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.

Review of The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel, by Doug Holder

Review of The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel by Doug Holder ( Cervena Barva Press POBOX 440357 W. Somerville, Ma. 02144) http://cervenabarvapress.com
$13
To order: http://www.lulu.com/content/2651312



* Review by Pamela Annas, PhD

Doug Holder is above all an urban poet, an observer chronicling the everyday sights and absurdities of Somerville, Boston and New York City in plain talk flavored with cool irony and sudden startling bursts of imagery. His settings include hospital rooms, bars, coffee shops, Harvard Yard, the post office, buses and subway trains, the Boston Public Library, Shea Stadium, housing projects, city streets, and the Midtown Tunnel from Queens to Manhattan which is the location of the book’s title poem. His characters are bizarre and ordinary like all of us. Several of the poems are inspired by newspaper stories—about a woman who sat on a toilet for two years in her boyfriend’s apartment, about an old man who murdered his equally aged wife, about a middle aged man who died on a subway train: “the Daily dropped/ From his hands. . . .The trains backed up/ From Cambridge to Dorchester.”

I’m reminded in the pages of this collection of meeting, a year or two before her death, the artist Alice Neel, who painted gorgeously surreal ironic portraits of famous and ordinary people in the 1930s and 40s--and shivering as she looked me over. Doug Holder looks at the world through a similarly sharp and amused set of eyes. Yet there is no malice but a profound sympathy here—for the helplessness of aging and of poverty, for physical and mental illnesses, for the complexity of family relations—and most of all, for the isolation and loneliness lurking underneath tenaciously crowded city life. In the title poem of the collection, the man in the booth in the Midtown Tunnel “paces the perimeter/ Of his cage” while outside the cars whip by: “And we are/ Faceless and a blur,/ Behind thick plates/ Of light-bleached glass.”

However, let me assure you this is not a gloomy collection of poems. There are rich nuggets of humor and wry reflection throughout this collection and, to combat the isolation of urban life, in almost every poem a relationship is forged between the observing eye and the subject of the poem. So, for example, as the speaker of the poem observes a woman nursing in a restaurant in “Private Dining Under a Blouse”:

I saw
The infant emerge
Sleeping
Held in an untroubled
Dream.

I sucked on my straw
Flattening the plastic stem
Still awake
And troubled.

A few of the poems in this collection, like the one above, segue gracefully in subject from Holder’s last book, Of All the Meals I Had Before: Poems About Food and Eating. Another is a poem toward the end of the book, “The Last Hotdog”: “She brought it/ to his sick bed,/ He bit through/ The red casing/ The familiar orgasm/ Of juice/ Hitting the roof/ Of his mouth”. And one more food-focused poem, “At the Fruit Stand,” which is about bananas and melons and grapes and is too erotic to discuss in a family publication. However, you will enjoy it. And the whole collection.


* Pamela Annas is a Professor of English at University of Massachusetts/Boston and the author of A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath.

Gloom Cupboard Issue 3

Gloom Cupboard
Literature for the common people


GLOOM CUPBOARD ISSUE 3
http://www.gloomcupboard.blogspot.com

Gloom Cupboard is a well-known literary blog that prints a hard copy, chap-sized magazine. I had the pleasure to be both on the blog and in the print edition. This enterprise is headed by two English poets Richard Wink and Alan Corkish. The magazine has published such small press poets as Lynn Lifshin, and Stanley Barkan, as well as lesser-known poets. In Issue 3 there is some interesting work by Karl Koweski. In his poem “Edward Lorenz” (the father of the “Butterfly Effect” theory), the poet describes how Lorenz’s death in Cambridge, Mass., affected some distant, disparate place.

“ Edward Lorenz, 90
Father of the
butterfly effect chaos theory
died today
at his home in
Cambridge, Massachusetts

in Aardmore County,
straight line wind,
tore the roof off
a house trailer.”

Other poems of note: “A Poem is not an Empty Room,” by Jim Murdoch, and “My Father” by Jack Henry. This is an interestingly quirky new ‘zine from across the pond.

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update

Review of Hot Rain by Lo Gallucio

Review of Hot Rain by Lo Gallucio (published by Singing Bone Press, an imprint of Ibbetson Street Press, $7.00)

When I was a teenager, a friend of mine once said that people never talk as intimately as when they are cleaning out their ears with a q-tip. I have learned over the years that, although an adolescent made this comment, there is quite some truth in it. Hot Rain is a witty, fast-paced collection of poems that focuses on language, memories, and sound. The author is like a q-tip, and Galluccio’s going to get the wax out. Lo Galluccio, a lyricist and poet, flows between the spiritual path of abstractions into the concrete world of images that she drums up like a percussion soloist. You can hear the beat she establishes pumping through your veins. Then, when she has you in sync she craftily starts to augment and diminish, to run around in circles that examine the very act of speaking, thinking, and loving. In this way, these poems are able to make you anticipate a certain word based on the rhythm and then change course on you and surprise you with a new word, new sound, and new image—a new thought. This is the delightful gift of Lo Galluccio. She knows you’re there and she knows who she’s talking to, yet she’s decided to clean out your ears until you hear her unique, mystical incantations. She takes your hand and leaps into a transcendental world, but don’t think it’s all abstract and flimsy. The images are hard and real and the language is a code Gallucio has studied. Take a look at “1. The Come On” where Galluccio masterfully employs hard, crisp language:

"Make me act.
Buy the red dress.
Wriggle—a slut
of gum—for your
hard pink.”

