Seamus Heaney’s Last Poetry Collection Human Chain Ten Years On by Michael Todd Steffen

Seamus Heaney’s Last Poetry Collection Human Chain Ten Years On

by Michael Todd Steffen




The Hastings Room Reading Series was informally established by Steven Brown and myself with the help of Daniel Wuenschel as a quarterly poetry reading event in the spring of 2014, with the generous support of First Church Cambridge, 11 Garden Street, offering their elegant library, the Hastings Room, as a venue free of charge. The series has never had any financial support or official charter. Our readers have appeared for the pleasure of our audiences. They have included Pulitzer Prize winners Lloyd Schwartz, Frank Bidart and Franz Wright, National Book Award winner David Ferry, as well as pillars of the local scene such as Doug Holder and Gloria Mindock. While the series has hosted some of the best Boston area poets like Martha Collins, Fred Marchant, David Rivard, David Blair and Joan Houlihan, we have hosted notable national and international poets: Natasha Sajé, Louise Callaghan, Greg Delanty and Ernest Hilbert.




In August of 2014 on the one-year anniversary of his death, we dedicated our end-of-summer reading to the memory of Seamus Heaney, whose place in the Boston area and affiliation with Harvard is well known. The scope of Heaney’s influence has been witnessed by the many brilliant Memorial readers we have invited who are not particularly “Heaney” scholars, though Daniel Tobin, Meg Tyler, Valerie Duff and George Kalogeris have been in the close circle of Heaney readers and they have graced our series and the memorial readings with great insightand feeling.




Many other reading series have successfully combatted the isolation of COVID-19 by continuing, and even multiplying, their readings on the Internet, while the Hastings Room Series has gone fallow. Yet the upkeep of the Heaney Memorial struck me as important, even urgent in light of another anniversary, the ten-year mark of Heaney’s collection Human Chain, and its unsettling resonance into the dire circumstances of 2020.




In response, I wrote out my thoughts on the importance of the title and the title poem of this collection, and reached out to the friends of the series, our poets and lecturers, asking them to join in on a “chain” or collective written-word discussion on the book, to all topics of its great reach pertaining to the so plain so strange poetry of Seamus Heaney.




C o n t r i b u t o r s

Michael Todd Steffen

Valerie Duff

Denise Provost

Fred Marchant

George A. Kalogeris

Joan Houlihan

Daniel Tobin

Joyce P. Wilson

Meg Tyler




Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain ten years on




Of Seamus Heaney’s collection of poetry published in 2010, simply the two words of the title, HUMAN CHAIN, nearly surround us these ten years later in the grim reality of a mortal virus that lives and thrives by virtue of our very physical connectedness, the chain that binds us as one human race upon the planet.




Yet Heaney’s title also evokes his own rural background and the way his poetry illuminates farmland hardware like the shunting of a tractor engine or the feel of the handle of a turnip snedder. So, physically, the iron chain. With its dolorous connotations of human slavery, throughout all human history but most relatively recently here in America, the seeds of this second tragedy of racial outrage and its cast over these worrisome spring and summer days of isolation, frustration and boundless grief.




For all the visionary universality of those two words, the title poem itself, “HUMAN CHAIN,” startles our curiosity by being very local, physical and focused on the ordinary, even under duress. Heaney has seen aid workers struggling to pass heavy sacks of grain, person to person,in a human chain, for the purpose of preparing food for “the mob” in distress for relief while soldiers are shooting over them.




In his rural life, Heaney has passed sacks of grain like this before, loading them from a farmer’s co-op onto a trailer. The sight of the catastrophe, in person or on television, or the Internet, triggers the personal physical memory of the work of forming a human chain to work together to accomplish something that would be overwhelming for one person, especially under the stress of the authoritative clamor over them. This strikes me as paradoxical for the standard image of the poet who is generally assumed to be solitary and independent. Yet as all of us know, and this effort at a chain e-mail conversation would show, there is a great connectedness to our work and our lives.


H U M A N C H A I N




FOR TERENCE BROWN




Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand

In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers

Firing over the mob, I was braced again




With a grip on two sack corners,

Two packed wads of grain I’d worked to lugs

To give me purchase, ready for the heave—




The eye-to-eye, one-two, one-two upswing

On to the trailer, then the stoop and drag and drain

Of the next lift. Nothing surpassed




That quick unburdening, backbreak’s truest payback,

A letting go which will not come again,

Or it will, once. And for all.

~ ~ ~ A reflection on Heaney and the reach of his last book, Human Chain.

 When I came to Boston in 1994, Heaney had been in residence at Harvard for almost a decade, and was, at that time, on the cusp of receiving the Nobel prize. Shortly after it was awarded, I remember standing body to body in the vestibule of Harvard’s Memorial church, having inched along with a throng of others in the darkness across Harvard Yard, to hear him read with John Ashbery and Jorie Graham—his first public appearance post-Nobel.



While I couldn’t see the readers at the pulpit (I was probably staring into the back of someone’s head or jacket), there were speakers in place to broadcast to the gathered crowds. I remember the joy in his voice from above as he read “Poet’s Chair,”—his secret delight shared in the delivery of the line, “Leaves / on a bloody chair!” He was Ireland’s poet, but he was also Boston’s. Harvard Yard always brings Heaney back for me, as his poem “Canopy” (for David Ward, whose art installation lived in that space from 1994-1995) brings back the Yard to us all, and as it must have done for Heaney who had been away for so long when Human Chain appeared in 2010. I like to think he missed us, too:







Canopy


It was the month of May.

Trees in Harvard Yard

Were turning a young green.

There was whispering everywhere.



David Ward had installed

Voice-boxes in the branches,

Speakers wrapped in sacking

Looking like old wasps’ nests



Or bat-fruit in the gloaming—

Shadow Adam’s apples

That made sibilant ebb and flow,

Speech-gutterings, desultory



Hush and backwash and echo.

It was like a recording

Of antiphonal responses

In the congregation of leaves.



Or a wood that talked in its sleep.

Reeds on a riverbank

Going over and over their secret.

People were cocking their ears,



Gathering, quietening,

Stepping on to the grass,

Stopping and holding hands.

Earth was replaying its tapes,



Words being given new airs:

Dante’s whispering wood—

The wood of the suicides—

Had been magicked to lover’s lane.



If a twig had been broken off there

It would have curled itself like a finger

Around the fingers that broke it

And then refused to let go



As if it were mistletoe

Taking tightening hold.

Or so I thought as the fairy

Lights in the boughs came on.




~Valerie Duff, September 7, 2020



Links in a H u m a n C h a i n

Putting aside my work on a family biography to consider Seamus Heaney’s Human Chain, I’m struck anew by the biographical nature of so many of the poems in this collection. I point to several here, not in the spirit of “review,” but by way of cataloging the human chains these poems evoke, and how they link the whole work through emotional substance and tone.

Remembering his parents with complicated nostalgia in “Album,” Heaney writes about moments in their shared past and even before, even imagining his parents’ “wedding meal/And I am at the table….” His narrator self expresses regret for chances untaken to demonstrate affection for his father:

Were I to have embraced him anywhere

It would have been on the riverbank

That summer before college, him in his prime….




In “The Butts,” Heaney describes a heartbreaking substitute intimacy, digging into the wardrobe full of his father’s suits with their “Tonic unfreshness” where “a kind of empty-handedness transpired….” Spare vernacular describes deep, elegiac feelings. Even within the realm of poetry’s fictions, such writing about family members feels like a variety of autobiography.

“Route 110,” among its other rambles, announces, “And now the age of births….” and celebrates the arrival of Heaney’s first grandchild. It reminds us that some human chains run through families and time, longitudinally. Yet this and other poems in this collection also involve human chains which are lateral, linking author to friends, clan, and wider community.

The poem “Eelworks” describes how the act of courtship brings the narrator admission to a group of men and their way of life, with its “Cut of diesel oil in evening air/Tractor engines in the clinker-built/Deep-bellied boats….” “Miracle”- so beautifully described elsewhere in this tribute – honors the support of even unacknowledged members of a circle of kin and friends.

