like falling stars

as we take our dying breaths.”






















The sparseness of language in “Strange News” might appear basic or half-trying,

even exhibiting the occasional cliche “Took the wind out of her sails”, for example,

but what’s being presented in this work is an opulence of voice, culled from

news stories that, at times, are not-so-poetic, then reinvented into gems.

“The Need to Believe” uncovers a verity never found on the front page, but always

stirring in the heart:




“We’d love to believe we’re special

that out tiny lives impress the earth.

But it has seen trees that live

for centuries, hidden places

we will never see, forgets us

as quickly as raindrops

evaporating on hot stone.”




(Take that, Paris Hilton, Bill Gates, Steve DeOssie Etc. . . .)







Finally, the ending poem entitled “Play On” offers a testament to persistence.

Each stanza begins with the refrain “After it’s all over”, suggesting any

catastrophic event of the reader’s choosing.




“After it’s all over

the Indian will dig up

a beaded leather bag

buried in a mountain

pull out a smooth wooden

flute his grandfather carved

and wail his people’s

pain into the sky.”













Mike Amado is a reviewer for Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

and is an Associate News Staff & Roadpoet eMagazine book and music reviewer.

Two books are slated for release in 2008, “Stunted Inner Child Shot the T.V.”

(Cervena Barva Press), and “Rebuilding the Pyramids” (Ibbetson Street Press

River Tracks by Holly Guran

River Tracks
by Holly Guran
Poets Corner Press
ISBN 978-0-9798594-1-0 $12.00
poetscornerpress.com

review by Steve Glines

Each of us is a collection of stories, poems and portraits. Our lives alternate between being utterly dull and being the source of the most profound inspiration. It’s the use of language that makes the ordinary, extraordinary and the mundane, profound.

The rapper Eminem drew thoughtful inspiration from a less than ordinary industrial slum south of a road called eight mile in Detroit Michigan. He wrote and sang about it in the movie by that name. The movie made eight mile road intriguing and when I was in Detroit I carefully drove down this great divide drawing my own inspiration. To the north are the tony sanitized suburbs of middle class utopia where life mimics the art of Barbie and Ken. No bugs here. To the south are the leftovers. To Eminem, life began at eight mile road and progressed south. I understand. There passion where the Great Depression never left. There are rows upon rows of abandoned factories, abandoned houses, abandoned cars, abandoned lives. It is the detritus sloughed off the Great American Dream. It is inspiration by contrast and I don’t want to go there but I am compelled to look. I drive down dead end streets in my new shiny rental car, make mental notes and back out quickly.

River Tracks draws its inspiration from the mundane as well. Buttercups, wind, a rumbling train carrying commuters home, everyday life in a city, the suburbs and on the farm serve as a backdrop on which to tell a story:

Break-in

They took jewelery, small things
you care about, never
touched the typewriter,
but touched the clothes
inside the drawers,
inside the closets.

The police, too busy to come,
took your report over the phone.

The landlord nailed a board over the hollow
where they knocked the window out. You spoke
of new locks. He fell silent like your apartment.

After you folded the scattered cloths
and laid them in the drawers,
after you put your son to bed,
you opened the typewriter,
stared at the gleaming keys
and wed your fingers to their light.

The world does not always loom large. Life is not always as big as eight mile street.

Sometimes we need to look at the little things and draw small joys from whatever we find. River Tracks tells of the small stories that brighten and sadden a life. The largest among us sometimes need to be reminded that in the larger universe our lives are indeed very small. It’s a quick and pleasant read.

Black Mountain Whispers – A tribute to Raymond Carver ($15.00 U.S.D.) (Cave Moon Press, 2008) by Douglas P. Johnson

Black Mountain Whispers – A tribute to Raymond Carver ($15.00 U.S.D.) (Cave Moon Press, 2008) by Douglas P. Johnson




Review by Pam Rosenblatt



In 2008, Douglas P. Johnson’s Black Mountain Whispers – A tribute to Raymond Carver was published by Cave Moon Press. The one hundred and five page paperback is filled with short stories and poetry, entertaining with surprising (sometimes terrifying, and sometimes humorous) twists and turns, especially towards the end of the pieces.

Johnson wrote Black Mountain Whispers with the renowned short story writer and poet Raymond Carver in mind. Carver graduated from Davis High School, the Yakima, Washington high school where Johnson is currently an English teacher. Carver passed away in 1988. Black Mountain Whispers is a tribute to Raymond Carver’s short stories and poetry or, more specifically, minimalism.1

What is minimalism? Minimalism began in the mid-1960 and its style was developed in music, art, and literature, remaining strong through the 1980’s. The definition of minimalism, according to Raymond Carver, is “ordinary language [is used] to expose the inability of communicating the reality of experience through purely referential language.”2

Some minimalism musicians include Terry Jennings, Dennis Johnson, Richard Maxfield, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Barbara Benary, Julis Eastman,

Jon Gibson, La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, Harold Budd, and Phill Niblock.3

Such American artists as Barnett Newman, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd and Sol Levitt created in the minimalism style.4

Major literary minimalists are Raymond Carver, John Barth, Richard Ford, Fredrick Barthelme, Mary Robison, Peter Cameron, Judy Troy, and Alice Mattison.5

According to Hiromi Hishimoto in “Trying to Understand Raymond Carver’s Revision’s” published in Tokai English Review, No. 5, (December 1995), pp. 113-147, minimalism in literature is about “economy of word”, “very short, abrupt but impressive sentences”, “lack of psychological impact”, characters that are “completely stripped down”, “sensibility by outer and inner description as well as lacks empathy and lack of interest”. Usually something vital is not mentioned in the story or poem which generates confusion, uncertainty, and inarticulateness.6

In the literature of minimalism, there’s “no verbal communication, no depiction of informing another character about a matter of grave concern.” It’s impersonal and without unity. If there’s any empathy, it’s dramatic, or it doesn’t exist at all, showing up at the end of the writing. The minimalist writer leaves out “communal grief” and no character description is given. Repetition doesn’t happen, and lengthy sentences are replaced by phrases. Traditionally, a piece of literary minimalism is “short words with short sentences and paragraphs, super-short stories”.7

Often people either like minimalism or they don’t. It’s a style that is often found to be “different”. In “Bowing to the Great God Usage”, writer Kyle Gann writes about minimalism in music:




For me, minimalism, for me, was always a different kind

of music, requiring (to misquote John Rockwell) a different

kind of listening. It wasn’t for everybody. It acquired a cult

following of unusually patient listeners. It was, and is, a different

type of listening experience than the attention-holding narrative of conventional classical music.8




Johnson’s Black Mountain Whispers is a “different kind of [book]”. He takes minimalism to an extreme with both his short stories and his poetry. In this review, we’ll analyze the clever, humorous short story, “Color of Milk” and the poem, “Sitcom Sabbath”, to better our understanding of minimalism in literature.

Johnson begins Black Mountain Whispers with “Color of Milk”, a short four and one-quarter page short story about two women enjoying each other’s company while one woman, a portrait painter, is putting the finishing touches on a painting that she made of the other woman, who is handicapped and sits in a wheelchair. The opening of the story consists of short phrases, short sentences, and short questions. This economical use of words makes the first fourteen lines of “Color of Milk” read very quickly, though true to literary minimalism, the reader doesn’t understand what he is reading right away. The beginning of this piece is confusing.




“Burnt Sienna”

“Doesn’t smell burnt. Next?”

“Cadmium Yellow.”

“What’s cadmium?”

“A chemical.”

“Next? Easy. Cadmium Black.”

“Close.”

“It is to[o] Cadmium Black. I’ve been practicing.”

“Just black. Not Cadmium Black.”

“No, you tell it. I need to keep working.”

“You, you tell it better.”

“Deep breath. Better than glue. What is this?”9


The different metaphors for different colors like “Burnt Sienna”, “Cadmium Yellow” and “Cadmium Black” suggest that something colorful is going on. There’s confusion as to whether one of the speakers is smelling or looking at the different colors in order to identify them.

The story begin to unfold when the second speaker identifies a smell

as “Turpentine.”:




“Turpentine. That one’s easy. He didn’t smell like turpentine.

Gasoline. He smelled like gasoline. Remember? He was working on a

lawn mower, so his fingers had old grease under the nails.

I could tell when he picked me up out of the gravel and put me back in

my chair. You didn’t mean to dump me. The wheel got caught in a soft

spot. Wait! Give me a chance before you wave it under my nose. What’s

the color?”