This is a great example of how she plays off a reader’s anticipation. I already hear “a stick of gum” in my head, but she twists the q-tip a bit and changes the words on me. The changes are refreshing and help clear your ears of all those stuffy clichés. In “Sarasota IV — Elegy for Anthony” she discusses missing her father with vivid images and cutthroat metaphors. Look at the first stanza:

I wept into granite to raise you
Did you drink? Has God
swallowed like gumdrops your oracle eyes?
Did morphine blind you like Oedipus?
When will we say our good-byes?

You see her actually dripping into the tombstone and wondering if her liquid was swallowed. These poems are real and physical. Yet they are metaphysical as well. With the sober precision of a brain surgeon, Galluccio talks about the abstract. Then, she jumps on her head, and riffs on about concrete images like a stoned jazz soloist.

She’s a studied musician who has done her homework, memorized those two thick songbooks, digested all the chord changes so her improvisations and songs are grounded and welcomed. That’s what we’ve paid for: a front row seat to see her concoct her magic. And Gallucio’s not trying to hide her tricks. In fact, she’s got her arm outstretched. In “The Witch’s Antidote to Sanity” she lets the reader in on her secret, “An artist must switch/ the landscape/ and preside over tunnels.”

Galluccio’s wonderful sense of sound and rhythm allows her to alter words and images while keeping structure and order. This means that every line is readable yet sizzles with energy. She says, “poets have thieving camera eyes/ the way seagulls are scavengers”. Galluccio is certainly a thieving camera, serving up a slideshow of unique images in a rhythmic incantation. As you read, the poems are as surprising as they are lovely—and relentlessly moving around. She’s riffing, she’s improvising, she’s hurtling across the universe.

Her style is bold and classic at the same time. She shows all the erudition of a scholar with the street smarts of a hustler. “The Witch Looks to Map” and “The Witches Antidote to Sanity” are particularly cutting edge in this regard. They force the reader to think hard about what is language, what is society, even what is to thought itself. She muses on what a YOU ARE HERE map is, an arbitrarily guide to a place someone wants you to go that exists in reality. The memorization of the map’s lines and schema is reality; this is sanity. In fact, Galluccio extrapolates, the map doesn’t really exist just like your sanity and insanity are not exactly as concrete as you may have thought. The map, the language you speak and read, the thoughts you have, Galluccio says, are all encoded. Language itself is a code, and the poet is playing with the code and showing you little glimpses of the spaces between codes, the code-cracker’s perspective. The same code in a mirror may not be what it appears to be when you look straight at it.

I allow myself to be shepherded by logistics
and don’t become the breeder of wild sheep.
The sheep of pirates, of dragons, of deep leap.

She praises codes and language. She feels all would be lost without it: “We’re non-readers tumbling through literacy/ snatching angry letters that snatch us back.” She suggests learning the codes, following them and then she adds a touch of rebellion and suggests breaking some of the rules. “The first thing an artist must do is escape.” Escape the YOU ARE HERE map. Be anywhere but HERE inside the engineer’s logistical map. Get inside and outside the code, be code-cracker, code-eater, become code-terrorist. “The way deformity is beautiful,” Gallucio says in the poem “Some things”, the broken code is gorgeous. The manipulated code is poetry. The manipulated code is here as poems in Hot Rain. It’s the words and beat drumming out this book. It’s Gallucio’s great big q-tip. Sit down. Open Hot Rain. Clean out your ears.

by Ralph-Michael Chiaia
poet & editor (http://formonksonly.blogspot.com

Winter Poems by William Michaelian

WINTER POEMS
William Michaelian
Cosmopsis Books 2007
San Francisco, California
ISBN 978-0-9796599-0-4
$11.95

Michaelian’s metaphors sting like walking in snow too
long, “I’m an old man alone with a frozen axe, a
curved wooden handle planted in dead weight.” He
presents winter in stark reality; the hunger, the
piling snow, the impending situations only nature
seems to recognize and the poet takes heed.

“howling-gruff the call-forth bark
of scent-wise remembering dogs,
tether-worn with pale claws,
madness revived in distance born,
I run off to greet the storm.”

Have we lost our ability to discern the signs or to
except the storm? perhaps. William Michaelian is very
capable of reading the season’s turn.

“not a single leaf remains:
a reminder that winter kills,
while that which survives
is cleansed.”

As a city dweller I welcome these poems. This honest
straight forward book, like a warm fire glows, and has
embers. Michaelians' madness is about what is happening
around him. It is not the madness of a saint or a
sinner, it is the madness of knowing.

“shall
we confirm
what others fear
to know? that a plaster
statue lives long
after winter
has set
in?”

Irene Koronas
poetry editor: wilderness house literary review
submissions editor: ibbetson street press

Poet Eva Salzman: From Brooklyn to Britain with a side trip to Somerville, Mass.

Poet Eva Salzman: From Brooklyn to Britain with a side trip to Somerville, Mass.

Over 20 years ago Poet Eva Salzman popped over the pond to England after spending her early years in Brooklyn and Long Island. Salzman was a friend of the late poet Sarah Hannah who was interviewed on my show “ Poet to Poet…” on Somerville Community Access TV shortly before Hannah took her own life. Salzman was in town visiting with Hannah’s parents, and gave a reading of her own and Hannah’s work at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Mass. (hosted by Fulcrum Magazine). Salzman traveled in a drenching rainstorm to the hinterlands of Union Square, Somerville to be interviewed by yours truly.