Route 110’s lowly bus line takes its narrator from purchasing a used copy of Aeneid VI, “To Italy, in a wedding guest’s bargain suit,” and on to the home of neighbors, who have wrapped each individual grain on a spray of oats in “glittering foil/They’d saved from chocolate bars, then pinched and cinched” to give the home’s “wee altar a bit of shine.”

Since “It was the age of ghosts,” we are conducted to wakes: one where “For three nights we kept conversation going/Around the waiting trestles…” and, in stanza ix, to one for “Mr. Lavery, blown up in his own pub…” and another for “Louis O’Neill/In the wrong place the Wednesday they buried/Thirteen who’d been shot in Derry?”

At the end of this stanza ix, Heaney, again acknowledges the unacknowledged. He writes of the dead:

Unglorified, accounted for and bagged

Behind the grief cordons: not to be laid







In war graves with full honours, nor in a separate plot

Fired over on anniversaries

By units drilled and spruce and unreconciled.





This image of the ceremonial firing of guns over ground sacred to the honored dead is the obverse – or, possibly, the reverse – of an image central to the poem “Human Chain.” Put immediately into the action, like its narrator, we are

Seeing the bags of meal passed hand to hand

In close-up by the aid workers, and soldiers

Firing over the mob…




So the title poem of this collection connects these two disparate uses of gunfire, just as this poem and the work as a whole connect various kinds of human chains into a web or net, not just of kinship or proximity, but of humanity.

A decade after Heaney’s death, we are confining ourselves apart, trying to avoid the scale of death by disease that we have only read about in history books. Heaney, I feel, would feel and appreciate both aspects of our pandemic – the human chains transmitting infection, and the human chains of rescue and healing.

I think it’s telling that the poem “Human Chain” was included in the 2014 anthology Tools of the Trade: Poems for New Doctors, which was given to all graduating medical students in Scotland that year, before any suggestion that 2020 would be a plague year.

All of us now need all the tools we can wield or invent to escape our various predicaments – even tools as crude as

Two packed wads of grain I’d worked to lugs

To give me purchase, ready for the heave-

We, all of us, need a poetry of connection, to feel the tug of our human chains – and that is what Heaney supplies.

~Denise Provost September 18, 2020

The first thing I'd like to say is to reaffirm what I wrote in a review/essay about Human Chain published in Salamander, 16.2, in the Summer of 2011.




In this piece I offered the idea that taken together over a lifetime Heaney's writings were at heart a defense of poetry in and for our time. In both his poetry and his essays Heaney's fundamental stance was that poetry is its own uniquely valuable way of knowing, feeling, and being. In Human Chain, I sensed a continuing exploration of that faith in the art by showing us how poetry embodies a certain kind of inner-life or spiritual connection to the world, to others, and to ourselves.



In the back of my mind was Walt Whitman's "Noiseless Patient Spider," with its creature sending out filament after filament until "the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my soul." I think Heaney might have said those filaments were like poems, and the connections the soul established thereby were not clanking chains, but more like gossamer threads of feeling, often subtle, but stronger than one might think, and ultimately more beautiful than one might expect.



That is how I read and understood the poems in Human Chain. The title poem, for instance, with its line of aid-workers tossing burlaps full of meal while soldiers fire their weapons above them presents a moment of grievous social crisis. But among those tossing the sacks, there is that gossamer thread of connection, their sense of working together, even under extreme conditions. Throughout this book, in recollections of family, teachers, friends, stories, and other writings, Heaney gives us glimpses of such soul-sustaining connections that live on in the works of the imagination that are passed from one hand to another, from one life to another, even beyond our mortal limits.



~Fred Marchant August 11, 2020

This poem is ready for whatever history or nature has in store. You must grow up to what you have stored up, Heaney once said. Those sacks of grain. The human chain.

How wonderful to celebrate such a deeply humane magnificent poet.




~George A. Kalogeris ~ ~

I’ve always been deeply affected by Heaney’s “Miracle” from his collection Human Chain, for its unsentimental focus on the work around healing, the way a “miracle” is enabled by many lowly tasks, by “the ones who have known him all along,” and the poem’s deflection from the expected sense of intervention of the divine in the title. In this poem, the homely work of neighbors and friends counts for as much, if not more than, the miracle of recovery itself and reflects the reality of how someone suffering needs labor by others to recover. Heaney says this poem came from his own experience of recovery after having suffered a stroke, so it’s likely that the authenticity of observation in this poem—and gratitude—comes from that experience. The power of personal experience informs his always astonishing, superbly-crafted lines—their understatement and unflinching, visceral directness.




Miracle




Not the one who takes up his bed and walks
But the ones who have known him all along
And carry him in —

Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked
In their backs, the stretcher handles
Slippery with sweat. And no let up

Until he’s strapped on tight, made tiltable
and raised to the tiled roof, then lowered for healing.
Be mindful of them as they stand and wait

For the burn of the paid out ropes to cool,
Their slight lightheadedness and incredulity
To pass, those who had known him all along.




In the spirit of Heaney, I offer my own version of a well-known miracle and recovery.




Christ Healing a Blind Man

After Seamus Heaney




Strange hands hovered, found the place

my sight would be, and I felt his breath




and smelled the fish in it and tried to turn away,

when from the hands a future came: a tree




some mourners stood beneath, three, with loud and shaking

shouts at first, then the word forsaken spilled




from his gall-filled mouth. I see you, I said, and he laughed

and pressed down harder on my sockets’ second sight.







Then see yourself, he said. The low voice gave me chills.

Because I didn’t see myself, but how he hung suspended




under clouds. His crown—on closer look, a wreath of thorns—

tilted, and from his rib poured the living wound a skeptic




would be taken by his hand to touch and know—

and then I saw his face come slow and bend




to me, his hair and dirty beard and deeply in his eye:

the tree, the cross, a handful of nails, the INRI.

~Joan Houlihan~

  The Key to the figural imagination and key to Heaney’s trans-figurative poetic is the idea that, in fact, the poet does not need to leave the rag-and-bone shop world to ascend the stair of transcendence. As William Lynch again observes, within the figural vision “the temporal flow of human life” may be seen as “a formed thing, a significant form. It is a progressive and planned movement into and within the infinite” (2004, 58). From this vantage, the transit of Heaney’s poems both individually and collectively exemplifies how poetry is a formed thing made through time, a weave of imaginative constants. Despite the poet’s lapse of faith, Heaney’s poetry may be read most profitably as a latter-day example of the figural imagination decentered from the tripartite cosmos of heaven-earth-hell in which the poet grew up and re-centered along its own axis. And if, as Heaney believed, the “shock waves of the consciousness reflect the upheavals of the surrounding world,” then the poet who would be “most the poet” must allow that condition—the condition of increasing ontological as well as religious doubt—pervasively into the work without losing the thread of meaning that holds the entire weave together.




Heaney’s poetry accords remarkably with the directive to reflect the shock waves of consciousness precisely because of its contested nature. Yet it faces extreme doubt in a manner that refuses “the process of dematerializing” (SS, 449). For all the attentiveness in his poetry and prose to the spiritual conditions of his time and to the historical conditions that have led us here, Heaney affirms that he “can’t conceive of a poetry that hasn’t a subject to deal with” (SS, 449). This conviction goes to the heart of his vision or reality, however lapsed his religious views, as well as to the heart of his poetry. These lines from “A Herbal” make that clear: If you know a bit About the universe It’s because you’ve taken it in Like that, Looked as hard As you looked into yourself, Into the rat hole, Through the vetch and dock That mantled it. (Human Chain, 43) For Heaney there is nothing immaterial about the world, and there is consequently nothing immaterial or dematerializing about language. The world as it is, is alive with transfiguration: you take in the world, the world takes in you.