“Raw Umber”

“Like raw meat?”

“What do you think?”10




The relationship between these two women no longer seems blissful, as indicated by

the use of “Raw Umber”. The woman who’s the artist seems upset over something yet to be discovered by reading further.

As “Color of Milk” progresses, an interesting story unravels, one that includes

jealousy, love, and revenge. Johnson uses several minimalism techniques in the story to get his ideas across, or not across. He never identifies the women or man by proper name.

The only character he capitalizes besides the pronouns “I” and “You” is the name “Mom”.11 He never lets the female speakers show empathy, except when the woman

apologizes for falling dramatically out of her wheelchair.12 He stereotypes13 the man as a sex symbol type of handyman who flirts with the women, both of whom become jealous of one another. There is a danger lurking in this short story. Menaces are typically found in literary minimalism.14 In “Color of Milk”, it’s a complex danger. It’s the power of the paintbrush, as the artist keeps painting mustaches under the other woman’s nose either on her face or on a canvas, as it’s not clear, and the woman with the painted mustache has no idea what it looks like:




“What’s color is this?”

“It’s new. Don’t know. Paint a mustache under my nose, so I

can try and memorize it for later.”

“You look like Hitler.”

“Who is that?”

“Or Aunt Hilda.”

“Is it orange?”

“No.”15




Through economy of word, abstract thought, humor, and inarticulateness, Johnson has

written a fine minimalistic lead short story, one that motivates the reader to continue onto the following short stories, many of which aren’t as easy reads and contain threatening, violent, and scary situations which may cause the ordinary reader to put down the book and read the comic section of his Sunday newspaper. But, if you’re the type of reader who enjoys surprises, twists and turns of fate, then you probably will like the rest of the short stories in Black Mountain Whispers.

Black Mountain Whispers’s poetry is complex, abstract, innovative, and often confusing, the latter typical of literary minimalism, then again the writing is sometimes very economical and clear. “Sitcom Sabbath” is a fun yet serious poem found on page 90.

The poem’s speaker has prepared for the Sabbath by cooking


Tarragon Chicken




Fresh tarragon

Fresh garlic cloves

Six chicken breasts

Half cup of white wine

One cup of vegetable broth

Tablespoon olive oil

Teaspoon black pepper




Heat oven to 350º. Rub chicken with olive oil. Halve garlic

Cloves. Slit chicken breasts. Place garlic halves into slits. Place seven to

Eight sprigs of tarragon over and around breasts. Mix white wine with

Vegetable broth and pour over chicken. Cover with aluminum foil. Bake

For 30 minutes. Check chicken. Uncover and bake 10 more minutes.




Serve with brown rice or green salad.

Serve with pumpernickel.

Serve family on T.V. trays.16




Here the speaker has made a special Friday night dinner just to have this weekly holiday

event’s relaxing time thwarted by fate. Death acts as the menace here. The speaker’s grandmother dies.







Answer phone.

Listen to Mom’s hoarse, snorting sobs.




Grandma just died.

I talked to her an hour and a half ago and said I love you. I could tell

she was trying to say something, but it didn’t come out.17




The whole poem lacks empathy, until the speaker’s mother says to the grandmother, “I love you”. When the speaker’s mother says, “I could tell she was trying to say something, but it didn’t come out”18, the reader feels a sense of confusion and inarticulateness of verbal communication.

The speaker doesn’t commiserate with his, or is it her, mother after learning of

the grandmother’s passing. What she does is rote. The short, economical sentences lack emotion. Some repetitive phrases would probably be normal to hear, but Johnson doesn’t

write that way. In his minimalistic style, he uses sentences without a subject noun or pronoun to convey the emptiness of a holiday evening gone awry.


Check calendar. Confirm today is a full moon.

Listen to laugh track in the back ground.

Wonder how to say goodbye to Grandma.19




The last line of “Sitcom Sabbath” is beautiful in its simplicity. The speaker just says,

“Goodbye, Grandma.”20 Johnson has captured a distinctive moment and conveyed powerful feelings without emotion, without tears, without personal feelings exhibited.

“Color of Milk” and “Sitcom Sabbath” are two separate genres and reflect the development of minimalism in literature from the 1960’s through the new millennium. Johnson has written a book that capitalizes on the minimalism style, a style that not everyone accepts, but it has definite qualities and can be identified as such. Black Mountain Whispers is a good read to understand minimalism techniques in literature.

###

Bibliography


ArtLex, “Minimalism”, ArtLex on Minimalism.

http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/m/minimalism.html

Carver, Raymond and Gallagher, Tess, editor. All of Us: The Collected Poems. (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1996).

Carver, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1989).

Gann, Kyle “Bowing to the Great God Usage”, PostClassic.

http://www.artsjournal.cpm/postclassic/2007/08/bowing_to_the_great_god_usage.html

HighBeam Encyclopedia, “The narrowed voice: minimalism and Raymond Carver”.

http://www.encyclopedia.com/printable.aspx?id=1G1:15356194

Hasimoto, Hiromi “Trying to Understand Raymond Carver’s Revisions”, Raymond Carver: Precisionist, 6/5/2008. http://www.whitman.edu/english/carver/precision.html

Johnson, Douglas P. Black Mountain Whispers, (Yakima, Washington: Cave Moon Press, 2008).

“1970s AD – Decade | Studies in Short Fiction | Find Articles at BNET.com”.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2455/is_n4_v33/ai_20906637/pg_3













1 Douglas P. Johnson, Black Mountain Whispers, Yakima, Washington: Cave Moon Press, 2008, p, 107.

2 HighBeam Encyclopedia, “The narrowed voice: minimalism and Raymond Carver”, p. 1

http://www.encyclopedia.com/printable.aspx?id=1G1:15356194

3 Kyle Gann, "Bowing to the Great God Usage”, PostClassic, p. 1.

http://www.artsjournal.cpm/postclassic/2007/08/bowing_to_the_great_god_usage.html

4 ArtLex, “Minimalism”, ArtLex on Minimalism, pp. 1-3.

http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/m/minimalism.html

5 “1970s AD – Decade | Studies in Short Fiction | Find Articles at BNET.com”, p. 3.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2455/is_n4_v33/ai_20906637/pg_3

6 Hiromi Hasimoto, “Trying to Understand Raymond Carver’s Revisions”, Raymond Carver: Precisionist,

6/5/2008, p. 4.

http://www.whitman.edu/english/carver/precision.html

7 Ibid, p. 7.


8 Kyle Gann, “Bowing to the Great God Usage”, PostClassic, p. 1.

http://www.artsjournal.cpm/postclassic/2007/08/bowing_to_the_great_god_usage.html




9 Douglas P. Johnson, Black Mountain Whispers, p. 15.

10 Ibid, p.15.

11 Hiromi Hashimoto, “Trying to Understand Raymond Carver’s Revisions”, p. 3.

12 Ibid, p. 7.

13 Ibid, p. 4.

14 Ibid, p. 13, 15.

15 Ibid, p. 17.

16 Ibid, p.90.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

A TRIBUTE TO GRACE PALEY: A WRITER WHO FOUND BEAUTY IN THE EVERYDAY.

A TRIBUTE TO GRACE PALEY: A WRITER WHO FOUND BEAUTY IN THE EVERYDAY.

By Doug Holder

On a warm and humid morning in late June I jumped on the Red Line to go to UMass Boston, to attend the William Joiner Writers Workshop’s tribute to writer Grace Paley.

The Workshop is directed by poet Kevin Bowen, and is held every summer at the Boston campus. The late Grace Paley is a renowned fiction writer and poet who passed away in 2007. Paley was an enthusiastic, and much admired and loved teacher at the William Joiner. She was born in 1922 in the Bronx to Russian-Jewish immigrants. She published three collections of short stories “The Little Disturbances of Man,” (1959), “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), and “ Later the Same Day” (1985),and her “Collected Stories”(1994) was a finalist for a Pulitzer and a National Book Award. She published several volumes of poetry, was elected the first New York State Writer, and the Vermont Poet Laureate in (2003). Paley was also a political activist involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, as well as the Women’s Movement. In 1969 she accompanied the peace mission to Hanoi to negotiate the release of prisoners of war. In 1978 she was arrested as one of the “White House Eleven” for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner on the White House lawn.