Salzman is an accomplished poet, living in London, who grew up in Brooklyn and attended Columbia University where she got her MFA. Her latest poetry collection is “Double Crossing” (Bloodaxe Books). She has also co-edited an anthology of modern women poets “Women’s Work…” that is scheduled to be released soon from the Seren Press. She has taught at such British institutions of higher learning as Warwick University and Ruskin College in Oxford, England. She has also collaborated on a number of operas, and her work has been frequently broadcasted on the BBC. Salzman has been published widely and has read from her work at festivals around the world.


Doug Holder: First off, why did you move to England in 1985?

Eva Salzman: That’s easy. A man. It’s the old story. He was in Brooklyn with me, and then we moved to England. It was a pretty major move for me. I thought that I would never leave New York. He was born in South East Wales. It was a huge culture shock for a Brooklyn Jewish girl.

DH: Why didn’t you leave England after your breakup?

ES: Well we moved to Brighton. And I started to make friends and get published there. When we split up, he said: “Well I guess you’ll move back to New York.” I said to myself: “ Damn him…I have a life here. I’m going to stay here!”

DH: You have had a lot of offbeat jobs…I suppose a lot of writers do. Another Brooklyn writer Paul Auster comes to mind. You worked as an out-of-print book searcher, an Exercise Director at a Brooklyn orthodox Jewish diet center, a cleaner of rich ladies houses, all of which informs your work. In a sense did these jobs have more value for your writing then say your MFA?

ES: I love studying…but I had a fear of missing more. In a way I was trying out different lives. The out-of-print book search service I did for many years was to support my writing habit in Britain. It was a continuation of a business my grandmother ran for many years from her house in Brooklyn.

DH: You studied at Stuyvesant High in Brooklyn in the 70’s. One of your teachers was Frank McCourt, the author of “Angela’s Ashes” Did you know at the time that he would be such an acclaimed writer?

ES: He always seemed world- weary. I had a romantic sense of him. I felt he was not fated to last long. He would tell us wonderful stories about his impoverished Irish childhood. I realize now he was rehearsing for his great memoir “Angela’s Ashes.” We were the last class he came to—he had taught in many tough schools in the city. He did not teach a strict English class, expecting us to write a lot, etc… I thought learning English was learning stories. Maybe it is. He was just fascinating. I eventually met up with him in England. I interviewed him for the Guardian.

DH: You have also studied with the likes of Derek Walcott, Jorie Graham, Stanley Kunitz, and Joesph Brodsky to name a few. Was it hard to find your “voice?” Do we really have a truly original voice?

ES: I was very intimidated at the Columbia MFA program because I was a lot younger than most of the students there. But I still loved the program. I remember taking a workshop with Stanley Kunitz. He would pick out pieces of my poems and say: “ This is your voice.” I wondered what that meant. Was there a voice I was supposed to slip into already? It made me think about what would trigger my voice.

DH: Can you talk about the new CD “Secret Life of a Girl” by singer/songwriter Christine Tobin in which a poem of yours is set to music?

ES: She is actually from Dublin, but now lives in London. She is well known in both places. She makes a point of collaborating with poets, and in her new CD she used a poem of mine, and a poem of Paul Muldoon.

DH: You have also collaborated on operas. In fact one has been with your father, the composer Eric Salzman. Good poetry should have a strong sense of musicality, no? Has you work as a poet helped you with your work with opera?

ES: I see it as a two way street. Language and music are interactive. I believe the music of language leads you to ideas or poems. But yes, I do believe poetry has to have a sense of music to it.

Most of the poets I know who write in form or meter, don’t do it for ideology. You write in free verse or you write in form. You write what you want to write.

DH: I use food in a lot of my poetry. I notice you do too. What would you say to critics who say food as a theme or focus is too trivial?

ES: I am a sensualist. I am about everything to do with the senses. I don’t see this split between matters of the body and matters of the spirit. I see it as all parts of the same. Coming from a large Jewish family you can guess how I feel about food. There is a ritualistic quality about eating and meals.

DH: You were a friend and mentor to the late poet Sarah Hannah. Hannah taught at Emerson College in Boston, appeared on this show, was the author of two critically acclaimed poetry collections “Longing Distance,” and “Inflorescence” (Tupelo Press).
Can you tell me how you met and became fast friends?

ES: We met at the Wesleyan Writers Conference, where I taught. I was interested in the sonnet form and so was she. She had read my poems. She was passionate about the sonnet. She brought me her work that had wit and formal dexterity. Like Plath, she coupled the vernacular with a more elevated poem.

DH: Her poetry is accessible. Yours is too. Your take?

ES: I never personally think about accessible or inaccessible. Some of the poems I write are accessible, some are not. Sarah had that ability to travel to different worlds. I have a review of her two collections in “Contemporary Poetry Review.,” extracted from an article in “Dark Horses” magazine.

DH: You have co-edited a new anthology of women’s poetry titled “ Women's Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English”

ES: “Women’s Work…” will be out within months. It will basically be modern women poets from 1920 on… Women poets who write in English. Jorie Graham is in it, English, American, and Irish poets….you name it. It is published by SEREN.