The lines “Because you have taken it in / Like that” embody what is essential to the figural imagination: the world is real and we know it is so because of the grounding of consciousness in a broader similitude on which language depends. The disruptive effect of Nietzsche’s declaration “God is dead” and Heaney’s tacit “generational assent” to that condition stands at odds with Heaney’s stated poetics and his practice of the art. In the figural vision of reality, consciousness and the world are linked in similitude, or, as Heaney declares, “I had my existence. I was there. / Me in place and the place in me” (HC, 44). Such a vision of intimate communion need not appeal to doctrine to be regarded veritable. On the other hand, “A Herbal” ends with lines that speak movingly to the spiritual longing that implicitly undergirds both Heaney’s work and its broader significance: Where can it be found again, An elsewhere world, beyond Maps and atlases, Where all is woven into And of itself, like a nest Of crosshatched grass blades? (HC, 44) The end of “A Herbal” juxtaposes the centripetal and centrifugal poles of Heaney’s imagination, its parabolic dynamic now pitched into the utterly transcendent where it doubly performs the transfiguration of self into world and world into self (“Me in place, the place in me”), and then of the transcendent into the immanent, the immanent into the transcendent. Heaney’s figure of crosshatched grass blades is the humble equivalent of Dante’s figure at the end of The Divine Comedy, a knot where all is in-woven into one. The figure of Dante’s Cosmic Rose admits a Reality beyond representation. It represents the point at which the figural transcends itself in a mystical singularity of One in Many, Many in One, and All in All. Heaney’s late woven nest and his earlier harvest bow are both “knowable coronas,” artistic “love knots” that envision the end of art as a peace passing our understanding. Each brings the longing for transcendence-within-immanence home in the homeliest of figures.




~Daniel Tobin, from his essay “Beyond Maps and Atlases” in The Soul Exceeds its Circumstances: The Later Poetry of Seamus Heaney, edited by Eugene O’Brien

(Notre Dame, 2018). 

Opening Seamus Heaney’s book The Human Chain, I was stunned by the first poem, “Had I not been awake.” The title is a quotation, and while I don’t recognize the source, I was struck from the beginning by the subject and setting, which was completely familiar to me. I often wake up in the middle of the night. Heaney describes this wakeful state when everyone else is asleep and the world is dark as a precious time. If the narrator had not been awake, alert, and in a state of readiness to hear the sudden gust of wind, he would have missed out on an experience that drew him out of the depths of sleep into the state of the quickening soul.




Had I Not Been Awake

By Seamus Heaney




Had I not been awake I would have missed it,

A wind that rose and whirled until the roof

Pattered with quick leaves off the sycamore




And got me up, the whole of me a-patter,

Alive and ticking like an electric fence:

Had I not been awake I would have missed it,




It came and went so unexpectedly

And almost it seemed dangerously,

Returning like an animal to the house,




A courier blast that there and then

Lapsed ordinary. But not ever

After. And not now.




Heaney describes awareness of the real world with leaves from a sycamore, animals outside the house, and winds that rise, whirl, and blast. The concrete descriptions in his poetry give the reader footholds to perceive his poem as a journal of his habits. He has trouble sleeping, he hears leaves hitting the roof. Yet what comes outside of his description, and between the lines on the page, moves beyond a record of the details into an event of transformation.

In the middle of the night, is he apprehending danger? Someone has suggested that Heaney’s “whole of me a-patter/ Alive and ticking like an electric fence” is the sign of his damaged heart reaching a new state of health after a long convalescence. (He had a serious heart attack in 2005). Clearly, it is evident that he is up, alert, and ready to work. Also, Heaney is describing a natural occurrence of wind and leaves on the roof as a "courier blast," which implies a message being sent, the awareness of a transfer of energy from a messenger or divine mediator. Poets often talk about that interim state when the consciousness, not far from the mind of sleep, can receive ideas without inhibitions of daily pressures. Sometimes a poem resolves itself in the mind overnight and is ready to assemble itself upon the page upon waking.

So Heaney is enervated by something that will end up in a poem he is composing. Afterward, the whole thing passes in an instant. Reality ensues, and the poem ends affirming that whatever it was that has happened does not rest with him now.

But he does remember experience thoroughly enough to write about it. And I remember, when reading the poem, how the vigorous iambic pentameter lines became inscribed in my mind. When I received a telephone call in the middle of the night some years later, I thought of Heaney’s poem. A nurse was on the line with a message for my husband who had fallen asleep downstairs. His mother was failing and he should go to her immediately.

Assessing the events of that night and the days afterward, I sensed a poem forming about the experience, and there was the first line: “I’m glad I was awake when the call came.” A look at Heaney’s poem assured me that I had not stolen the line measure for measure. In fact, how can I compare the music of the two, when the one is so much more superior? But I persisted. (The poem is addressed to my husband as “you,” and the epigraph in italics is from notes by the film director Ingmar Bergman).




Her Passing

By Joyce Wilson




Your mother’s death at 3:30 a.m.,

The quiet hour saved for births and deaths,

Came as she would have wanted it.




I’m glad I was awake when the call came

And I could tell you of the nurse’s plea

To hurry to your mother’s side.




I’m glad I was the one who chose her clothes,

the handkerchief embroidered with her name,

The silk chemise, the tailored blouse.




I’m glad I was the one who sang the songs,

Recited verses, stood and took the host,

And heard your brother speak his mind.




I’m glad I was prepared to find the gifts––

The call, the clothes, the ritual, the host––

That she arranged and left for me.




I’m glad I was the one to hear the news

About her spirit’s thrashing and escape

And not her roommate, who was deaf.




I’m glad I was awake to know the hour

Of her quick transformation into fire

And its admission into us.




(From Take and Receive, Kelsay Books, 2019)




My poem was also probably influenced by another poem by Heaney, Number 7 of the sonnet sequence “Clearances.” I read this poem now, and I barely see the connections. The scenes, the English languages, the cultures are markedly different. Yet it was the mood and the participation of those in attendance of a death that I took away from his lines. They prepared me for the way I could consider the unfolding of my life. Not my life lived, but considered.

The important thing to note, also, is that the subject of my poem, my mother-in-law, was also prepared. She called a special meeting with her son and told him that, at age 93, she was ready to die. She left things to be found that she knew we would need once she had passed. Her readiness made the aftermath a joy amid the sorrow.

I learned recently that those close to Heaney sensed that he was preparing for his death, that Human Chain is a collection of poems that speaks his farewell. Theo Dorgan suggests, in a lecture on Youtube, that we read the last poem in Human Chain (2010),” A Kite for Aibhin,” and compare it to “A Kite for Michael and Christopher ” from Station Island (1985). In the older poem, the kite is "the soul at anchor there," and the string is a line for the boys to hold, to feel “the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief” (44) and, out of responsibility passed down from father to son, to take the strain. In the new poem, the string breaks, . . . and—separate, elate---/ The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.” Might this be Heaney’s image of his impen-ding death, the isolation and freedom of it?


~Joyce Wilson


For Heaney silence was always a generative space, as was the act of listening into it. Recall, from The Haw Lantern, “A soul ramifying and forever/ Silent, beyond silence listened for” (“Clearances”). The silence he has left behind differs. I find myself turning to Human Chain again and again, amid the pandemic and its consequence, because I need his moral compass. The third to last poem in the volume, written in memory of the musician David Hammond, alludes to a section from Tennyson’s In Memoriam. ‘The door was open and the house was dark’ finds the speaker calling out Hammond’s name in an empty house, although he knows the answer “would be silence/ That kept me standing listening while it grew.” Those of us who loved Heaney and his poems are perhaps aware that we are engaged in a kind of collective listening to his silence right now. Silence allows us the space to remember, to reflect. If we are really lucky, it might show us how to move forward.

As September spills its golden light across my desk, I think of “The Baler,” where sounds (and the memories they evoke) collect and emerge as a chief concern: the cardiac clunk of the baling machine, the race of a tractor’s engine, woodpigeons cooing, all suggestive of the season’s, and our, ephemerality. However, the outdoor sounds quiet as the poem draws to its close. Once they fall silent, what remains is the voice of the painter Derek Hill, who says “he could bear no longer to watch/ The sun going down/ And asking please to be put/ With his back to the window.”

When we listen deeply, we become aware of what we do not hear. In poems that return to childhood scenes and figures, Human Chain offers few pointed references to the current political moment or to England (“imperially male”), although we still notice the textured Anglo-Saxon monosyllables and compound-epithets that marked his earlier poetry. We don’t hear the Petrarchan sonnet’s intake of breath and exhaled release or the Elizabethan sonnet’s resolving couplet. In fact, in this volume he often directs our attention towards sensation and away from hearing. A remarkable image closes “The door was open and the house was dark,” an image that intimates no distinctive sounds. On the doorstep, the speaker feels:




Only withdrawal, a not unwelcoming

Emptiness, as in a midnight hangar

On an overgrown airfield in late summer.