Paley’s writing focuses on the lives of women, examining their gritty everyday world. Her characters ranged from left wing women, their kids, their husbands, their lovers, their aging parents, and their aging selves. She was a master of dialogue, and a champion of everyday life in contemporary literature.

At the tribute were a number of Somerville poets including: Pushcart Prize winner Afaa Michael Weaver, Off the Grid Press publishers Bert Stern and Tam Lin Neville, Somerville poet, writer and activist Alex Kern, and Ibbetson Street Press author Elizabeth Quinlan (“ Promise Supermarket”). Paley’s husband Bob Nichols was present, as well as her daughter Nora.

Sitting next to me in the audience was Henry Braun, one of the founders of Somerville’s Off the Grid Press, and a friend of Nichols and Paley. Braun, who was once an editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal said of Paley: “She was the voice of my people. People who came from New York, the Lower East Side, political activists from the Vietnam era.” Afaa Michael Weaver, who was teaching at the Joiner this summer said later that he had met Paley two years before at the Joiner Center and was impressed by her graciousness and her “commitment to society.”

Julie Thacker, a creative writing instructor at Lesley University in Cambridge, lead the discussion of Paley and her work. She told me that Paley had a “Singular and human voice, married poetry and prose together beautifully, and found beauty in ordinary life. She also exhibited a striking compassion.”

The audience often commented on passages from Paley’s work and peppered their commentary with memories of Paley’s teaching at the Joiner Center. Most were in agreement with the fact that Paley, along with Tillie Olsen, were the first writers to open up the idea of ordinary woman as being good fodder for stories. Poet Elizabeth Quinlan told me: “ For the first time I realized that you could write about being a struggling young mother, your babies, even, well, your period.” Martha Collins, the founder of the undergraduate Creative Writing program at UMass Boston said she was amazed how Paley could combine the “political” with the fabric of life, and do it with such great humor. Paley, according to the anecdotes of the many folks who knew her was a master of dialogue, organically bringing the conversational into her work. She was a big believer in revision. Her husband Bob Nichols pointed out to the audience that they should respond to her work not only on an intellectual level but also on an emotional level . He reminded the audience that her work was all about emotional content. He also noted that Paley when she was giving a reading was always looking down at the text, rather than the audience. Poet Fred Marchant, the director of the Poetry Center at Suffolk University
said this was testimony to her singular focus on her work.

Paley, to her credit, was able to marry the profound and the ordinary, without sounding stilted. And in all of her work there was endless conversation, rather than a strong sense plot. Like in her fiction, the tribute was an ongoing conversation punctuated by memories, and always-generous doses of laughter. One student remembered Paley asking her to her home to discuss her work. She said: “ Let me make you a cheese sandwich. You’ll love it.” And I guess Paley would like it that way, to be remembered by her work, and, yes, even her cheese sandwiches.


Here

Here I am in the garden laughing
an old woman with heavy breasts
and a nicely mapped face

how did this happen
well that's who I wanted to be

at last a woman
in the old style sitting
stout thighs apart under
a big skirt grandchild sliding
on off my lap a pleasant
summer perspiration

that's my old man across the yard
he's talking to the meter reader
he's telling him the world's sad story
how electricity is oil or uranium
and so forth I tell my grandson
run over to your grandpa ask him
to sit beside me for a minute I
am suddenly exhausted by my desire
to kiss his sweet explaining lips.

--Grace Paley


Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ June 2008

Steve Glines Photo Study of the Dedication of Louisa Solano Square

Steve Glines, founder of the Wilderness House Literary Review, and Book Designer of the Ibbetson Street Press, took a number of photos of the June 21 dedication of Louisa Solano Square in Harvard Square Cambridge. Louisa Solano was the former owner of the famed Grolier Poetry Book Shop.













Louisa Solano ( Left) Ifeanyi Menkiti ( Right)





John Hodgen (Left) John Hildebidle





" The Group" ( Elsa Dorfman--center)






Sam Cornish (Right)




Louisa Solano




Doug Holder






Harris Gardner ( Background) Louisa Solano Sam Cornish ( Left)





Martha Collins (Right) Louisa Solano ( Left)

Third Wednesday: Review by Zvi Sesling

Third Wednesday
Spring 2008
Volume 1, Issu 3
A publication of Gravity Presses
Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Third Wednesday is a magazine out of Ypsilanti, Michigan. To date they have published three issues (and I have been fortunate to be in two, including the latest). Within its 58 pages and inside back cover you will find some familiar names such as Simon Perchik and Wanda Coleman, maybe some other names you recognize or don’t. In addition to poetry there is art work, photographs, short stories.

The magazine is named for a group of poets who meet each Third Wednesday in Ann Arbor, Michigan (reminds you of the Bagel Bards who meet each week in Somerville and Cambridge). Some of the writers are undoubtedly from this group. However, regardless of where they are from, the material contained in this issue can be interesting and fun to read.

One poem, What Dad Got in the Divorce is a reminder of any separation of two people:
"He turns up the radio/mouths Madonna/and pushes the gas-/a lull of slick tires and fresh rain./Mom’s Chanel lingers in the upholstery-/a ghost that envelops/nauseates, gags me quietly..."

There is also Jan Worth-Nelson’s story, Clover Island, 1984, about looking back on life, sadly. It’s more about what a woman thinks and wants, not about love and tenderness. But then it takes place in Michigan and it gets quite cold up there.
"Half drunk, he follow her whim, stumbles abreast her confident stride through the noisy Pacific beach-side carnival crowd. Air electrified with the squeals and screams of joy riders is likewise peppered by her syrupy notions....." So begins Wanda Coleman’s The Wild Mouse which like Jan Worth-Nelson’s story, is about a woman who doesn’t get what she wants or needs. With a kicker on men.

And there’s Perchik’s untitled poem which begins "These leaves getting fat/the way a child born ravenous/almost devours its mother...

There are intriguing ideas throughout the magazine and Third Wednesday is worth reading and submitting to. You can check them out at thirdwednesday.org and submit to them at submissions@thirdwednesday.org. However, I suggest a read first.

*Zvi Sesling is the winner of the International Reuben Rose Award (2007) and the founder of the "Muddy River Review"

In the summer shade of the Quercus Review (number eight)—Review by Michael Todd Steffen

In the summer shade of the Quercus Review (number eight)—featuring Ed Galing,
an oak of the small press and friend of Boston area poetry.

by Michael Todd Steffen



The summer edition of Quercus Review (number eight), across the country from Modesta, California, will be of interest to Boston area readers and poets and writers. Its featured poet, Ed Galing, at 90 years young, stands as a great oak of the small press, with a publishing career that spans sixty-some years. Ed is known widely to the local eyes of the nation, not least to friend and editor of the Ibbetson Street Press Doug Holder from Somerville.
I became aware of Galing’s work first through the Ibbetson Street web site and in the pages of Holder’s Off the Shelf run weekly in the Somerville News.
The featured section in Quercus gives 42 pages to Galing’s work, the first four consisting of an informal essay by Doug Holder who characterizes Galing’s experience as a “hardscrabble life,” the poet’s compositional effect a “no-bullshit, call a spade a spade style” and his poetry’s turn of wit a “calculated ironic distance.” It is an apt description of a craftsman’s unseeming wisdom and acquired skill with words and sense and how to place them, ever so nonchalantly, as in ONE DAY IN A NURSIN HOME, in which Galing, pushing his wife in a wheelchair to the cafeteria for lunch, is asked where his is taking her, and—

i reply with a smile
i thought today we would go
into the forest, and see the
lake, and the trees, and maybe
stop in the pizza parlor…


Galing’s answer here is as wry as the names of those with whom he plays cards in SENIOR CENTER—

during
lunch.
every day,
there is moe epstein,
abie weisberg, and sam
adelman, and me.

Galing’s poetry bears on you to the extent that you are immersed in language. People of some age and wisdom are keenly attuned to language in a way others are not. Some of us must especially focus in order to perceive the music in what is being said. A dip of the hand
does not find the resistance of wading up to your breastbone in a pool or shoreline. Galing’s wit and expression are so at one with the fluency of his spirit, after these some years, the demarcations in the language, the poetry, simply breathes from him. Ed sums up the almost transparent union in his composition process:

I sit at the electric typewriter and bang them out… It is as if the poem has come to mind long before it develops on paper.