To The Enemy
Sit down, have a chair and relax,
you who've made the former friends bleed.
Here are all my questionable expenses
for the tax-man, the faithless to read.

Okay, so I drink, talk to strangers,
loudly befriending at parties
those lacking position, power or wealth,
who aren't distinguished or arty.

I slept with a man who was handsome
instead of the powerful editor
(not that I've ever claimed purer ethics -
it's just that I never knew better).

Please outline what's wrong with my life plan,
help map the route of my passions,
edit me into comfortable style
according to science or fashion.

It's not that I don't have ambition
or a liking for money or fame.

Is it just that I misinterpret the rules?
Don't I cheat well enough at the game?

--EVA SALZMAN

http://evasalzman.com


--Doug Holder

What is a failed poet?

I posed this question to poets of my acquaintance: "What is a failed poet?" I hear the term used all the time, but what does it mean? How do you define a failed poet? Is there such a thing? Below are some very thought provoking answers to this question I posed:



A failed poet can be a mainstream adherent who buckled to society's pressure against artistic commitment and stopped producing work in order to "act like a grownup" or "get a real job." Worse than this type of poet, however, is the practicing, productive poet who never reaches his or her full potential out of fear of offending readers or popular poetic figures and theorists.

An artist who holds back, obeying current rules or trends whether or not they challenge or showcase individualized craft, generally frustrates readers as well as himself by writing safe for decades. An artist who lacks personal integrity is the worst poetic failure of all.

--Mignon King (co-editor of Bagel Bards 3 Anthology)



Just off the top of my head, a failed poet is one who doesn't write.

--Tam Lin Neville ( editor “Off the Grid Press”)


Even Faulkner, you know, described himself as a failed poet. Raymond Chandler, failed poet, found his talent late in life...writing crime novels. I was not familiar with the term. Sounds like a good subject for a funny poem.

--Ed Meek ( author of “Walk Out” )



Thanks for the prompt. A quick search turned up Wordsworth, Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, J Alfred Prufrock (Eliot by extension?), and Alexander Wilson, father of American ornithology all as "failed poets."
There is something a little precious about the idea of calling oneself a failed poet (Oh, I couldn't possibly...), and most of the above (admittedly abbreviated) list used failure as a catalyst for something else. What is a successful poet?

--Valerie Lawson ( coeditor of “Third Coast” magazine)


To answer your question, first let us ask what is a failed human being. If the question promotes strict answers then we will have strict answers to the question “What is a failed poet”.

But then let us particularize the query to other categories as well and ask the question:


What is a failed flower?
What is a failed kitten?
What is a failed cow?
What is a failed elephant ?
What is a failed worm?

And then ask:
What is a failed baby?

And then ask again:
What is a failed planet?
Or what is a failed solar system?
Or what is a failed galaxy?

I have a preferred answer. It is that if anyone of those things had cause to exist and have fulfilled their existence in any way, according to any place on a range of some Platonic ideal that listed things from low to high, good to bad, quick to slow, sweet to sour, heavy to light and so forth, then they would have to be called successful. That is: they would be successful if they performed their state of existence along any particular position in the entire range of their performance.

I often quietly reflect on of Grey’s Elegy In A Country Churchyard. We are all are unknown and our Fulfillment is unknown. We all deserve quiet contemplation and fond consideration. It seems harsh to speak of a “failed poet”. Might it be more a reflection on us who ask the question then on the thing the question is being asked of?

Sidewalk Sam ( founder of “ArtsFirst”—Boston, Mass.)



A failed poet is a person who loves language, but they cannot express in words the bridge to the other world where poetry is supposed to take you. I am a failed poet because I cannot attain the lean, carved from the air grace of the poet's I most admire. I've written only a handful of poems at that level. So, I write what I call spoken songs, and I write fiction.
A lot of fiction writers are failed poets. They started out as poets but couldn't take the heat.
A failed poet could also be a shadow artist who wanted to write but became a talker and an alcoholic instead.

C.D. Collins ( author of “Blue Land” -- Polyho Press)


I have to hand it to CD, because whether or not she agrees with it, the woman is a poet because she authentically uses original language and phrasing. Her narratives use repetition and musical phrasing like all great modern lyric poets. As for the mint juleps…we’ll that’s another story. Someone I once loved said that writing poetry is largely a thankless task, and in that sense, for those of us still “in the “Tower of Song” no matter what degree, well, we fail and succeed. It’s the love of language and the compulsion to capture something beautiful, weird or hidden about the world that makes anyone a good poet.

Lo Galluccio ( author of “Hot Rain”)




If your poems falls in the forest and nobody hears it you have failed
as a poet. Poets write to be read, to be heard---if poets don't put
themselves in the position to be heard, either by not working hard
enough to be good or are not being good enouth to be published and read-
--then they have failed. They have failed if they fail to make people
care about what they write. It is a no brainer that they care about
their own writing---not a measurement of success.

Tim Gager ( founder Dire Literary Series—Cambridge, Mass./ author of "this is where you go when you are gone")




I tell my workshop students that there is no such thing as a bad poem, as long as the poet is happy with it. It's all about what purpose the poem serves for the poet. I've learned from students that there are multifold reasons to write poetry: Some are closet poets who write strictly for themselves; some like to journal with poetry; others want to write social/political commentaries in verse; one student wanted only to write poems for his girlfriend; another wanted to write poetry in order to become a better, more concise newspaper reporter. The list could go on. So who outside of poets themselves, is qualified to determine how well a poem executes the purpose for which it was written.