The empty house has a “not unwelcoming emptiness,” granted to it through the comparison to “a midnight hangar / On an overgrown airfield in late summer.” Why is the emptiness “not unwelcoming”? Within the confines of the poem, its silences, there linger memories of activity, of human warmth, past but invisibly present. The hangar itself is surrounded by a fertile world, “overgrown,” the tall grasses of late summer untouched by a mowing machine. We aren’t told about the natterjack toads or the corncrakes or perhaps even the reed warblers that sound out in late summer but here, at poem’s end, we almost hear them. I strain to -- especially to hear one more time the race of a Heaney tractor engine. Instead we face into the “not unwelcoming emptiness” of his absence, listening “open-eared to this day” into the silence he left behind.



~Meg Tyler

Doug Holder interviews poet Christine Tierney about her debut collection...

Bob Snyder’s Milky Way Accent (Dos Madres Press, 2020), reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos

 

Bob Snyder’s Milky Way Accent (Dos Madres Press, 2020), reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos




Bob Snyder, whose poems are gathered in Milky Way Accent, died twenty-five years ago. The manuscript memorializing his work has been prepared for publication by those he loved and mentored. In a preface to this volume, Snyder’s sister states that the poems “reflect love, family, West Virginia, crazy wisdom in the Buddhist tradition and countless other themes showing that in spite of (and because of) our hillbilly accents we are part of the Milky Way and the cosmos.” Snyder, though his poems spring from and reflect his West Virginian life, is not to be dismissed as a Regionalist interested only in depicting local color. Rather, his sister suggests, the poet “uses the prism of Appalachian experience” as a means of extending outward. The details of his poems are Snyder’s way of approaching the “Milky Way,” i.e., the “Universe.” Paradoxically, the more Snyder’s poems are authentically tuned to local voices and experiences that demonstrate how the Appalachian people “fit together in a fabulous backbone way,” the more they foster a Buddhist “one-ness.”

Snyder’s poem “Night Watch” illustrates the wide-angled lens through which he takes in the world: “above it all I’m the satellite watching/ lonesome cities lighting the Trans-Siberian Railway clusters/ of burnpipes on the Persian Gulf/ . . . squidlights flooding the Sea of Japan.” Yet the poet “keep[s] an eye on the whole planet,” and also draws the readers attention to the significance of minute detail: “I spy out David Boothe—hey Boothe! You down there/ in your bachelor trailer on Fenwick Mountain/ . . . / straighten up! There’s a blue baby mouse in that pile of dishes!” The poet sees not only “the flames across the African grasslands/ Amazonia dotted with slash and burn” but also “the campfire that Boothe and Billy have scattered.” Snyder, from his perch in the Milky Way establishes a connection among the fires of the world by containing them within the vision of a single poem: “a coal shining here . . . another over there/ what a spark-eyed sight to see.”

Though the language of Snyder’s poems is colloquial and the details and imagery drip with local color, their historical and literary allusiveness connect their immediacy to a greater world. In “Billy Greenhorn’s Tradegy [sic]” the lovelorn title figure, a stand-in for Snyder, refers to himself as the “Great Beer Joint Poet” while he “sits at midnight/ on the cold cold statehouse steps/ nestled on the Orion Bridge/ two thirds out the Milky Way radius.” As he sits, he imagines himself as the object of desire of famous women: “let me go you dirty dog/ it’s Billy Greenhorn I love/ (sez Heloise to Abelard)/ and [as] Mark Anthony smooches Cleopatra/ . . . / she rolls them Egyptian eyes/ and sighs and says/ O to have been born in the future in the province of West Virginia/ then I could have obtained a REAL MAN.” In “Kerouac in Charleston,” Snyder envisions the writer literally “on the road” in West Virginia. The visiting writer is “humble illusory” and ensconced in a kind of zen oneness as “sunfaced Mason says to moonfaced Dixon/ we got to draw no line nowhere.”

When Snyder celebrates the beauty of women in his poem “West Virginia’s Darlin Gal,” he does so by creating a bouquet of compliments drawn from the local roadhouse: “you’re no more’n inside the roadhouse door/ when everyone winks and whispers your name/ and law! You’re not one bit embarrassed/ but just tickled that someone—someone!—cares.” Snyder observes, “for you the pay phone rings off the hook/ for you bats circle Butch’s shingle job/ on the roof of the roistering honky-tonk/ for you Roy lurks in the parking lot/ nursing a tire iron for his rivals/ . . . / and for you just you/ the lil orphans in red sweetpea pajamas/ fold their sleepweak palms and pray for sugar.” In “Welfare Witch” Snyder captures the ensorcelling power of West Virginia womanhood: “Buster the canary mumed an oh/ No sooner than your slick sole hit sill./ Goldfish huddled behind the white chateau/ . . ./ This gal’s famous, I thought./ You tossed creek gypsy hair, flashed green eyes./ Trashy. Irresistible. Hot to trot.” But there is more to this woman than temptress, and Snyder’s concluding imagery connects the object of his fascination to the fertile land of his home: “[You] gave out such a wild will to show/ What went past sireening. Here was/ Stronger scythe. Broader swath. And longer row.”

In “To Blossom Dearie” Snyder describes the women he has known as confidantes, educators and symbols of a world unified by time, place and desire: “O the women of the fifties/ hard-loving women of the fifties/ the slinky smoke of their cigarettes/ rides in rings to the everlasting/ ebb and flow of human music--/ for one reefer lights another.” These women invite Snyder into their world: “they greet me/ HI BOBSVILLE WHAT’S HAPPENING” and treat him to “stories of exes and lovers/ in jealous little pictures . . . / a private collection of worries/ come down from La Boheme.” Snyder rhapsodizes about these women, suggesting that they not only educated him to the ways of the world, but set him on his path as a recorder of human emotions and feelings: “Out of love and boppawhatnot/ they made me their historian/ showed me what to feel and when/ and how to slide with the seasons/ (going through changes, doing takes)/ all that/ I owe to the women of the fifties.”

Snyder, having established in many of his poems the general truths that can be drawn from the specific, has provided a context for his close treatment of details in other poems, allowing readers to share a unifying experience through his depiction of a specific moment. “Payne’s Place” is a paean to the memory of a single kiss: “of all them fifty thousand-odd kisses/ there was one in particular/ in your old black Chevy/ outside Payne’s beer joint/ . . . / you pressed into my lips/ that cracked half a benny/ and all at once laid the kissereenymoe/ on your wide-eyed Christ of the cornfields.”

Snyder’s poems in Milky Way Accent demonstrate both the universalizing beauty of a remembered moment, as well as the truths to be gleaned from experience over time. The wonders of the galaxy are found in the metonymic features of small town West Virginia life; the vivid colloquialisms of Snyder’s verse celebrate the moment they depict—but they are the fruit that draw our attention to the tree that bears them.

Rejane Musis : Somerville's Practitioner of Praticutuca

Somerville has a large population of Brazilian folks. Where I live in Union Square there is a large Brazilian Market and before the pandemic, a Brazilian butcher. There are still a number of Brazilian businesses peppered around the streets of our city, and this ethnic group makes big contributions to our collective culture. So I was lucky to speak to Rejane Musis about her program to educate kids about Portuguese and Brazilian culture.

How has it been for you living in Somerville? With the large Brazilian population here--it must in some ways feel like home.

I arrived in Boston in 2011, now I live in Everett, but Somerville is a city I love.  I work a lot with Somerville residents. And yes, I feel a little piece of Brazil in some of the streets of Somerville (and I love it!).



You are a practitioner of Praticutuca--an educational tool that uses Brazilian pop culture for learning and cultural identity. Can you give us some more details about the program, and has the Somerville schools been receptive to it?

The Praticutuca is a project that teaches Portuguese heritage through language, music, and literacy. We have existed since 2005 in Brazil, and we found a home in Somerville. The Somerville schools are an awesome partner, sharing our videos and spreading the word about our group classes which are always free and now online.



Tell us about your Portuguese TV show.

We have a YouTube channel with music videos, storytelling and interviews. Everything is produced with kids from Brazilian families and everything is in Portuguese, YouTube.com/praticutuca



Sometime folks mistake Spanish for Portuguese-- there is a big difference between the two languages, right? 