Quercus is a reputable biannual literary journal of poetry, fiction and b & w art, which has featured such names as X.J. Kennedy, Naomi Shihab Nye and Charles Harper.
Their number eight, along with this generous feature of Galing’s work, includes poets and writers from every direction in the United States, from Ashland, Oregon to Bristol, Rhode Island, from Houma, Louisiana to Broomfield, Colorado, not to forget poet Mary P. Chatfield from Cambridge, Massachusetts whose quiet description of waterfowl and winter ice melting on the river in “Waking” reads itself as carefully as the observation “the wing display the splashing the feathering/the reeds.”
The fiction section highlights Frank Arroyo’s “Acceptance,” written with an exquisite patience for detail and palpable ambience. Reserving the story’s plot for your curiosity, I can’t leave this article without quoting from Arroyo’s deft descriptive style, the narrator’s perceptions as a child lying in bed at night toward the end of the story:

The silence of the house turned the air around me electric. I could hear the steady hum of the refrigerator; a car slowly turning some corner, and then speeding up; the wind seemed to rise with some great force, as if the ocean had come with it, leaves crackling against the bottom of the house, the wind caught in the swaying trees, a branch tapping the roof in a steady rhythm. Outside my bedroom window, through the twisting and blurring black branches, I focused on the thick blue air of the back field, how deep and tangible it seemed because for a moment it became a dark ocean of waves rolling with the rhythm of the tapping branch, the bright windows of the distant tenement building bobbing in the waves…

For a peak at this issue of Quercus Review and ordering information go to www.quercusreview.com.

Ibbetson Update/Michael Todd Steffen/June 2008

*Michael Todd Steffen is the winner of the 2007 Ibbetson Poetry Award.

DALE PATTERSON: A Somerville Poet with many hats.

DALE PATTERSON: A Somerville, Mass. Poet with many hats.

Doug Holder

Long-term Somerville resident Dale Patterson is a soft- spoken and modest man, but don’t be fooled by that. He is a well-respected grant writer, a Manager of Development Communications for the Boston Public Library Foundation, a former president of the board of Somerville Community Access TV, a lecturer at Simmons College in Boston, and a runner-up for the 2007 Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award. I interviewed Patterson on my Somerville Community Access TV Show: “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: You are the Manager of Development Communications for the Boston Library Foundation. Describe the function of the board and your position?

Dale Patterson: The foundation was formed in 1992 to do one thing: to raise money for the Boston Public Library for special projects that are insufficiently supported by taxes through the city of Boston, or the people of Massachusetts. It was originally formed to restore the McKim Building; the old wing. Since then it has been polished and spruced up, and that was basically by a public/private partnership. We are still working on the renovations of the third floor. The third floor houses the Fine Art Dept., the Print Dept, etc…. On this floor you will find the Sargent Gallery and John Singer Sargent’s famous work: “The Triumph of Religion.” (1919)

DH: There was a lot of controversy around that work

DP: What got people really angry was the mural that portrayed the Virgin Mary above that collapsed figure that represented Judaism. Not very subtle. Sargent argued that this was very European, and traditional, and that he didn’t mean anything by it at all. There was a national debate that surprised Sargent.

DH: Tell us a bit about the rare book collection?

DP: We have a first folio of Shakespeare out on display, as well as Whitman’s “Two Locomotives,” the hand-written manuscript. Our rare books collection is accessible to the public, but people don’t always know it is up there. It is not always accessible through the electronic catalogue, so you may not find a rare manuscript on Google.

DH: You came back to poetry after a hiatus for many years.

DP: I wrote poetry when I was younger. I was very interested in it in college. I put it away, but always kept it in my thoughts. 9/11 got me started again. I tried to make sense


of the event. I tried to feel better through poetry. Poetry lets me be outside myself…it’s a good thing. People put themselves in all sorts of states to transcend the everyday.


DH: You were president of the board of Somerville Community Access TV. What changes and improvement did you bring during your tenure?

DP: SCAT’S mission now was developed when I was president. We served the community with community-related content. We wanted SCAT as a media center, not just a cable access TV station. This continues to be the case. SCAT has evolved rapidly. We hired the current director Wendy Blom.

DH: You also teach at Simmons College in Boston?

DP: I teach Grant Writing. I enjoy working with social workers. It keeps me up to snuff.

DH: You are a long-time Somerville, Mass. resident. Is this city a good fit for you?

DP: I have lived here since 1996. I lived in Brookline and before that Cambridge. I lived in a house that William Dean Howells resided in, perhaps this inspired my writing. But I really like Somerville.

DH: The poetry I have seen from you recently has been concerned with the environment. Are you a Green Poet?

DP: (Laughs.) I try not to use toxic chemicals. I am very concerned about the environment. How can I walk around pretending everything is all right? We are in the middle of the biggest extinction of the species since the dinosaurs. Hopefully we will have more solar power, and cut down on our abuses.

--Doug Holder



IN TRANSIT

Announcements commanding vigilance
spit from gritty loudspeakers hanging over
today’s news-stained subway platform.

Report suspicious activity do NOT leave packages unattended
and thank you for riding the green line.

A roar of white light
approaches
bright windows decelerate
passed me
and stop
green doors folding open
with a rush.


Tracking indistinctly within the tunnel
beneath the breathing city I am
with a hundred others reading

about the war the game the crash the rain celebrities
the big deal prophecies posted on the moving car’s wall.

An electric guitar swirls
around amber earbuds
nicely next to me.
She sees
I can hear.
Smiles.
That’s big treble.


Now’s our chance to start singing something together but no
we won’t while we
stall out in this gonging long long tunnel.

You and me, baby, baby! Squeezed against each other
in the tunnel of love love love get this goddam car moving!

Can’t call it crazy—
crowded, trapped
underground—
but cursed at
the train moves out
like a maniac
lurching toward a girl.


Opposite where I sat once
a young woman squatted on the subway car floor.
Black beetles crawled in her greasy hair.

You dirty loser staring at me want me to flash my tits?
Stop looking stop like you’re after what’s up with my mind—

She yanked up her tee shirt
and I saw.
My idea of perfect.
Now I am charged
with all
of her mad
memory.


I am the refocused light approaching
the platform. I am the suspicious activity
now I must report.

See that hair see that nose see that chin that is me
my glassy reflection collapsing as the green door folds open.

I denounce myself perversely
while stepping down
as yesterday’s bad news.
In transit
lies truth.
Arrival
results.

-- Dale Patterson

The Poet Sees His Family Sleeping by Samuel Charters

The Poet Sees His Family Sleeping

Samuel Charters
Kamini Press 2008
ISBN 978-91-977437-0-9
order@...
www.kaminipress.com $6.

"the girl across from me on the bus
thinks I'm staring at her, but I'm
just trying to read the advertisements over
her head. she scowls with pursed mouth
as sour as if I'd reached across the aisle
and tried to touch her,
since to her I look old."

Samuel Charters, like Whitman, asserts the mundane,
every day occurrences, the back and forth realities.
You are me. I am you. In his first poem in this small
volume of poetry, he brushes our ears, takes us on an
intimate journey through his writing rooms. The reader
becomes the child, parent, sky, night, "I move slowly
for a last time from one to the other."

Charters is open; he presents lust in a casual,
dignified manner. "what she presents of her elegant
thigh, slides beneath her swirling skirt." His poems
open all the windows and doors on a spring day, even
the heat of autumn bearing down over our laden walk,
we sit on his bench and breath.

"I notice that the deck needs painting,
I notice that it's still hot, that my legs are
too red for me to think of doing any
work in the garden.
I notice that the sunlight
wasn't given eyes or ears. it won't
see me if I sweat - or don't sweat."

Readers will enjoy the intimacy, the fit in your hand
size, the smooth way in which the poems appear and
gather into a complete song.

Irene Koronas
poetry editor: wilderness house literary review
www.whlreview.com

Case Fbdy by Kate Schapira

Case Fbdy
Kate Schapira
rope-a-dope press 2007
rope-a-dope-press.blogspot.com

Some of the language in this book of poems comes from,

"a found page of text from a medical journal."
Schapira's inspiration from the one page is fused with
meaning; an honest presentation of characters and
situations we may identify with.

"practice from the outside to the trachea
get her to swallow half the battle. limit
use to a similar instrument. this original
observation of the authors has been observed."