If one wishes to write for publication, there are of course standards, but these vary drastically, depending on editors' likes and dislikes. Poets sometimes feel "failed" if they keep getting rejections from editors with a different definition of merit than they have. That doesn't mean there aren't editors elsewhere who would like and publish the same poems.

And getting published doesn't always mean the poet is satisfied that her/his work is good either. William Faulkner said, "I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't and then tries the short story, which is the next most demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing." Yet both Faulkner's first nationally published works, the poem “L’Apres-Midi d’un faune," and his first published book, The Marble Faun, were poetry. Was his poetry good? At least his publishers thought so. But it was Faulkner's own expectations that compelled him to consider himself a failed poet.

It's easy for those of us involved in the publishing part of poetry to develop stringent definitions of excellence. And where has this gotten poetry, when most Americans think they don't like poetry because they can't relate to it?

Ellaraine Lockie ( author of “Finishing Lines”)


When I announced to my mom that I wanted to be a writer she wearily told me that I came by it naturally and that I came from a long line of failed and petty literati. I’ve often thought about what that means and Liz (my daughter) and I had a long debate about it. Our conclusion is that a failed writer is someone who has put their heart and soul into their writing with no lasting results. We all know poets who thrive on being “poets” without much output. I’m sure they anguish over their work but the results are, to put it politely, trivial. Our conclusion that it was better to be a petty literati than a failed one. I’m still not sure I agree, but a part of me would much prefer to go down swinging for the fence in the majors than being a position player in a very minor league.

Steve Glines ( founder of the “Wilderness House Literary Review” )

There is no such thing as a failed poet. What gives someone the right to call a poet a failure? A poet can only fail if he stops writing. Just write. I hate all this labeling. To summarize: “There is no such thing!

Gloria Mindock ( founder of Cervena Barva Press)


maybe a failed poet is one who doesn't attempt to capture what s/he feels and thinks through language . . . perhaps s/he is one who loses touch with the impulse to write . . . maybe a failed poet is one who never finds another with the capacity to sense the works / words as "instruments of evocation" (using Christopher Wilmarth's words for his sculptures) . . . maybe a failed poet is a poet, acknowledging that there may inevitably be distance between impulse / intention and word-form . . . in Japan there is / was a tradition of a sort of savoring of failure, related to the experience of pathos, passing, and poignancy . . .


Eytan Fichman ( professor Boston Architectural Center--Boston, Mass.)


Maybe a more sensible question is what is the definition of a poet? What is poetry? And who has the qualifications to make these definitions or determinations? What makes a succesful poet? Sales? Media attention? The number of publications you are published in? Pimping yourself? I dare say there are not that many poets around who have read the work of Gene Ruggles, considered by many to be an important poet, but who had only one book published (Lifeguard In the Snow, University of Pittsburg Press). Does that make him a failed poet? I think not!!! And the idea that everyone is a poet is absurd, just as absurd that if you write a poem and you are happy with it, that this somehow makes you a poet.

I think the suffering of those people in Burma and China are far more important than an exercise on what is a failed poet.

a.d. winans ( founder of Second Coming Press-)


I think the worst version of a failed poet is one who has never tapped into his or her deepest private self and it inside-out for the public. Like digging deep past the skin, the tissue and the muscle for the humming tuning fork in the marrow and letting it resonate on the page for the whole world to see....if this is not accomplished then the poet has failed and his poems are soulless and the equivalent to crossword puzzles.

--rob plath (author of poetry collection "Ashtrays and Bulls")



I've been giving more thought to failure. It seems to me that failure is an inability to achieve what one has set to accomplish. And the concept that if one is satisfied with one's own work and chooses not to publish, they too might be a success. I have a friend or two who's shrink told them to write poetry and/or memoir as a method of dealing with their issues. If it helped and they never sent them out, are they success or failures? Then there is the poet who sends poetry to magazine "a" and is rejected, but magazine "b" accepts. What does that mean for the poet? Your question is an interesting rhetorical exercise with no right and no wrong, no answer to success or failure.

Zvi Sesling (founder of the "Muddy River Review)

FAILED POET CHARLES PLYMELL AVAILABLE TO LEAD YOUR SEMINAR ON SUBJECT Honorarium; $100 thousand based on awards from Ms. Lilly to the likes of Princeton Prince of the Academe, C.K. Williams and Grand Scoutmaster, Gary Snyder. (or some pills)---

Charles Plymell-- (founder of Cherry Valley Editions)
--------------

Renowned African American poets Afaa Michael Weaver and Major Jackson to be in a filmed public discussion at Somerville Community Access TV

( Afaa Weaver)

(Major Jackson)


Renowned African American poets Afaa Michael Weaver and Major Jackson to be in a filmed public discussion at Somerville Community Access TV.

( Somerville, Mass.)

Doug Holder, founder of the independent literary press “Ibbetson Street,” and the host of the Somerville Community Access TV Show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer” has started the process of organizing a public discussion featuring renowned African American poets Afaa Michael Weaver (http://afaamweaver.com) and Major Jackson (http://www.majorjackson.com) on April 2, 2009 ( Poetry Month)

Somerville poet Afaa Michael Weaver has won the prestigious PUSHCART PRIZE (2008) for his poem “American Income,” published in POETRY magazine and in his collection "Plum Flower Dance" ( U/Pitt Press.)