Sure! They are two totally different Romance languages. In my opinion the mistake is proof about how some  people don't  know about Latin America. I never saw that mistake between Portuguese and Italian or French, for example.



Do you think , through this program-- and in this racially charged climate--- you can address racism?

Of course! I just got approved the BIPOC grant by the Somerville Arts Council, and I will produce 10 videos for kids, in Portuguese, talking about racism here and in Brazil, and readings and singing by black authors/composers.



How has your work been affected by the Pandemic?

Deeply affected. We are a family of musicians, and don’t have the possibility of playing gigs and teaching our group classes. This has affected us financially and mentally. I hope now, with the new president, we can turn this page, and I hope soon Brazil will have the same chance to as well.

Newton Free Library Poetry Series Feb 9, 2021 Lloyd Schwartz, Gail Mazur and Danielle Jones

The Open Door by Ruth Smullin

 

The Open Door

by Ruth Smullin

Fishing Line Press

Georgetown, Kentucky

ISBN 978-1-64662-356-3




The 26 poems of Ruth Smullin’s chapbook, The Open Door, arrived in the mail just in time to provide perfect biscuits to go with my wake-up-from-your-nap-and-face-up-to-the-afternoon coffee; they so absorbed my attention that I stretched out my arousal, compelled to finished the poems before I finished my coffee.




The poems of this collection, with its ekphrastic title poem on a painting of Bonnard, are life drawings from the speaker’s earliest memories until as a grandmother she places her grandchildren into a Bruegel composition in “Yom Kippur Under the Night Sky:”




On this eve of the day of atonement, it's hard

to feel solemn – the balmy October evening warm

and humid as a summer night, sky a blur of gray,

the moon fuzzy with moisture.




Twelve hundred chairs line the parking lot.

Sitting in the back row, listening to rush-hour sounds

from nearby streets, I watch families trickle in,

find seats and friends, catch up on news – children

of all ages and colors, jeans and striped socks,

tutus and leotards, Superman and Alice.




Intoxicated by the night air, the children, the moment,

I think of my two-week-old grandson,

born into a new moon, a new year.




Her strokes are sure, sometimes pointillistic and, when necessary, as fluid as these from the initial prose poem “Yellow,” which, besides being a dissertation on the color, “Sunflower, goldfinch, goldenrod, yellow jackets on a ripe peach,” is also an announcement of the time spanned by this collection from the yellow of “fat rendered from a chicken in Grandma’s kitchen,” to an impoverished present where “These day corn is too yellow, too sweet, watermelon yellow when it should be red; the seeds we loved to spit, gone.”




That mild complaint about seedless water melons provides a hint of an elegiac tone shared by many of these poems of which “Old Letters” (she has “saved every letter. … Six boxes full”) is a good example; here are its concluding stanzas:




Did you mean to sound so cold and hostile?

My mother writes. Dearest, his mother begins,

the phlox is blooming, we’re looking forward

to your visit.




Sarah is growing up at an alarming rate,

my now-dead friend tells me, she is thin,

complicated and moody –




Reading their letters an act of mourning

that sharpens the sense of loss.




I suspect Ruth’s favorite impressionist is Bonnard since, besides the title poem, the only other frankly ekphrastic poem is “Bonnard’s Nude in the Bath and Small Dog”:




In the bath, she floats, calmed

by warmth, wetness, a sensation




of lift. Around her, violet walls swell

blue-green tiles ripple. She drifts




like kelp on the open sea, the tub

holding her steady.




In addition to writing about painting she frequently writes as if painting a still life:




Pomegranate




on a white plate, my own still life.

Fruit lavish as a rose colors the room,

pleases my eye.




For weeks I study its odd shape,

angles like cheekbones, skin taut

with the fullness of what's hidden,

the blossom and a tiny crown.




or an intimate landscape:




Raspberry Patch in Winter




Rising from deep snow, the canes stand spare,

naked – bright calligraphy in late sun.




Their long shadows – delicate, insubstantial –

reach out across the white expanse.




But regrettably, as my initial pleasure was interrupted upon reaching the final poem, I must stop my praise somewhere, so I shall do it by letting the poet speak for herself about loss with the first lines from “Lost,” a poem where she approaches grieving with humor:




Why do people say we “lost” him when he died?

as if we'd left them on the beach by mistake

like a forgotten flip-flop, after we packed up

towels, shovels, sunblock, and somehow overlook




our husband and father asleep in the sand where we

buried him up to his neck, face covered with a hat

to protect him from sun. If we’d glanced back

from the car before driving home, surely




we'd have noticed the hat, the mound of sand.




Now, when you have obtained your copy from somewhere other than Amazon, such as with an old fashioned mail order from the publisher (Finishing Line Press, P.O. Box 1626, Georgetown, Kentucky 40324) make yourself a cup of coffee or tea or hot chocolate, sit where you have good light, and have some good reading.

—Wendell Smith

Somerville Artist Janeann Dill: An animated animator, painter, educator and filmmaker.

 

 Somerville Artist Janeann Dill: An animated painter, educator and filmmaker.

This city offers a plethora of choices of talented artists to interview. Janeann Dill, caught my eye and interest--so I managed to catch up with her for an ( online) interview.

Interview by Doug Holder

Can you tell us about your Somerville Experience?

After relocating to the Boston area in 2011, I made a conscious choice to establish my studio in Somerville. When attending an ICA retrospective exhibition and memorial for an important experimental animation artist, Karen Aqua. As an experimental animation historian, I had been well aware of her artwork for years. I understood how influential and compelling her art films were for the City of Somerville as well as internationally. At this exhibition, I had the pleasure to meet and speak extensively with Karen’s husband, Ken Field. Ken Field is also an internationally recognized and compelling jazz artist, musician, and composer. Longer story short, with Ken’s generous help and suggestions, I was led to my artist studio at Miller Street in Somerville. I have worked in my studio and resided in Somerville for some seven years now and still believe that my decisions to live here were good ones! To name only one example among the many opportunities Somerville offers its artists, the Somerville Arts Council is an impressive arts organization with numerous successful programs for its artists and for Somerville’s citizens at-large. https://www.janeanndill-artist.com/somervilleartscouncil

You are a painter and filmmaker. Which came first?  And do they inform each other?

I love this question! Thank you for asking. My first long-lasting professional career was as a painter of works on paper and paintings on canvas. Experimental animation came into my view years later when I realized that I wanted my paintings “to move in time” when an Artist In Residence at the American Center In Paris. Little had I realized the profound conceptual influence the animated film, FANTASIA, would have on my paintings prior to living in Paris. I was, however, quite aware of the influences of music, poetic literature, and choreography on my paintings.

You are a conceptual artist. You deal with the "action of thought"   Can you explain this?

I teach my students in higher education how vital it is to at least try to understand their singular creative process as a disciplinary strategy in addition to being a medium or craft. I teach the importance of understanding what a concept is, and how to have one.

A concept is an idea. An idea comes into view through research. When research merges with intuition, creative intelligence informs and balances an artist’s output. In other words, one must take action when a thought arrives to reveal itself to an artist. It is a fleeting moment and comes quietly. Thought is ethereal. The act of hearing/seeing/sensing thought leads to another action, i.e., research. Research is meant to discern the impulse for idea. This takes work. Research is are acts of investigation to clarify an idea. For example, making a film is an arduous and laborious pursuit. Keeping a North Star of Idea in view during a lengthy creative process is essential to “remembering” why and how the artist decided to commit to this particular work of art in the first place. This is true for composing music, choreography, experiments in science, writing poetry, theatrical performances, and any visual works of art. I hope this is helpful …

You directed an award-winning documentary about the noted experimental filmmaker Jules Engel. Can you talk a bit about his work and your relationship to him? 



I am the Authorized Biographer of Jules Engel (1909 - 2003). The biographical components yet to be distributed are a feature cinematic essay film (documentary) and book. The short film, “An Artist for All Seasons,” is in many ways a seven-minute introduction to the enormous and largely unknown art historical legacy of Engel and his art students. A consummate arts educator and mentor to four decades of artist-students, Engel was the Founding Director of the first animation program in America to award a higher education degree in Animation, California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). As one of his students and Engel as my Mentor at CalArts, Jules Engel’s teachings are not only visible and tangible in Los Angeles, his far-reaching influences are evidenced in New England as well. http://www.Jules-Engel.com

I read he was also a poet.