Case Fbdy is a tiny book carefully considered, hand
sewn, folded and more importantly, Kate Schapira
blends the words, each poem becomes her own, then it
becomes the readers:

"old enough to swallow herself
girls seem to be prone
with heads downward. attention
transfixes across the lumen
her obligation. chores.
like on little house
on the prairie sundays
no work as possible
as folded stillness.
staring. aged. enough.
cure. inhale. one every
year for the rest of your
life. see how you've grown"

There are eighteen poems in this unique book. All the
poems stand on their own as they meld with each other.
I will chose to read these poems over and over again;
it is insightful and requires frequent readings. Don't
let the size fool you. This book is an important
presence and deserves a careful read.

Irene Koronas
poetry editor: wilderness house literary review
www.whlreview.com
submissions editor: ibbetson street press

Interview with Poet, and Polymath Hugh Fox: Still a Wunderkind at 76

( Hugh Fox and his wife)

Poet, and Polymath Hugh Fox: Still a Wunderkind at 76

With Doug Holder



At the Sherman Café in Union Square, I met poet, translator, critic, playwright, Hugh Fox and his wife before a taping we were to do at Somerville Community Access TV of my show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.” Fox was visiting his daughter who lives in Somerville and teaches at area universities. Two of my next-door neighbors Kirk and Lucy joined us as Fox held court. At age 76 Fox no signs of slowing down. He regaled us with stories of his extensive travels, all peppered with his vast wealth of knowledge of ancient Aztec culture, mythology, literature, and publishing. Fox talks like a Bronx cabdriver, (decidedly from the side-of-his mouth,) and he is not afraid to use, to put it mildly, unsavory language. My friend described him as “Larger than life.” And so he is.

Fox, who was a tenured professor at the Michigan State for well over 30 years, recently completed a controversial memoir “Way, Way Off the Road” (Ibbetson Street) that dealt with many of the figures from the small press movement, a movement that has produced thousands of small literary magazines and books, and is the lifeblood of poets and writers of all stripes. Fox was a founding member of COSMEP, (a seminal small press organization), he published the well regarded literary magazine “Ghost Dance,”and penned the first critical study of the dirty old man of literature himself, Charles Bukowski. Fox has written and published many books and chapbooks of poetry, and has reviewed countless small press books for Len Fulton’s “Small Press Review.”



Doug Holder: Hugh you wrote critical studies of Henry James and Charles Bukowski, two vastly different writers. Whom did you have the greater affinity for?
.


Hugh Fox: I got my PhD from the University of Illinois and my dissertation was on Edgar Allen Poe. I was raised as an Irish Catholic, and all I read was Irish Catholic literature. I had no idea what was in the outside world. I decided to take on Henry James because it would be an Americanization process and I thought I would learn to write novels. I did like James’ work a lot.

I never intended to get involved with Bukowski. I was totally academic. And then one day I was in this bookstore in Hollywood, the “Pickwick,” (I saw Aldous Huxley at the store that day as well. I was reading him for years. There was this old woman standing next to me, and I said to her: “Look there’s Aldous Huxley!” She said: “ Don’t know what you are saying!” He heard us and then vanished!) So I bought Bukowski’s book: “Crucifix and the Death Hand.” I got a hold of his press LouJon in New Orleans, and they told me to look him up in the phonebook. So I called him up and said: “This is Hugh Fox. I love your work. I want to meet you.” He said OK come over tomorrow. He was living in a motel in Hollywood. I talked with him awhile. He took out these suitcases. There were all his books and magazines in them. He gave me five full suitcases. He told me if I saw doubles to keep them. My entire way of seeing the world changed after this. Bukowski and Henry Miller were big influences of change for me.

DH: You were friends with Harry Smith, the book publisher, and founder of “The Smith” magazine. Smith published such writers as: Duane Locke, Ruth Moon Kempher, John Bennett, Lloyd Van Brunt, Jeff Sorensen, Alan Britt, and Tristram Smith as well as my friends Luke Salisbury and Jared Smith. Can you talk about your relationship with Smith?

Hugh Fox: I’ll tell you what happened. Smith had no money at all. He meets Marian Pechak up in Rhode Island at Brown. So he marries her. Her parents die and she gets millions. So they move to Brooklyn Heights. They had a big Brownstone mansion. So Smith tells her he wants to be a publisher. His wife said:” Hey, we have the money do what you want to do”. So he started to publish. He had an office right by City Hall in New York City. I met Smith through COSMEP. I used to go to Smith’s all the time. I go between semesters, the summer; I’d go for a month a year for twenty years. Smith published everyone who was anyone. I did a lot of reviews for him. He paid me—I stayed at his house—he set up the basement for me. We used to go out for lunch and dinner. His wife told the kids to call me: “Uncle Hugh.” I was closer to Smith than anyone else. Through him I met Menke Katz who was a Yiddish writer.

DH: You edited the groundbreaking anthology “The Living Underground,” that our Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish was in. How did you get this collection together?

HF: It was formed due to my connection with COSMEP. This was the “Committee of Small Press Editors and Publishers.” Len Fulton and others formed it in the early 70’s. Len Fulton still runs the magazine “The Small Press Review and “Dustbooks Publishing” in Paradise, California. COSMEP used to have annual conventions around the country: St. Paul, New York, and New Orleans. Every convention had a huge reading. Almost every small press editor in the country was there. I got to meet all the writers and all the publishers. I got to know people in Boston, and of course Sam Cornish was in Boston, and as it happened he was included in “The Living Underground…” He was at the convention in Boston.

DH: What is an “underground poet?”

HF: Someone who is not published by the big New York publishers.

DH: What was “groundbreaking” about the anthology?

HF: We had living, contemporary small press poets. We had folks like Charles Potts, Richard Krech, and many others. We had a reunion almost forty years later in Berkley, Ca.

DH: How did you get involved with the small press literary award the “Pushcart Prize?”

HF: I got involved through a COSMEP conference in New Orleans. The Prize doesn’t have as much impact as it did in the day. I go to a Barnes and Noble today and nobody is
buying anything, everyone is there with his or her computer. Everyone is having coffee with their computers.


DH: Hugh you are the most prolific reviewer I know. How did you get involved with reviewing books, and why do you spend so much time on an activity that doesn’t provide you with monetary compensation?

HF: I became good friends with Len Fulton of the Small Press Review. Now, every four months or so I get a package of books to read. It’s good for me because I get to find out what’s going on with the poets. It influences my style—all these poets I read. It helps me get my name in the Small Press Review all the time. I want to be involved.

DH: Your are the doyen of the short review. How are you able to get to the essence of a book with such few words?

HF: Before I go to bed I always read a few things. Then I just react to it. It’s funny it is like I listen to an inner voice. The inner voice tells me what to write. The reason I got a degree in American Literature was really to learn how to write reviews of books. To react to books. My first draft of my Poe dissertation was horrible. My advisor said as much. He told me that I was going to write his way. He said: “ You are going to react, feel, and so forth. I learned to react. I learned this from academic teaching.

DH: You said you always considered yourself a wunderkind, a boy genius. How about now at 76?

HF: The same at 76. I haven’t aged mentally or psychologically. I’m still 26. I may have cancer of the prostate, arthritis, but my mind is the same. When I was in California recently I wrote 100 poems in two weeks.

DH: What do you want your legacy to be?

HF: I haven’t thought about it. I would like to see other people do the same thing. I want them to react to the world around them.


--Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update/ June 2008/Somerville, Mass.

Bagels with the Bards 3 edited by Molly Lynn Watt

Bagels With the Bards #3 (click on title to order)
Edited by Molly Lynn Watt
ISBN 978-0-6152-0762-9
88 pages at 15.95 paperback
Ibbetson Street Press
25 School Street
Somerville MA 02143

According to the Introduction by Regie O’Hare Gibson, a Bagel Bard is “a poet that is glazed and ring-shaped whose poetry has a tough, chewy texture usually made of leavened words and images dropped briefly into nearly boiling conversations on Saturday mornings -- often baked into a golden brown.” The Bards featured in this anthology of 55 poems by 51 poets come together as writers over breakfast every Saturday morning. Every poet -- famous, unknown, or somewhere in between -- is welcome to share breakfast with the Bagel Bards while baking up some tasty treats.

I’ve chosen not to quote from any particular poem in this review. The work here is as individual and unique as each contributing Bard. Delighted readers will find a variety of styles and forms, including ekphrasia, prose poems, villanelle, and free form poetry. Between these covers can be found little day-to-day deaths, dreams, and wounds, lost causes and dead ends presented in playful, whimsical, and experimental ways.

