Somerville Writer Will Fertman: From China to Cheese.

Somerville Writer Will Fertman: From China to Cheese.

By Doug Holder

Being a ritualistic early morning denizen of the Bloc 11 café in the Union Square section of Somerville, I couldn’t help but notice a man somewhere in his thirties, with a shock of Harpo Marxish curly brown hair, laboring over a computer like a mad scientist. Another writer in the Paris of New England you say smugly? Well you are right.

Will Fertman, 32, lives in the Davis Square section of Somerville but commutes down to Bloc 11 because he can’t write at home, and the Bloc 11 was on route to his job at the Boston Review, a literary and political journal based in our burg. Fertman and I eventually came out of our respective shells and started to converse. I asked to interview him, and he consented to a 7A.M. meeting.

Fertman, after experiencing a stint of wanderlust that took him from China, to New York City, and eventually to here in the Ville, has found our city a place to firmly plant his feet. He grew up in Winchester, Mass. and later graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, eventually getting his MFA from Goddard College in Vermont. He told me that even though he lived in NYC he prefers Somerville. Fertman said: “ New York is too conformist. By nature I am somewhat of a hermit. My idea of a good evening is inviting someone over my apartment for dinner. You don’t do that in N.Y. In Somerville I enjoy the eclectic texture: the students, the Brazilian immigrants, the old-time Somerville residents—all here in Union Square.”

In 2008 Fertman landed a job as an advertising and promotion director of the Boston Review. The Review is a well-respected literary and political journal that publishes some of the work of the major political thinkers, and literary lights of our time. Here Fertman worked with the likes of Pulitzer-Prize winner Junot Diaz, poets like Mary Jo Bang, Timothy Donnelly and others.

While working at the Boston Review, Fertman labored over his novel that was inspired by his time living in the Republic of China. He told me it is a story of an Asian Frankenstein. It all takes place in the sometimes gothic and rabidly industrial society of contemporary China.

Fertman has recently left the Boston Review to write for a cheese magazine titled “Culture.” The magazine is looking to possibly locate in Somerville. Although Fertman is no cheese expert, he gets to write a column in which he can ruminate about cheese, from the sharp and biting Cheddar to the more “holy” grounds of Swiss. In one column Fertman wrote it concerned a 15th century heretical philosopher who speculated that earth was formed from, well, a blob of cheese. Needless to say this did not go over well with the powers-that-be at the time.

Fertman listed his favorite Somerville haunts to procure this epicurean delight. On his list was Sherman’s Market and Capone’s in Union Square, Dave’s Fresh Pasta in Teele Square, and other cheese hubs.

Fertman told me he always likes to offer his readers a hook in his writing. He wants to make his readers laugh or gasp, maybe both. Fertman believes that writing is not a “polite” art—and he is dedicated to putting sizzle in the reader’s steak.

Fertman’s favorite writers are Iris Murdock, Raymond Chandler, and Shelley Jackson, to name a few.

And to young writers wherever you are Fertman opines:

“ The two things that I learned was to write constantly, read religiously, and write about what you are interested in. Don’t wait to be recognized; send your work out; start your own magazine, or your own blog—be persistent and network with other writers.”

Fertman believes that an MFA in Writing is not for everyone, but he needed the discipline to write a lot and at level that you need to make it in the biz.

Like any true Somerville scribe, Fertman shook my hand after the interview, and retreated into the recesses of Bloc 11 to pound the keys on his shopworn laptop.



http://culturecheesemag.com

************************************

From Will Fertman's column about cheese in "Culture Magazine"


Cheese might seem like a wholesome business on the surface, but here at culture we’re not afraid to peel back the wax and give you a taste of the gamier side:

Dec. 7, 2005,
Memphis, TN (AP):
Jessica Sandy Booth, 18, was arrested over the weekend and charged with four counts of attempted murder and four counts of soliciting a murder . . . According to police, Booth was in the intended victims’ home last week when she mistook a block of queso fresco for cocaine, inspiring the idea to hire someone to break into the home, take the drugs, and kill the men . . . “Four men were going to lose their lives over some cheese,” said Lt. Jeff Clark.

Popular Poet Populist: Jean—Dany Joachim

Popular Poet Populist: Jean—Dany Joachim



Interview by Doug Holder



Well – I interviewed the Poet Laureate of Boston Sam Cornish, the Poet Laureate of Portland, Maine Steve Luttrell, and just recently the Poet Populist of the Republic of Cambridge, Jean—Dany Joachim. Both Jean and I teach at Bunker Hill Community College, and both of us are poets. One day perhaps I will be able to interview the Poet Laureate of Somerville if the city ever gets off its haunches. Jean Dany Joachim was born in Port-au-Prince Haiti. In his online bio it states "…his writing found its voice in the never-ending, complex reality of his country." Joachim is the author of " Chen Plenn-Leta", and his work has appeared in anthologies and numerous literary magazines. I talked with him on my Somerville Community Access TV show "Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."