Jules Engel approached his experimental films and animations as a form of art founded on the principles of timing, rhythm, and personal expression. In much the same way, Engel’s poems are extensions of capturing a gesture of sound and motion in words.

Looking at your work on canvas it seems you use an orgasm of vivid colors--and they seem to project a certain energy--like the formation of a distant galaxy.

I am blushing! I suppose remnants of my Southern upbringing are responding! Hahaha

I’ve never framed my paintings as ‘orgasms’ of color; in this same way, I’ve never considered the Big-Bang an orgasmic event of our universe. That said, I understand how my paintings can be described in this way. I’m not offended by the comment. I did wonder, however, if this description would occur if these paintings had been created by a male artist? I ask out of curiosity. Do you think of the formation of a distant galaxy as an orgasm of color?

The formation of galaxies has been described to me by an astrophysicist to whom I showed my work early in his career and mine as “a kind-of colorful soup.” I am, indeed, creating an animated short film that involves the combining of NASA images (Harvard website) and my original images in which I imagined what is on the other side of the sky. This series of paintings were created in the South of France prior to the launching of the Hubble Telescope for deep space exploration. These pre-Hubble works may be viewed virtually on my website.

https://www.janeanndill-artist.com/creation-of-a-universe-project

Is it hard painting intangible things rather than, let's say, having a bowl of fruit in front of you? You must be very intuitive.

As mentioned, my view is that the intuitive is informed by intelligence, i.e., research! I teach a philosophical approach that is grounded in the discipline of an actual creative process … after years of experience (or no experience at all) the challenge for any artist, young or old, is to remain committed to seeking new fields of inquiry (for themselves) when blockages show up. I can say with certainty, blockages or plateaus or detours and distractions will present themselves to the creative process. In terms of external or internal stimuli for an artist, the distinctions of painting a bowl of fruit in front of me and intangible evidence are both a kind of grappling with the blank canvas, or the piece of white paper in front of a poet. One learns to “kill the white” (canvas or paper) with differing strategies attached to outcomes. Idea is intangible but a bowl of fruit is not just a bowl of fruit. Not even in Photorealist art works. Lighting, placement, and choice of spatial relationships all exemplify the grappling of an idea. Skillful execution imposes a demand whether or not the object is seen in actuality or in the mind’s eye.

Why should people view your art?

Why not? My paintings offer a sense of the mysterious and my experimental films offer a sense of inquiry and curiosity of the “in-between” of rhythm, timing, and pacing. Both challenge prior assumptions and evoke the viewer into the presence of the now - this is not something I consciously intended when emerging as a young artist nor do I consciously intend it now as a mature artist. These are simply responses as the art work’s first viewer.

The text, philosophies, information and defining descriptions written, composed and authored by (c) Janeann Dill are reserved rights. Citation and written permission directly from Janeann Dill is required to publish beyond this one-time use for online and print publication granted to Doug Holder and the Somerville Times.

The Great Empty: A Renga in Time of Corona Gary Duehr

The Great Empty: A Renga in Time of Corona

Gary Duehr

Grisaille Press [2020]

$9.95

https://www.garyduehr.com/poetry




Review by David P. Miller




The Japanese term renga indicates a series of linked poems. Each poem consists of five lines in two “stanzas” with specific syllabic counts, the first with three lines of 5-7-5 syllables, the second with two lines of 7-7 syllables. This, at least, is how the form manifests in standard English-language practice: the relevant concept in Japanese practice is mora or “sound units” rather than syllables. If 5-7-5 seems familiar, it is: the first renga stanza, called hokku, evolved into what we know as haiku. Typically, renga are written collaboratively, and can be quite lengthy. The linkages between poems may be based on different attributes, such as (free-)association, comparison, or contrast. (There are interesting comparisons with more recent forms such as the surrealist “exquisite corpse.” On a global, multimedia scale, have a look at the collaborative Telephone Project: https://phonebook.gallery/.)




Gary Duehr makes a thoughtful, evocative contribution to the literature of the COVID-19 pandemic with The Great Empty. This renga includes forty linked poems in orthodox English-language form. As suggested by the title, Duehr especially evokes the sense of alienation and social abandonment which marked the onset of the crisis, in the late winter and spring of 2020. I’m writing this around the New Year at the top of 2021. Although we are still far from coming to grips with the disaster, on all levels beginning with the devastation of individual lives, families, and communities, the situation is no longer new. This work recalls what it was like to have the pandemic suddenly crashed down on us.




The Great Empty is not a group product. Nevertheless, Duehr makes use of different forms of linkage between poems, suggesting associative flows discovered in the process of writing. Individual words and phrases may be transmuted. A key image in the last line of poem 2 mutates in the second line of poem 3:




This face mask, smudged, torn blossom. (2)




On a U.S. map,

The pale pink smudges swell up, (3)




Stark contrasts may mark the space between poems. Poem 22 ends with an image of the early community applause for first responders: “Block by block, Brooklyn’s neighbors / Clap their hands: a pond’s ripples.” Compare this with the first stanza of 23: “Isolate, apart / A tribe of total strangers, / We roam dusty streets.” Images themselves may transform, as between poems 24 and 25. 24 ends with an image of late afternoon quiet, from the cessation of subtle sound: “Somewhere outside a dog yelps. / The house ticks, hums, falls silent.” This is followed by an image of nighttime quiet disrupted by sound similar to, but different from, ticking: “Two a.m. Hard rain / Nails the walls down. Still awake, / You miss everything.”




Particularly complex associations link poems 34 and 35. Here is 34:




These tiny moments:

Look how bright the house-fronts are!

Night slides into day.




From the next room, the tapping

Of computer keys: light rain.




Poem 35 begins with a line repeated verbatim from 34. It sets into motion connections between rain/river, present/past, and house fronts/skyscrapers:




Night slides into day.

The house a watery dream.

A lifetime ago,




The river in Chicago

Lit up by sunny towers.




The Great Empty is, of course, more than a compendium of linkage techniques. Duehr expresses the combined shock and melancholy of the early COVID-19 period, when we learned that the disease was going to mean much more than a cruise-ship infestation. Poem 5 imagines the sudden disappearance of normal crowds from city streets as an optical illusion: “As in a 19th-century / Tintype, only transient ghosts.” From 9: “Here’s The Great Empty: / Terminals, hotel lobbies, / Train stations, plazas.” The crises of emergency hospitalizations and surges in mass deaths manifest as surreal images of the mundane: “Beds flank a parking garage. / In a field, white tents billow” (11). Our lives’ in-person events, abruptly cancelled, resulted in blanks evoking hospitals and cemeteries: “Calendar squares lie empty: / Pillows, graves” (16). The sense of being unmoored expands to include time itself: “The day / Begins its long trip – // Alone, without any bags” (29).




At the same time, the voice does not settle for despair. The poet repeatedly re-centers his perception. For example, while poem 6 begins, “We are ghosts, transients,” it concludes, “In his drive, a dad unloads / 12-packs from his Range Rover.” “Forsythias spark” in 10, there’s “a din of starlings” in 20. To focus on such phenomena is not to bypass the catastrophe. Rather, it’s to keep one’s fears and cautions situated in what has in fact not changed, what is also still real. It is not a matter of sentimentality but of psychological survival. Poem 32 melds The Great Empty’s most affirmative statement with an observation that’s acute as it is uneasy:




What can be read there?

Einstein: live as if all things

Are miraculous.




Two branches, high up, rubbed raw:

A violin’s plaintive cry.




We’ve seen that poem 35 moves to the memory a past life in Chicago. This revery continues through poem 37 and then pivots, as if a reminiscent daydream wakes into contemplation of early morning and its qualities: “The world falls open— / Breathing, quiet—the glossy / Red mouths of tulips” (39). With the 40th poem, the renga concludes, not in an easily-grasped redemption, but with space for each moment and sensation:




Between breaths, a pause.

A quiet slice of Thisness.

She’s asleep upstairs.




Your day has not yet opened.