If you haven’t discovered the Bagel Bards yet, start with their latest anthology. Short of having breakfast with them at the Au Bon Pain, reading the results of their Saturday mornings is the next best thing.

Review by Laurel Johnson -- Laurel Johnson is a book reviewer for the Midwest Book Review.

TOUCH CREATURES: SELECTED POEMS. Ryk McIntyre.

TOUCH CREATURES: SELECTED POEMS. Ryk McIntyre. http://destructibleheart.com $10

Ryk McIntyre is such an accomplished spoken word artist you forget how well his stuff works on the page. His wit is both deliciously subtle, and can also have the impact of a cream pie smacked in your unsuspecting face. McIntyre cut his teeth on the Boston poetry scene in the early 80’s, and if you have been around the block it would have been hard to have missed him at the many venues he read at, organized, hosted, etc…over the years. McIntyre has a hilarious and pithy poetry book out “ Touching Creatures…” that deals with his own creature comforts, those creatures or monsters who lurk in his fevered imagination or on the Silver Screen. McIntyre also writes about childhood friends, old movies; all his signature themes are in this collection. In his poem the “Jesus of Ugly” McIntyre realizes that beauty is skin deep, but ugly is to the very bone:

“ I’m a good example of a bad example,
I’ve never been one of them personable people,
but I got a good face for some bad memories,
Mirrors and me, we have agreed
if I don’t look at them, they don’t talk shit to me.

God must be Ugly,’ cause he gave me so much.
Was beauty born without two good feet,
and needs the crutch? One look at this face,
don’t your heart skip double- dutch? Don’t it clutch?
Medusa looked at his face and just had to get stoned.
Look up “ugly” in your Webster’s-that’s me:”

And talk about original work, how many poems can you recall that deal with an “aging” vampire. In “Old Blood” McIntyre writes about this poor old “sucker”:

“I am old.
I smell bad.
Hey, you sleep in the same dirt for five hundred years!
And I am not interested in going to a bar so we can talk
About how much you wish you were me.
I don’t drink…whiney people.

Okay, fine. I am a vampire!
But it’s not this hot-shit sex-thing you kids think.
The grim truth? Nothing stays stiff in the grave.
I don’t even take people in their beds anymore.
The last time I tried? You remember my bad back?
I made a very funny bat, hahaha….


Look kid, the best bloodsuckers today?
They’re alive and hold Law Degrees,
Not a cape and a badly faked European accent..”


Highly Recommended.

YOU ARE COMMONLY KNOWN AS A BEAT POET. IS THIS A FAIR CHARACTERIZATION?: INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES PLYMELL

INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES PLYMELL: A POET WHO REFUSES LABELS.

With Doug Holder


Recently I sent out an email asking poets what does it mean to be a “failed poet.” Poet A.D.Winans hooked me up with poet Charles Plymell who (tongue-in cheek) offered to teach a seminar in this arcane subject and requested a hefty paycheck, and or a stash of drugs in payment.

Charles Plymell is a poet and writer who is often overlooked for his involvement with the BEAT literary scene in the 50’s and 60’s. Plymell, originally from Wichita, Kansas, moved from New York City in the early 60’s, to San Francisco and shared a house with Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady on Gough St in 1963. Plymell, although in the background to such BEAT figures as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, was very influential. Under his “Cherry Valley” small press he published such Beat writers as William Burroughs, Robert Peters, and Herbert Huncke. Ginsberg credited Plymell as the first person to introduce him to the music of Bob Dylan.

Plymell had a huge influence on the underground comic scene, and printed the first issue of ZAP COMIX on his printing press in San Francisco. Plymell said he worked feverishly over this interview with his wife, the avant-garde publisher, and cofounder of “Cherry Valley Editions”, Pamela Beach, on a scorching June day.






YOU ARE COMMONLY KNOWN AS A BEAT POET. IS THIS A FAIR CHARACTERIZATION?

It beats not being known at all, I guess; therein lies the rub. Tag fame when you can, or cast your mind about the shadows. Burroughs said he never thought of himself as beat. He always knew the literate way to say things. I never did, so I’m always stuck in the semantic swamp. It is “fair”? I suppose it is, in a historic literary sense where labels serve as quick designations when they take on broader connotations toward social history. For instance, I was reluctant to contribute to Kevin Ring’s Beat Scene all these years because I could never think of Bukowski, Fante and many others he publishes as beat; but the broader brush, however thinly, feathers the label purposely, so that’s that. To argue for my reluctance would seem silly. But no, personally I hate to be eclipsed by a scene. As a fervent outsider, it is always a signal that my work has remained around the edges of a group. That is by my own design as well, though, I was always reluctant to jump into another’s scene (for more than a night).

YOU HAVE SAID THAT KANSAS CITY IN THE ‘50'S WAS YOUR FAVORITE SCENE, EVEN OVER THE HAIGHT IN THE 60's. WHY?

For many reasons my youth was spent seeing all the greats of jazz, race music, rhythm and blues across the tracks, and traditional songs by the greats at the honky tonks for a dollar cover. The youth of the Haight didn’t have that cultural education. We were also able to get all the Peyote we wanted and had youthful rituals on the riverbanks. No one was aware of anything happening except us, so there wasn’t any trouble. When I write about my long-time friend, Rapid Ronnie, alias Barbitol Bob reading me Pound in Zip’s Club that was way before we had heard of the Beats. We were ignorant of the latest cultural phenomena of Life and Time, but we didn’t need it. Our nights were spent on Benzedrine and Boo, making the rounds of clubs with the band members and club entertainers like Mickey Shaughnessy, the actor, making the rounds talking, laughing, goofing until breakfast or driving across the tracks to see and visit and smoke and drink with the likes of Fats Domino in his 49 Caddy from New Orleans in a little club with a few people all night long. We had something peculiar to the Midwest that we got high on for days at a time, bought at the drugstore that was much stronger than the amphetamines that Kerouac used while writing. I have never heard it mentioned at all in other canons of drugs and literature. Bob and I were in the Wichita jail together as high school dropouts and petty pill head gangsters, but we always read great literature and had the famous names in music always available to hang with at Mrs. Dunbar’s Barbeque. There are some things that are meant for place and time, never to come that way again. We even studied Zen and the New fucking Age!

I can remember the years and what I was doing by the cars I had. In 49 though I was up in the Dakotas operating a caterpillar (Neal (Cassady) later claimed part of that story for a riff) near the reservation and borrowed a ‘48 Dodge from a friend of my father’s that had to got back to Texas. There was no such thing as a driver’s license at that time in that state so I drove it down to Oklahoma and joined my mother who was working on an auto daredevil thrill show ramping over a row of cars and driving through a board wall of fire...that sort of thing. I had a new ‘51 Chevy in San Antonio that I drove to Southern California to stay for a while. Then back to Kansas and down to Guadalajara and back and a trip to Baja for Bennies and Boo packing my 38 special and then followed the rodeo and rode Brahma Bulls and bareback broncs. Worked on the pipeline, then to Hollywood for a while and bought my ‘53 Roadmaster Buick there and went up to Oregon to work on a dynamite crew building a dam on the Columbia River. I bought a tugboat to live on and named it “Little Toot.” Then traveled Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming with my sister who worked the towns as a prostitute. Then to Kansas City, and Wichita for Peyote rituals and worked for the Santa Fe then back through Denver over the pass I had driven as a kid in my Mom’s ‘39 Buick, and back to San Francisco. Those are but a few highlights of the years when I had new or fairly new cars that corresponded to my travels in those years. I met Neal in ‘62 and that’s when he read me some of his highlights from the book. Understandably, I wasn’t that enthralled, so he only read two or three passages. I liked to drive with him and take him to work on my motorcycle.

So, by the time I went back to San Francisco again (right turn north off the Benzedrine Highway, Rt 66, my commute and Kerouac’s discovery, in 1962; I was living on the first block up Ashbury off Haight St. A couple other friends from Wichita and those they knew were there. Conner had a show at the Batman Gallery, and Rapid Ronnie was living with his family in a ‘52 Chevy, I worked as a printer and printed some stuff on the side. I made collages and had a show at the Batman and made a couple of 16mm films, which were all the rage. They were in Ann Arbor Film Festival, through my Wichita friends, we had Sandoz LSD and later, Owsley. “Acid” hadn’t been coined. We also had pure Mescaline from a laboratory in England. Brautigan and I sat in a café and watched the neighborhood change. It had been an old Russian neighborhood with great cafes serving pirogues and good food…unfortunately that all was to be trashed, I reflected that the new comers didn’t have much street smarts and most of them didn’t have formal education as did the beats who had made an earlier scene centered around City Lights and national attention over “fuck.” So I asked Brautigan what would become of them. He got right into their trappings. Neal reminded me of the people I hung with in the 50's from Denver to K.C. I got along with him well, and later when Ginsberg returned from India in ‘63, he and Neal shared the Gough St. flat with me. I think Ginsberg knew Neal’s wild side and saw me as a stabilizing force. So I’d take Neal to work at a Goodyear tire shop on Van Ness on my motorcycle and go on to my job at the print shop like the squares of the 50's the young people now talk about. Well, with the circus in town, that didn’t last long!