Henry Louis Gates, historian and professor at Harvard University writes of Weaver:

"Afaa Michael Weaver is one of the most significant poets writing today. With its blend of Chinese spiritualism and American groundedness, his poetry presents the reader (and the listener, for his body of work is meant to be read aloud) with challenging questions about identity, about how physicality and spirit act together or counteract each other to shape who we are in the world. His attention to the way language works is rare, and the effects of that attention on his poetry are distinctive and expansive."




Major Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry: Hoops (Norton: 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Hoops was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature - Poetry. He has received critical attention in The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Parnassus, Philadelphia Inquirer, and on National Public Radio's 'All Things Considered.' His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Post Road, Poetry, Triquarterly, among other literary journals and anthologies. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Last year, he served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Major Jackson is an Associate Professor of English at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

A description of the discussion is as follows:

“Two Generations of Black Male Poets/
Two Sets of Eyes on the Urban Landscape

Afaa Weaver & Major Jackson

In a public chat in the SCAT television studios in Somerville,
these two poets share the experience of their lives as black
men who came of age in large American cities, Baltimore
and Philadelphia. They discuss the music, visual art, and
literature that were influential in their times, from The Temptations
to Grandmaster Flash and Chuck D, from Ron Milner
to Susan Lori Parks, and more. They share intimate moments
in their lives and some of their own work as well as that
of poets they know and admire in an evening setting in the
burgeoning artistic community north of Cambridge to be
recorded in front of the live audience.



The moderator of the event and time of event will be announced…

Contact: Doug Holder: dougholder@post.harvard.edu for more information.




“

Tim Gager: A Talk with a Dire Reader

An interview with Timothy Gager: A “Dire” Reader in Somerville, Mass.

Writer Timothy Gager is a man who crosses many literary genres. He has a new poetry collection out from Somerville’s Cervena Barva Press: “ this is where you go when you are gone.” In 2007 alone Gager had 32 works of fiction, as well as poetry published in online and print journals. Gager is the current fiction editor of the “Wilderness House Literary Review,” the coeditor of the “Heat City Literary Review,” and the editor of the fiction and prose anthology “Out of the Blue Writers Unite.” He is the cofounder of the Somerville News Writers Festival, as well as the Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Mass. The series was voted “Best Of” in the Boston Phoenix 2008. I spoke with him on my Somerville Cable Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: Tim you write both poetry and fiction but until recently you were primarily known as a fiction writer. Which do you identify with more strongly: poetry or fiction?

Tim Gager: I don’t define myself as exclusively either of them. I don’t wake up in the morning and say: “ I am a poet, I am going to write a poem.” Or “ Gee, I haven’t written a story for awhile, I’m going to write a story.” If something strikes me at a certain depth or certain level, that is when it is going to become a poem or a story.

DH: Charles Bukowski wrote that wine, classical music, jazz, the horses, and women were essential to his writing life. What’s on your list?

TG: Reading. Food. Love. Disappointment. Achievement.

DH: Any music?

TG: I like calming music. I like folk music. I also like to have baseball on in the background. I’m not really watching it on the TV. I’m not listening to it, but I like it on.

DH: Some writers claim that writing is like an addiction. Your take?

TG: Addiction is sort of a strong word. It can be viewed negatively. I think “passionate” is a better word. With passion-you always want to be in possession of it. If you have a passion for writing you want to spend as much time with your love as you possibly can.

If I wasn’t writing I would miss it. It would be like my best friend went across the country. But I would survive. But I can’t see myself giving it up. If I didn’t write there would be definitely a void.

DH: Baseball comes up in a lot of your writing, as well as other writers we know. What is it about the game that holds such allure?

TG: Baseball is the first reality television show. The drama is each individual’s numbers going up and down: it’s who is hitting better, who’s in first place. It’s a lot like life. Life has a lot of drama. There is also love in the game. When Manny Ramirez makes that great catch you love it.

DH: You co-founded The Somerville News Writers Festival. With the support of the folks at The Somerville News, you managed to book top name talent like Junot Diaz, Tom Perrotta, etc… You spend a lot of time on this. You are in essence making a showcase for other folks, and you are not getting rich. What makes Tim Gager, run?

TG: I promote other people, but, if I didn’t have the Dire Reader Series, The Somerville News Writers Festival, I would be missing out. The fact that I have these venues provokes people to check out my stuff. A lot of excellent writers’ work may never see the light of day. The fact that I founded these series is a big payoff for me personally. When in doubt (because it is subjective to a great degree of what good writing is), editors, etc… when they see that I have read with the likes of Franz Wright, may have second thoughts about my work. It has given me a lot of respect. I even getter better rejection slips…almost apologetic ones.

DH: But of course there is an altruistic reason, right?

TG: I believe writers should be treated like rock stars. It makes me happy to have an event where writers can be seen.

DH: The Norton and Tauro families, the owners of The Somerville News have been very supportive ,right?

TG: It has never been, “Hey, get 250 or 300 people or the festival is over…” I have that internal pressure on myself.

DH: In the poem “2A.M.” from your collection “ this is where you go when you are gone” you write provocatively about sex:

“On me
you push down
the weight on each bent leg,
cures my evils…”

Often you explore the ying and yang of your relationships with women. Is there more ying than yang or vice-a-versa?