Let each thought stretch out, release.




COVID-19 has confronted us with challenges that are, in their totality, beyond individual comprehension. Poets have provided all manner of responses, contributing perspectives that, combined, help us to understand the depth and extent of the crisis. See, for example, Voices Amidst the Virus, published by the Lily Poetry Review Press (disclosure: that anthology includes a poem of my own). The distinctions of Gary Duehr’s The Great Empty are its formal elegance and its meditative quality. While not denying the pain and alienation of this time, it allows us to step back and reset. It turns out that emptiness means room for panic to subside, as well as the vanishing of vehicles and crowds.




(Duehr has also published a sequel, The Great Empty 2, including “infrared, black and white photos taken in the spring and summer of the pandemic by the author, which reflect the apocalyptic, science fiction-like nature of the times.”)

New Book coming soon from the Ibbetson Street Press/Endicott College Young Writer Series

 

****  The Ibbetson Street Press/Endicott College Young Writers Series will have a new book out this month by talented undergraduate Koby Hirschaut

https://youngpoetseries.wordpress.com/

"The title of Left on Read evokes not just an unanswered text message but also the violation of a traffic rule. Like a driver turning left on red, the poet takes us in a direction that is risky and unsanctioned, veering within the space of a single poem from pastoral dreams full of flowers and sunlight into nightmares in which posies appear to be grey bullets. Ultimately, however, Hirschaut’s achievement here lies in the way he explores the space between dreams and nightmares: the sleepless nights and early mornings full of grainy coffee that the poet sips alone, “lips pressed against nothing but porcelain.” Rejecting the comfortable clichés of love poetry and other “memories that aren’t mine,” Hirschaut plunges instead into a stark reality that he calls “undersold and ours”—in which, for example, an anonymous girl who appears “golden” turns out to be lit by the neon sign of a convenience store. Hirschaut is not afraid to indulge in this kind of “neon fantasy” (in fact, he suggests that fantasy is essential to self-discovery), but he is at his best when he shows us how the poet’s dreams are less compelling than their raw material-- the everyday experiences that make up what Yeats called famously "the foul rag and bone shop of the heart."   ----Sam Alexander/  Associate Professor of English/Endicott College

Doug Holder interviews poet and writer Kevin Carey about his crime novel...

The Age of Infinity and Disappearance in Jane Hirshfield’s new collection of poems: Ledger

Jane Hirshfield

The Age of Infinity and Disappearance in Jane Hirshfield’s new collection of poems Ledger


article by Michael Todd Steffen




You can be young Joe, thirteen years old, ridden with the anxiety of time and mortality at the discovery that the universe is finite, in Woody Allen’s Radio Days. Or you can be an American poet just past being fifty-something, writing an ode to the precedent decade of your life, as Jane Hirshfield, from her new book Ledger (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2020, ISBN 9780525657804), in the poem “TO MY FIFTIES.”




It is not so much an address by Hirshfield to her fifth decade of life, her fifties. It is to the substance of the maturity of her craft, the opening of inspiration, where a balance or equality has been struck between the poet and her light, creating the “You” of other within self to be reckoned with, with an exact reversal of terms expressing this equality, echoing the title of her visionary 2013 collection Come Thief:




You opened me

as a burglar opens a house with a silent alarm.

I opened you

as a burglar opens a house with a silent alarm.




It registers a memorable moment akin to “the uncertain hour before morning” section in T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding—“So I assumed a double part, and cried And heard another’s voice cry, ‘What! Are you here?’” Yet Hirshfield’s unraveling of the climactic moment turns at once to the familiar and to parable:




We knew we had to work quickly,

bears ecstatic, not minding the stinging.




The short poem goes on to unfold on a variation of anaphora: “Or say it was this:…Or this…Say:…”—concluding:




We were our own future,

a furnace invented to burn itself up.




For its facility, John Keats’s conclusion to one of his famous odes, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty…” has brought him, one of the undisputed Pleiades of English poetry, to considerable critical scrutiny.




But we do not scrutinize poets these days for their conclusions so much as for their faculties with associations, their ability to leap from association to association. (Eliot esteems the associative sensibility—yet in an age more beset with stultification than with diversity.)




The two middle sections of “TO MY FIFTIES” display Hirshfield’s virtuosity with transition, which might be identified as the virtuosity of the collection Ledger as a whole. One strophe reassures us with the familiar and particular, in this instance, of doing stuff at home, in an act of preparing a gift for others:




We were the wax paper bag

in which something was wrapped.

What was inside us

neither opaque nor entirely transparent.

Afterwards, we were folded into neat creases.




This is a sort of witness, metaphor of things (wax paper and then the things wax paper holds—“neither opaque nor entirely transparent”).




Yet it is important and honest for Hirshfield to recognize the poem as itself in textual terms:




Say we were paired

parentheses—




still evoking figures—




cupping two dates, a hyphen,

and much that continues unspoken—




“unspoken” to announce even the silence, the margins of white paper bespeaking the line breaks of verse that make poems different from prose.




Hirshfield’s poetry has been selected for seven editions of Best American Poetry. She is a distinguished member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, earning Kay Ryan’s praise as “a true person of letters—an eloquent and exacting poet, first, but in addition the author of enduring essays and influential translations and anthologies…bringing the good news about poetry to nearly every state of the union…[with] her elegant ambassadorship for poetry in the greater world (…Japan, Poland, China).”




Hirshfield demonstrates a keen awareness of her times. She may use the fog and mirrors of the trade where they are needed, where we are less concerned, such as with conclusions. She knows our agendas are full and she is mindful to fit her carefully termed and mystifying poems into our fifteen or so minutes here and there. We like passing by and stopping door to door but we don’t like those doors locking shut in our wake.




We live in this early 21st Century, in the moment of the poem just a little less than a well-spaced page, which may account for the rampant proliferation of poems on the accommodating Internet in the last 15 years or so. The good of this phenomenon has ever been with us, in the stars above, with the accompanying vertigo of contemplating—like young Joe in Radio Days—their vastness and finitude, and accelerated disappearance.




As Rosanna Warren reminds us, Hirshfield’s “poems appear simple, and are not. Her language, in its cleanliness and transparency, poses riddles of a quietly metaphysical nature.”




The poems in Ledger uphold this “sensual philosophy.” Hirshfield can do this with the butterfly net of a couplet, as in the concluding grasp of “NINE PEBBLES”:




This body, still walking.

The wind must go around it.




She does it more elaborately, comparable to the early 17th-century “Metaphysical” poets, in poems like “VEST” with its “many pockets,” concretizing with this single image the several ways diversity and compartmentalization hang in the balance of our lives as well as in our closets:




It is easy to forget

which holds the reading glasses,

which the small pen,

which the house keys,

the compass and whistle, the passport…




The poem proceeds characteristically with a jarring transition from the familiar and reassuring to the less-defined and potentially disturbing:




To forget at last for weeks

even the pocket holding the dates

of digging a place for my sister’s ashes,

the one holding the day

where someone will soon enough put my own.




The vest of Hirshfield’s poem speaks to this time of COVID isolation by holding in another of its pockets, for our restlessness and searching, remnants to our global transport and connectivity:




I rummage and rummage—

transfers

for Munich, for Melbourne,

to Oslo.

A receipt for a Singapore kopi.




To familiar readers the passage is like the closing of a dormer window opened in Hirshfield’s 2015 collection The Beauty, from a poem like the Norman Rockwell painting titled “A Common Cold”:




A common cold, we say—

common, though it has encircled the globe

seven times now handed traveler to traveler

though it has seen the Wild Goose Pagoda in X’ian

seen Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto in Monterchi

seen the emptied synagogues in Krasnogruda

seen the since-burned souk of Aleppo…




Lists are important—perhaps even necessary—in a time where events of magnitude follow one upon another, like the 30 named hurricanes the troubling year of 2020 has delivered to our quarantined and boarded-up doors and windows.