Doug Holder: So, as I said in the introduction it has been said that you found your poetic voice with the "never ending complex reality of your country." Explain.



Jean--Dany Joachim: The first poem that I wrote when I was 13 years old dealt with the reality of Haiti at the time. The poem was titled

"Good Morning." That poem was the first one that made me start writing. My writing dealt with Haiti, the land, the dreams, the aspirations, and the political trouble. Later I discovered poetry for the language. The Creole language. It is a beautiful language that has a lot to do with French. This is because for close to 200 years the French were in Haiti..



DH: You are the second Poet Populist in Cambridge. Tell us about the position.



JJ: 2007 was the first year Cambridge went with this concept. They did not create it; it was first started in Seattle. Seattle had the first "Populist" instead of the commonly named Poet Laureate. In 2007 I was one of the finalists for the position, and I was eventually selected. I wasn't even sure what the position was about when they called me in 2007 to tell me I was nominated. Peter Payackwas the first Poet Populist--before me.



DH: What is the difference between a Poet Laureate and a Poet Populist?



JJ: Bluntly speaking the Poet Populist is Cambridge. Cambridge must have its own way, so therefore it has the Poet Populist. ( Laugh) It's just a different name. It is a position for the promotion of POETRY and the art of words in the City of Cambridge, and even beyond.



DH: Do you think there has been a greater awareness of Haitian literature due to the tragic earthquake?



JJ: I think Haitian writers with a few exceptions are generally unknown in this country. I think because they write in French. There are very few presses that are translating Haitian writers. I wish more translation could happen. I wish more translation could happen.



DH: Is there any signature quality to Haitian writing?



JJ: In Haitian art there is a lot of vivid colors. This definitely comes out in the writing.



DH: Tell us about your City Night Reading Series.



JJ: It started more than 10 years ago. At Bunker Hill Community College in Boston I used to run a series titled" Sunset Poetry Series" It was a once a month series with readings from faculty and students. So after years doing it at the college; I thought why not do it outside. I originally wanted it to be nomadic, city to city. But I realized this would be a great deal of work. I had the series at UMass Boston, in Chelsea, and other venues until I found Cafe Luna in Central Square.





FOUR CHAIRS



Four chairs sit

On a porch, they're waiting



Four chairs all dressed up

Sitting without a word

Four chairs of hope

In wait to be useful



Four chairs next to each other

Which are sometimes face- to- face

Four chairs of labor

Relieving the human tiredness

For chairs which cure



Four chairs observing

Life which ravels

Four chairs of silence

Four chairs in wait

To hang the words.



On the porch

The four chairs sit, they're waiting.

A Writer’s Journey: At the Norman Mailer Writers Colony By Tracy Strauss

(Strauss and fellow feline resident of the colony)








Tracy Strauss has been a long time friend of the Ibbetson Street Press and a regular at the Diesel Cafe in Davis Square, Somerville. She was kind enough to write this account of her residency at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony...




A Writer’s Journey

I just returned from a week at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, in Provincetown, Ma., where I received a scholarship to work with seven writers, under the direction of Kaylie Jones, in memoir. I first studied with Kaylie Jones (daughter of From Here to Eternity’s James Jones) last summer when I was accepted on scholarship to the Southampton Writers Conference’s memoir workshop with Frank McCourt, who, just two weeks before the workshop, grew gravely ill, and died. Kaylie replaced him as my teacher. This summer, I could not pass up the opportunity to work with her again, on my second memoir, Hannah Grace, about healing from PTSD through my relationship with a cat (http://thehannahgracebook.wordpress.com).

Arriving at the Norman Mailer Home on Commercial Street, I was awed by the view of the Massachusetts shoreline. The workshop took place inside the home, where we met for four hours every morning, sharing and critiquing our writing as the tide went out, and in.

Unlike the Southampton Writers Conference or the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, which I attended in 2008, each attendee at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony is fully-funded, aside from a $225 administrative fee. Housing is generous – I was placed in my own fully-equipped condo near the beach, where I found Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason and a thesaurus on the bookshelf, and where the kitchen cabinets were populated with pots and pans, tea and Progresso soup. Attendees are on their own for most meals, and with a stove, oven, refrigerator, plus supplies, eating in is a budget-conscious option.

Interestingly, my condo was the only one with a cat-flap on the door and, beginning my first afternoon in residence, a cat appeared there, meowing. When I left my condo to eat dinner with fellow writers, he circled my feet and rubbed up against my legs. Throughout the week, the cat visited me often – given that I was writing a book about my relationship with a cat, I considered him my talisman.