TG: That’s a personal question. I use intentional double meanings. People may not get the poems—but it adds an extra layer. For instance: “ Pushing down on someone”—you might think that refers only to the physical aspect of sex. But it also means you are leaning on someone.

DH: You have run the Dire Literary Series for many years now. Recently it was voted of “Best Of…” in the Boston Phoenix. What’s your secret?

TG: It is funny how Dire evolved. I had thought it would be a variety show, like David Letterman, with all the guests as readers. It evolved into a house party, and everybody is involved.

You have to make your series fun—it has to move quickly—you have to be able to relate to people. You have to have “events” not just another reading. The audience should have a chance to schmooze with the writers for instance. Oh yeah, publicize…I am afraid not to.

* On July 11 at 6PM there will be the annual Dire Barbecue, with readers, food and drink. Out of the Blue Art Gallery 106 Prospect St. Cambridge, Mass.

“Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard” by Michael Cirelli

“Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard” by Michael Cirelli
Hanging Loose Press, 231 Wycoff Street,
Brooklyn, N.Y. 11217
ISBN - 13:978-1-931236-96-6
Published 2008

Review by Mike Amado

Set against an NYC skyline, Cirelli winds his tales about his dad, love for words and musicand gives a human element to all three. In “Lobster with Ol’ Dirty Bastard”, Cirelli is on a gangsta lean in a baby Benz blasting old school, riding the seemingly safe daytime streets of craft-poetry, then turning down those dark alleys where the tension and bravado are thick like “. . . machetes in the air waves”. Cirelli definitely makes it with the Hip-hop heads with his rap culture overtones. (Example: Ol’ Dirty Bastard, real name Russell Tyrone Jones was a member of the Wu-Tang Clan, the rawest M.F.’er of that influential Hip-hop group). There’s more: the titles of each section are propsto albums past and present like, “3 feet high and rising” by De La Soul (1989),“The headphone Masterpiece” by Cody Chesnutt (2002), “The Love Below”by Outkast (2003) - and that’s just the section names,
I can go on and on ‘til the break of dawn.

At every turn, and twist of words, Cirelli reveals. New York City is Loud is a poem ripe with original descriptions, depicting a world of “skyscraper fingernails”,
police sirens that “scream like a phone call/ at 4 am to explain /
how the last drop of air clicked away/ from your father”.
Even, the nudge of a glassy leather shoe to
the flank of a homeless man making the sound like kicking a tin can.

I guess, when you’re a Hip-hop poet with an MFA, just the mere spanning of the
extremes will pop up in your writing. And it hollas in “Lobster . . .”
“Cutting Stevens”, is a recount of Cirelli being hired to teach a literature seminar,
“ . . . a snow flake, the son of a snow-dealer. . .”, where, the works of
Wallace Stevens were to be cross-compared with the rapper Young Jeezy.
“ . . . who dons a glittering snowman / on his chest. T
he snowman being the metaphor / for cocaine of course.”
To the speaker, “It was like winter on Pluto”.

“The seminar was part
of the university’s campaign to appeal to “urban”
students, and they named it Lit-Hop . . .
The snow piled up like penguins
and sea lions, and many classes were canceled
that semester. To rectify, I had to cut lessons,
lop the hands off of poets, remove the icy watches
from rappers.”


He also gives himself big lee-way when it comes to his own work.
In “Best Use For My Poems”, the speaker is at a poetry reading where no one’s
feeling him and his words. His three-year-old nephew picks up his uncle’s poems,
and besides using it as a billy club, a blurry baton and then a telescope . . .
“the long white / cylinder of my unmoving words, and held it to his mouth /
like a mic, and lip-synced some tongue I was too old to/ remember”

Cirelli’s work is tagged like a wall with the themes of music, his father and poetry,
in a loud-ass montage of catalog. “Lobster . . .” is an all-night convenience store
of lyrical goodies with no Twinkie-fluff in sight, “Lobster . . .” is also a
consignment shop of Hip-hop history.


Mike Amado/Ibbetson Update

Carousel Lounge (CD) by C.D. Collins

Carousel Lounge
CD Collins and Rockabetty
Produced by Pink Neon Productions,
Women Waging Peace, NoSweatShop.com.
The Carousel Lounge copyright 2008


I’ve always loved the South, albeit from a sly or reverent distance. Some associations for me as a poet/singer/actress are: ash blonde wigs, Emmy Lou Harris’ “Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town,” drinking Dr. Pepper and rum in a thunderstorm reading Truman Capote and bawling for my boyfriend from a porch in New Orleans, the sulfur smells in Alabama on a theatre tour, a cavernous motel lounge in Little Rock…the banana trees in Houston, the blue grass that entices my feet to dance, Elvis and Dollywood, the tragic-comedy epic movie “Nashville.” My images are impressionistic though, seen as a transient, not from the eyes of a native birch tree. I’ve never had real “mountain laurel” roots or the deep heart-break over coal mining damage that this multi-talented artist (writer, spoken word artist and short story writer) now a Somerville native, CD Collins, does. This self-proclaimed Southern tomboy, and once high school English teacher has managed to make the leap to successful spoken word recording artist in what she calls “chilly” New England. As she tells it in her artist’s statement:

I write to confront moral complexity, to discover my best self, to dig deeper than the first impulses of jealousy, rage or revenge. I write to discover beauty in the grotesque and the ordinary.