Someone just sent a notice that Bo Diddley died. He was from the old rhythm and blues and race music I listened to in the 50's. He was one of many originals who didn’t get his due, at least to the fullest. A snapshot apropos: We were living a block or two from the Avalon Ballroom in a pad where we printed Zap and had nude parties and someone came to visit who said to come over and meet the band he’s managing. A strange name: Pink Floyd. Another “strange name” was playing the Avalon during that era where the usual band had sell out crowds of hippies with psychedelic music blasting and strobe lights flashing. One night the lights were down and there was a dozen or so in the crowd. Bo Diddley took a place off stage towards the front of the ballroom and began by saying: Mercy, Mercy, Mercy, and here I am now, playing for YOU as if to punctuate the lack of cultural, educational, and streetwise heritage of the youthful arrivals. Of course, while living at that same place, we had complimentary tickets left at City Lights to attend Janis Joplin and Big Brother at the Filmore a few blocks in the other direction. After going up to City Lights to pick up the tickets, the night grew larger with more places to stop, get high and eventually miss a historically important performance where the like of Joplin, Doors, Dylan, Rolling Stones, Beatles would soon re-introduce the great traditional music that had been forgotten.

Though San Francisco was going to be the town built on Rock’n’Roll in the 60's, it would eventually have to pay tribute to the Jazz and blues from Kansas City from the 50's to achieve its greatness. My nostalgia lay in both decades.

ACCORDING TO THE INTERVIEWS I READ, YOU HAVE BEEN HEAVILY INVOLVED WITH DRUGS. GUYS LIKE BUKOWSKI SWORE THAT BOOZE, ETC...WAS ESSENTIAL FOR THEIR CREATIVE PROCESS. IN RETROSPECT WAS ALL THE LSD, ETC...MORE OF A HINDRANCE OR HELP?

That’s the old question “on many levels” as we used to say so much during that period. Someone remarked that he thought we were eternally on an elevator! It’s difficult to answer. Brain chemistry is still endless in new territories. Certainly spontaneity and improvisation in the frontal lobe are stimulated by holding all that Cannabis smoke in. The associations seem favorable and helpful for jazz musicians, for example, and probably proved through anecdotal experience and empiricism. Cannabis in other arts that demand simultaneous critical and symbolic motifs of the eye instead of the ear, and the whole language/brain involvement seems more problematic. It is essential for creative people to travel that road of excess unless they are by chance the Innocent or Idiot. It would be impossible for me to weigh those imports into such an elusive study of so many variables such as a personality overlay on a biochemical mass. The most concrete case study would probably remain in Kubla Khan. It is odd that two of the most motivating forces for modern man surface to the top of the paradigm in drugs and money. In the “B” column, Sex and Rock’n’Roll. Or maybe Sex on top.
ALBERT HOFMANN DISAPPROVED OF THE RECREATIONAL USE OF LSD. HE FELT YOUNG PEOPLE SHOULD USE IT MORE RITUALISTICALLY. YOUR TAKE?

Yeah, I saw his recent obit and said that was the guy who used rye bread for his toast and tea. Yes, there was intelligent advice in the obit. The Golden Mean is always good advice. I was more heavily involved in the variety instead of the quantity. Even with Benzedrine in the 50's, I would take breaks for my body to recuperate instead of maxing it out, which seem to be a universal approach for many in a kind of competitive way rather than what common sense would dictate. There was a certain excitement riding with Neal on the Amphetamine Trail, but in reality the more he used it, the more symptoms of overuse came into play, and his preoccupation with defending his title of fastest word in the west would became more tiring. So there is always an apex where force recedes to entropic realities.
There was always an implicit demand in opening doors to the interior universe, I remember just before the Haight explosion a bunch of us were tripping in a pad down the street below McClure’s. We had locked the doors and would express a kind of anguish about going there again. There were terrors along the way. The mirrors would change your face into others. Of course it was Sandoz vials at that time, or maybe Owsley had come on the scene by then. Either was the pure stuff and only fools would not have a personal trepidation of a contraindication. McClure came to the door about the time we were dissolving into the trip and we didn’t let him in . He was sort of joking about tripping and it was very alarming to us because we had definitely left the road of known landscapes. I don’t know whether or not he had the experience by then, but I’m sure he would have taken it with his doctor friends or under very trusted circumstances. It was not to play with in the normal environments of society. I shudder to think how the young would take it in such cavalier ways. Of course I don’t know how much the doses were diluted or contaminated since the first days of it. Even a decade earlier in the 50's with Peyote, we would naturally gravitate to ritualistic behavior down on the river banks. The experience itself seemed to demand the ceremony of at least twisting in the wind of a higher force. I just saw a rather stupid program on TV of Peyote to something or other flashing from early investigators to Leary and the Haight.. My God! Well it shows that culture is the worst contaminate. And I began to think of all the cool, hip distinctions surrounding the reefer of my early years and then tried to picture Laura Bush and her sorority friends smoking Marijuana. Ha! The devaluation and deflation dissolves the mythical. The tincture of spirit no longer has purpose while ground into toxic trash crawling alongside the sanctioned public expressway of technology. God will give us only what our hands can make, what our brains can discover in science. Our spirit has not busted out of our upright poster. Drug chemistry just stirs the maw. Some like to throw off social safety nets, hate controls, and chant for freedom to take the cosmic plunge. Hart Crane said that the bottom of the sea is cruel.

A LOT OF US SMALL PRESS FOLKS HAVE GRIPES WITH THE “ACADEMY.” YOU HAD A SMALL PRESS, AND THERE IS NO GREAT LOVE BETWEEN YOU AND ACADEMIA.

I’m no longer involved with either. Publishing has changed a great deal since I was active in it. Somehow I was one who had to be written off the money list for a personal grant/fellowship. Any institutional activity always needs a fall guy. Ironically, it’s always the person who could have benefited the most. After a lifetime of involvement, I just read my poetry when friends put together an interesting venue, or a cultural wealthy country invites me to their forum. I’m probably one of the few poets who needs the honorarium for livelihood rather than resume/curricula/vita. If I can add to my almost 700 a month social security check, I will. In publishing, I no longer know poetry and mainly read physics and sleep the longs nights thinking about what I do not understand and sometimes read what my comix friends send. If I do want to preserve thoughts in word combinations that I’d like to see again, or have something to give guests, etc. I print them privately. It’s much simpler that way and very inexpensive online printing with no storage costs, etc. I’ve had nothing to do with funding for publishing since the 70s. It took a long time for me to realize that any funding, private or public would have nothing to do with me. My wife told me that long ago. People still send me books inscribed to their first teacher and blah, blah listing several grants and awards they have received. I see the names that used to reappear connected with funding when little publications came in the mail; it’s pretty easy to see the corruption and who was whose friend. I toss them. Gradually, I receive fewer. I used the analogy of the farm bureau that wanted to help the small farmer by subsidies. They kept the administration to themselves until bureaucracies out numbered the small farmer. Where’s the small farmer now? Maybe Willie Nelson knows! All the rest are speculators who have manipulated the subsidies. The academe and mainstream politicos will always reward themselves first and create their legions to prop up their own organizations. In the name of milk or in the name of art, all the little towns have subsidized- homogenized products in the vinyl era.

IN AN INTERVIEW WITH JON RANDALL YOU SAID GINSBERG ENDORSES ANYTHING THAT IS POLITICALLY CORRECT AND PROFITABLY CORRECT.
GINSBERG AT ONE TIME WAS IN ADVERTISING, RIGHT?