Rita Baum Holder ( March 16, 1926 to Dec. 30, 2020)

 
(Left to Right)  Sarah Holder, Rita Holder, Doug Holder, Josh Holder, Donald Holder, and Phil Segal

Rita Baum Holder
( March 16, 1926 to Dec. 30, 2020)


Rita Baum Holder--wife of the late Lawrence J. Holder, beloved mother of Don and Doug Holder, grandmother to Josh and Sarah Holder, and mother-in law to Evan Yionoulis and Dianne Robitaille, passed away Dec 30, 2020 at Mercy Hospital in Rockville Center, NY due to complications from cancer. Holder was born in the Bronx, attended James Monroe High School, and later graduated from Brooklyn College. For many years Holder was a high school biology teacher in the New York City School System. Holder was passionate about the arts--theatre, literature, opera, and film, and instilled this sensibility in her two sons. Later she was proud to attend the Tony Awards, where her son Donald, a noted theatrical lighting designer was honored on several occasions. She also attended many poetry readings that her son Doug was involved in, and even made former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky laugh. For many years Holder was an active member of the Arts Guild of Rockville Centre and received an award for her many contributions. Holder and her late husband Lawrence were world-travelers, and she often documented her trips with wonderful photographs and storytelling. Holder was a volunteer at the Museum of Natural History in New York City--a position she was very passionate about. She will be missed by many--friends, former students, and family. She was a devoted wife, friend, and grandmother. May she rest in peace.

Murder in the Marsh by Kevin Carey

 

 The year 1980. The city of Revere. It is a coastal town right outside of Boston, but the Hub's skyline looks like OZ to the denizens of this gone-to-seed burg.

Carey, who is originally from Revere--knows the walk and can talk the talk. He is able to catch the bullshit banter of the barroom, and the invective from the numerous poseurs, thugs and cops, that circle each other in a compost heap of their own making. Carey's brutal dialogue reminds me of my favorite Boston crime writers--the late George Higgins  ( "The Friends of Eddie Coyle").

Have if you will, detective Eddie Devlin. A 40ish-- disgraced cop--with a bad elbow. He has only one true friend, and a wheelchair  bound-- almost girlfriend-- Gwen. She is a muse to this brooding poor man's Hamlet, as he tries to track the murderer who ruined his career and life.

Carey chooses the Marsh in Revere--a poignant symbol of all the hidden and repressed secrets that  are below the scum of the surface. The Marsh is a cesspool of corpses and rotting detritus--it envelopes the whole story.

Devlin is on a journey to redeem himself, and Carey brings his crazed quest into full bloom. He portrays Devlin as almost as feral as his prey.

I can see echoes of Dennis Lehane, and Robert Parker in this story. But this story has a unique Revere feel to it, with all its greasy fried clams, stunted lives, rotgut booze, and the biker bars, wonderfully brought to seedy life.

Somerville Ceramicist Arthur Halvorsen Brings Flower Power To The City

The hippies of the 60s evoked flower power in their fight against the "system."  Now in 2021, Arthur Halvorsen conjures up the power again, in the city of Somerville and beyond...

Arthur Halvorsen is a graduate of Maine College of Art where he received his BFA in Ceramics.
Arthur's work uses bright colors, textures and patterns on earthenware, gathering inspiration from pop art, coloring books and tattoos. Arthur is a Somerville Mudflat studio artist, he teaches classes and workshops at Mudflat but also teaches at Lesley University in Cambridge MA and and other venues nationally as a visiting artist. His work has been featured in Ceramics Monthly, Pottery Making Illustrated, Studio Potter, ArtScope Magazine and on WCVB Channel 5; Chronicle. Arthur has been recognized as a 2019 Brother Thomas Fellow recipient for his work in the field of ceramics within the Boston area.
Recently Arthur has been painting murals with spray paint throughout Boston. Keep up to date with Arthur more accurately on Instagram @arthurhalvorsen



How has it been for a creative person living in Somerville?


I have to say that moving to Somerville, as an Artist, brings with it a lot of benefits because of the Somerville Arts Council and all that they have to offer artists that live in Somerville. I couldn’t take advantage of what they have to offer in the past because I didn’t live in Somerville. I didn’t have the residency box checked off. I have lived in South Boston, Dorchester, Braintree, Newton,  and Chelsea, but I had my studio at Mudflat Studios on Broadway here in Somerville-- since we moved to the new building in 2011. I haven’t looked back since. Also I’m now a 10-15min walk to my studio from where I live. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing, or a bad thing. I think it’s a little bit of both and I say that because I am an insomniac, so when I don’t or cant sleep, I’m in my studio.


You work as a ceramicist , but your recent project is spray painting flowers on abandoned storefronts in the city. Is this another direction for you, or just an extension of your work? Was this spurred on by the Pandemic?


I see both my work in clay, and my more recent work with spray paint as relating to one another and complimenting each other. The clay came first I have to say, but the imagery I use of flowers translates so well into spray paint. I think that has all to do with the thick black line. That line to me is an incredible vehicle for getting ideas across. I reference kids coloring books, stained glass windows, tattoos and drawings done with Sharpies-- like I did as a kid.


The spray paint did come out of the Pandemic. I work at a hardware store in the South End, and after one of the protests in the city there was rioting and looting. At the same time I had been self- quarantining  away from Mudflat because I am a front line worker, I haven’t caught Covid luckily, thankfully, but back in 2009 I had Swine Flu (I survived the Swine, ‘09!), and I didn’t know if having had that made me more susceptible or whatever to catching Covid, so I stayed away for 13 weeks. That made me so depressed. I’m an artist and I feel as thought I need to work with my hands, I need to do something with my hands, I need to be creative. So the store where I work was hit by looters and we had plywood in the windows, we sell spray paint, and that's where I was hit by lightning with an idea… So I think for a second.... I’m depressed, a lot of other people are depressed what can I do to make other people smile? What is something that I could do for the people of city, where we have been through so much. Flowers, flowers are what you give to show someone they’re special, to say “I’m sorry” to send your condolences for a friend or family member that has passed away, etc. Flowers are very powerful, they can sometimes carry a lot of meaning and take on a life of their own, so I didn’t reinvent the wheel. I did what I knew I could do best and just started spray painting my flowers around the city. It was already in my wheelhouse but only on what I call the band-aids. One could say that I am vandalizing the buildings.  But to be honest--  but I am only hitting plywood or rigid foam insulation, the band-aids. I am not and will not “tag” or spray paint a brick wall or something of the like, unless I have permission. At one point throughout the city, I had 48 spray painted murals. I also find it interesting about  which ones do stick around or are kept up-- available to be viewed by the public. I assume after the pandemic that some of these murals will migrate and have a new life. They may be  put in peoples' homes as art, to or they the art on the interiors of restaurants and local businesses. It is is going to be fascinating to me, where they end up.


For your ceramic objects you often take banal things like buses, city buildings, etc... that you infuse with colorful, bright, and provocative images. Do you see the extraordinary in the ordinary?


Short answer: Yes I do. Throughout my life I have a tendency to give inanimate objects personalities. For example I see the traffic cones and construction barriers as the urban wildflower. Imagine looking at a hill, field, meadow, whatever, you are going to see flowers and weeds, and more nature sprinkled in there as well. When I see the traffic cone as doing the same thing. They both signal for your attention and both are about survival, one is to entice a bee to pollinate it, the other is screaming “WATCH OUT!” or “DANGER, DANGER!” They’re both calling attention to themselves for a variety of reasons. I like to draw what I commonly see around me and make it special.


Why did you choose ceramics as your genre?


I graduated from Maine College of Art in 2007. When it was time to declare our majors I was torn between Ceramics and Photography, and in all honesty I didn’t want to be photographing weddings for the rest of my life. I would rather make the cake stand for the wedding. After watching the Reality TV show  Bridezillas, one time in college, we got to see how brides act on their big day. After seeing how they treated the photographer I said to myself: Absolutely not! Honestly that’s how I came to clay. Also clay has a lot of mystery imbedded in it. It’s an art and a science at the same time. You give up a lot of what clay could be by placing things or objects into the kiln. You put your pieces in the kiln and there is magic that happens when it gets glaze- fired and then you open up the kiln again. That could be like Christmas Day or the worst day of your ceramics career-- if everything gets ruined. You have to have gambling in your blood in order to make friends with clay. You get used to disasters and happy accidents happening all the time with clay.


Why should we view your work?



Well why not? Everybody at least likes, not everyone loves but everyone likes flowers.

Bagel Bard Players in the "Nightmare Before Christmas"