Because of this devotion to “dig deeper,” Carousel Lounge manages to conjure musically and poetically much more than roots-slinging. Her 3rd CD: this one is an artfully moving mosaic of time wanderings and tales from her native Kentucky, set to country rock/blue grass/goth rock –her group Rockabetty --that could go toe to toe with any rock band. Its unusual chord bendings and blending of genres remind me of Morphine, of great Nashville session bands, of T-Bone Burnett’s work.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting CD Collins once, at the Newton Poetry Reading series a few years ago. Kind yet grounded, her fiery talent was clear. She had a couple of players with her then, maybe a fiddler and guitarist, not the full-blown kick-ass country-rock ensemble featured in her latest CD. By the way, it thrills me that there’s another woman out there doing what some would call, “Chamber Rock” again. Historically it was probably Anne Sexton who may have kicked this tradition off – the poetic enchantress of smokes and martinis, bridging madness and sanity as suburban housewife, with her band, “Your Kind.” Well, that was more than twenty years ago. CD is decidedly sober, funny, Southern “The men were farmers and carpenters – they worked, not worked out…” and one other poetess with mighty charisma who’s dared to put dramatic beats and vibes behind cohesive poetic works. She’s also a proponent of gay rights and an environmental rights activist. It’s her albeit skewed objectivity that gives her that brilliant story-teller’s edge.
My first CD, Being Visited, is surreal, dense and challenging, a brew of spoken ambient tracks, pop ballads and reharmonized jazz. It ain’t nothin’ like what CD Collins does real well. She, by contrast, casts a laser beam light of memory on her coming up years, constructing edgy concrete narratives of real times and rough loves, living proof stories mined from adolescence and those years when America was truly and deceptively expansionistic in its love for the land, its neighbors and its children. It was also easily distracted by speed boats and pop music and struggling with messy oppositions of race, convention and politics. CD emphasizes more than once that in the early 60’s time was slower, folks talked more (on party lines, cheaper than one number in most neighborhoods) and bonds were knitted together slowly like winter sweaters. Yes, she kids in one interview, they do have real seasons like us, “down there.”
It’s not that she plays it all straight –cause the lady’s too intriguing not to drop in some dissonance and juxtapose say, the Rolling Stones with a tomboy playing b-ball. That in one snapshot is CD herself, a girlfriend of the band in a letterman sweater, tossing the ball in from half court. Then there’s the off-beat Southern weirdness of it all –the 6 year old serving your bass for dinner, or the mascara blackened face of a beat up girlfriend or the bourbon bottles strewn across the living room carpet. She gives us the twists but she doesn’t over-warp the somewhat warped landscape too much so that we can’t hear the haunting crickets and appreciate the sexy gleam of Brillcream. CD’s got the gift of a captivating voice and she lays it out in a smooth as mint julep voice, never missing a moment, with some lovely elaborations like lacey layers of flute, soprano voiced mountain ridges hanging over “I am Losing Everything” and on the bottom, a consistently groovy bass.

Vocally she owns her territory (“knows her chicken” as the samping girl-group Cibo Matto once sang in “Viva la Woman”) but her attitude is disarming, compelling and never strident. There are some knock-out punches in this collection which spans from the darkly declared wisdom of “Prologue” in which Collins’ explores the truth behind the way you both trust and mistrust anyone sitting across from you in a small town because they know “your Daddy and your cousins,” to three takes on the Kentucky eating parlour, “Carousel Lounge” to the wildly funny “Attention Deficit Disorder” in which in a Laurie Andersonesque sketch of automated voice mails, she combusts the efficiency/sanity of our modern techno inventions and asserts the right to a crazed and incensed persona.

The CD winds up with a multi-lingual anthem called “City of Dreams” – a title used once by the Talking Heads band as well. Its got that open-ended wistfulness of packing up your red goblets and moving North (as CD once did,) the magic of a jazzy Parisian night, of the stacatto Spanish of the Gulf of Mexico.
It’s the break for the wide world horizon of an artist who’s been viewing her small town under a microscope.

CD Collins may say that her original home planet is a 3rd world in a 1st world and decries its diminishing, but she wonderfully engorges that world with life, light, risk and the beauty of looking back. Writers always balance past and present, looking backwards to move us forward. In this sense, CD Collins has given us a very classy and original Southern Goth episode to treasure. She casts a net toward fathoming more than her self-scorned starched dresses and patten leather shoes or the hilarious dinners that ended with dancing or gunfire, but includes a rich vein of U.S. history, the intricacies of the land and generational ties.

For me, it’s got the brio and magic of “Twin Peaks.” And it breaks new ground for all spoken word artists using live music to enchant their words.

Carousel Lounge is available on www.cdbaby.com, Porter Square Books and on-line at www.cdcollins.com. When you buy any of CD’s compact discs, 25% of the proceeds will be donated to the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition to help fight the environmental devastation of mountaintop-removal mining. Also, catch her on tour by going to her website for dates in your area.

Lo Galluccio
Ibbetson St. Press
Lo’s forthcoming memoir “Sarasota VII” will
be released on Cervena Barva Press in the fall of 2008.
Her CD, “Being Visited” is available on www.cdbaby.com.
http://logalluccio.atspace.com