I always thought that was apparent. I remember taking him to a national endowment meeting where he turned it all around immediately got grants for him and Peter and all his Lower East Side friends, some of them who had asked me to write about them. About that time, my friend Rod McKuen was in town and asked if he could do anything to help Cherry Valley Editions and I asked Allen to read with him for a benefit, but Allen said it would have to be out in Kansas. He didn’t want to offend any of his constituency. This after I introduced him at his big reading at the Folger Shakespeare library. He told me when we first met that he had worked as a market researcher. If so, I thought he put all those traits to good use managing his career. He did excel in that sort of thing. I thought it was a good thing to have, but a lot of work. He was on the phone all the time. I don’t think Burroughs was hype but he enjoyed others hyping him. As he used to say, wouldn’t you? Bremser was no hype. Neal, well hype was his might.

WE HAVE A MUTUAL FRIEND HUGH FOX. FOX IS AN ICON OF THE SMALL PRESS SCENE. RECENTLY THE IBBETSON STREET PRESS PUBLISHED HIS CONTROVERSIAL MEMOIR: “WAY, WAY OFF THE ROAD.” HOW DID YOU GUYS HOOK UP BACK IN THE DAY?

I knew Hugh mainly in the publishing days of the 70's. We published his book and he was friends with Pam’s mother, Mary Beach and her husband Claude Pelieu. He was always going off to Kansas City or Rio with outlandish stories of great interest. All he needed was a market researcher! Well, we were out in New Mexico on a literature panel 30-40 years ago and I sat down in a theater sort of place where there were presentations and along side me came a lady dressed to the nines. It was Hugh! Later we went to a party at a Mexican’s house in the country. He was a writer whose name I forget, but I saw it everywhere those days. Obviously he had ties to the director of programs who got drunk and started feeling me up. Later at the hotel, the director had a room across from mine and he opened his door and pulled out his dick and wanted me to suck it. It was small, dark and crooked, very unappealing, so I declined. I never knew whether this was the grant application or not. It frustrated me because I had heard stories of people with government power trading their influence for sex and the like, but I didn’t know the protocol. (No wonder they called them fellowships) I guess it continues for many today, like the foot taper. It was so unromantic, but sex in the Beat scene was like that, too. Most of it was a service type industry, almost clinical. I needed more research in this area. In Kansas all that was taken for granted, but it wasn’t tied to power, so I felt like the ignorant hippies, no street smarts, no educations, no grants!


A FRIEND OF MINE JACK POWERS, WHO FOUNDED STONE SOUP POETS IN BOSTON, SAID KEROUAC’S “ON THE ROAD” FREED HIM FROM THE CONSTRAINTS OF HIS BOSTON IRISH CATHOLIC BACKGROUND. HOW DID IT AFFECT YOU? YOU WROTE A BOOK OF SIMILAR THEME: “Last of the Moccasins”

Yeah, I remember Jack. He played me Willie Nelson’s “Blues Eyes Crying in the Rain” at the Stone Soup. I guess the Austin rebels were coming to fame at the time. Willie did a real version, of course. Jack looked kind of blank when I told him that my mother used to sing it to me. She had learned it from Roy Acuff on the radio. Kerouac’s book was a catharsis for many youngsters all over the world. I never read it. Neal used to read me passages from it, and I would see passages in literary anthologies. My catharsis probably cannot be related to an event. It was probably on the road. I’m not sure of the time line when he wrote his book, but I had definitely camped in the back of an old International (about the same year as the original Further bus) and had driven a ‘39 Buick over the Rockies. I was probably in the Dakotas at that time sleeping on the prairie. And by ‘52 was goin’ to Kansas City to hear Jay McShann and later Charley Parker. He was older and had a good ear for jazz and one of the only poets who could put poetry with it. Allen used to read me his Mexico City poems. But I was never into his prose. Except for his jazz, I wasn’t impressed with him and thought most of the Beats were pretty square early on. I thought Huncke was a true hipster and Neal was a phenomena and Burroughs superceded labels. My youth was far removed from the ward-head mentalities of east coast cities. The cultural geography was different. My geography was from the Mississippi to California. The expansive geographical freedom was a continuous catharsis for me, with maybe some peyote thrown in the medical definition! City Lights published my book and about the same time refused a book by both Kerouac and Burroughs, so I don’t know what the publishing situation was. My book was pretty well shelved with no royalties paid. Europa Verlag in Austria published it and I had to split the advance with City Lights. Later my rights were reassigned and it came out with Mother Road with the fabulous cover by the famed artist Robert Williams who said he wasn’t a cover artist but that he’d do one for me because of my history with the Comix, first publisher of Zap and first brought S. Clay Wilson into print when we lived in Lawrence, Kansas. Meanwhile I just gave my last copy of the one with the Robert Williams cover to a collector, a deaf guy who popped in, who I had met at a Robert Williams signing in NYC years ago. So that publication became very rare quickly, but someone (I wonder who) finally pulled the City Lights version from the cellars and the booksellers and collectors have the City Lights first edition for sale all over the place. I found it hard to deal with millionaire beatniks.

AS A SMALL PUBLISHER I AM INTERESTED TO KNOW ABOUT YOUR SMALL PRESS YOU FOUNDED “CHERRY VALLEY.”

It would be impossible to list the publications. Part of it began with Josh Norton here in Cherry Valley, where we received a couple of small publishing grants and famous poets and writers gave work and donations. Pam Beach Plymell knows more about that. She is also over her mother, the late Mary Beach and her husband Claude Pélieu’s voluminous work of beat book translations, their own publications and the visual art archive. Fame is what sells Independents. And one has to kind of be in a movement or tied to performance to sell original work these days. There is very little literature from larger presses. Most of it is reserved for the people who are known on television to have a hard copy of their thoughts. The book has become more archival and more of an artifact itself for lesser-known artists these days. We do not have an archive for Cherry Valley. We sold it for living needs. Wichita State has a complete one, I think and Byron Coley and Thurston Moore have put together a complete one at their Yod Space in Florence. They met the only remaining artist/poet; they didn’t have, who we published, Paul Grillo, at Claude and Mary’s show in NYC curated by John McWhinnie last fall.

WHICH POETS LIVING OR DEAD ARE IN YOUR PERSONAL CANON?

I don’t have any new influences because I read mainly physics and science and things I can’t understand. I think this country’s greatest poetic mind was Loren Eiseley. His brush was as broad as Shakespeare’s I thought that he didn’t have a vehicle in formal prosody and genre as did Shakespeare to use poetry and that his prose in books, like The Star Thrower, was more poetic than most poetry. Like a fool, I tried to suggest this to him and he humbly answered that he spent a lot of effort trying to place his words to suit him, or something like that. When I went to meet him at his museum office at the University of Pennsylvania, I was frozen in place as he came from his office. A glimpse of his even diminutive presence made me scurry out of the museum like a rat unnoticed. I don’t know why. His mind on the Platte and mine on the Cimarron must have fused at the Cathedral Rocks on the north/south trail where the voice from “the shaken tent” was heard, a catharsis on the trail, indeed. Hart Crane, out in Akron, before the literary moneyed industry, when we knew what a real bottle of milk cost, wrote: “Played ragtime and dances before the door/and we overpaid them because we felt like it.” A few meat scraps from Pound, his wonderful translations with Noel Stock from the days of Cleopatra taken from the hieroglyphs of broken pottery have didactic phrases from everyday life much like what poets send me now. The Island poets, any historical glimpses by Herodotus. I don’t like the fascist Greek plays. Plays always bore me anyway, except for “The Iceman Cometh” and some “movie plays of Tennessee Williams. Shakespeare’s Sonnets and poetry in his plays. Gore Vidal and Burroughs always remain current. J. H. Fabre, the French poet of science, Wilson’s Insect societies. Last winter I read at (I don’t read through difficult works) but pick them up and read at them to reflect or guide my dreams: Radin’s “Entangled Minds”, David Bohm’s “Wholeness and the Implicate Order” though he began to babble and rescued himself in Za Zen like Gary Snyder or someone; Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene; Nadeau and Kafatos’ The Non-Local Universe; and Becker and Seldon’s Body Electric, which has to do with reasons that might be shattering or retarding the national intellect. It also explains some of my own “road to Catharsis” by re-enlightening me to the fact that my younger years were spent only with the earth’s electricity that is open ended rather than the closed circuit man-made electricity. The other books and readings were to help me substantiate a theory I’ve been thinking about for a long time; places gravity’s weaker force as a tiny measurement of the larger magnetic force.




---- Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ June 2008/Somerville, Mass.