Staff members Guy Wolf and Jessica Zlotnicki helped us get acquainted with Norman Mailer’s legacy with a tour of the house, including his writing room, located in the attic, which, with its slanted ceiling, small windows, and cramped, rudimentary space, reminded me of my attic apartment in Cambridge, except that I don’t have a plethora of books about Hitler on my shelves or a Bellevue sign to remind me not to stab my spouse. The house was open for us to write in at our leisure.

The Colony loaned us bicycles to explore Provincetown, which I did on sunny afternoons, riding out to the Tidal Flats, where the “Life Seen and Unseen” theme became my (writer’s) journey, where I walked, and walked, and walked across rocks and water, unable to see my destination, but was compelled to continue onward. I listened to the call of Sandpipers and traversed steep boulders, flat slabs, rough and smooth rocks, which tested my footing. I thought about ways to surmount the obstacles I faced in writing my book, then went back to the Norman Mailer House to work.

Time to write is priority at the Colony. I spent many afternoons penning my chapters, and completing writing exercises assigned to fuel our creative process. The week ended with a luncheon held at the Norman Mailer House to commemorate our week’s work. We were also invited to a gallery opening in town. As we said our goodbyes, we vowed to keep in touch and support each other as we complete our books and work to publish them. I know we will.


Tracy Strauss



***********Tracy Strauss is a poet and nonfiction writer. A 2005 Somerville Arts Council Literary Fellowship Award winner in poetry, her work has been published in The Hummingbird Review, Ibbetson Street, Spoonful, and War, Literature & The Arts. A chapter from her first memoir, Personal Effects, was recently published in The Southampton Review. She has been a featured writer at SUNY Stony Brook Southampton, and the “Tapestry of Voices” and “Poetry in the Chapel” series in Boston. She is currently working on a second memoir, Hannah Grace, about healing from PTSD through a relationship with a cat. She teaches at Emerson College.

Legends of Winter Hill by Jay Atkinson

Legends of Winter Hill

by Jay Atkinson
Three Rivers Press
Softcover, 363 pages, $14
ISBN 0-9796816-6-0

Review by Zvi A. Sesling


Too many writers choose Boston for their detective stories. But Jay Atkinson, who wrote Legends of Winter Hill, has chosen true life than fiction. His hero is Joe McCain, a real detective pursuing real criminals who commit real crimes. Atkinson’s revelations about true crime is, as Humphrey Bogart says at the end of The Maltese Falcon, “The stuff legends are made of.”

Atkinson takes through the back alleys of crime – dirty cops, murder, robberies and lesser crimes like insurance fraud, workmen’s comp fraud – a hodge podge of major and lesser crimes that could – and do – fill the book.

He takes us through Somerville, eating at Redbones just off Davis Square and a Vietnamese Restaurant in Union Square. He takes us into Boston, Chelsea, Medford, Revere and other communities in the greater Boston area like Quincy, trying to videotape a man who is defrauding an insurance company with a fake injury. Everywhere he takes us where perpetrators live or operate and you wonder how he and McCain survive their run-ins with the underworld, and even clean cops who do not like the idea of their own being uncovered as dirty.

Each chapter is like a separate story and the dialogue, like the action in the book is real, not made up fiction, which makes it all the more interesting.

You will know the people, the locations and most of all you will know McCain through
Atikinson’s eyes and writing, which is crisp, fast paced and not only a true crime book,
but a look at the history of criminals, including the notorious Teddy Deegan case in which law enforcement officials framed several men, two of whom died in prison, for a murder they never committed and which cost taxpayers not only to keep them locked up,
but the millions of dollars they were awarded for their lost years. Yes, it is a book worth
reading and learning the lessons of criminals and misguided law enforcement which, more than likely, still happening

The Closing By Chava Hudson

The Closing

by Chava Hudson
Zingology Press
Copyright © 2010 by Chava Hudson
Softcover, 184 pages, no price listed
ISBN 1452865426

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Chava Hudson has succeeded where other writers have failed: you know what murder is about at the beginning, yet the novel works, the people are believable and so you keep on reading.

Hudson’s story is about a real estate agent in a realty firm that does a bit more than sell realty. In fact, the way they drum up business will just kill you. But that’s all I’ll tell you, except that the novel is filled with irony, a touch of humor, but more important, leaves you with serious questions about moral values, mortality and what the future might bring to an ever aging population, a theme done many times, but here with a new twist.

Singles, Anne meets Steve and the romance begins. But Steve’s mother gets in the way, and not as you might imagine. Still, Anne, whose boyfriend has abandoned her, finds a new romance irresistible, even with the knowledge she keeps inside.

The story is fast paced, easy and fun to read and, perhaps, should be read by people with Victorian ideas of life and death and what is noble and what is not.

This is Ms. Hudson’s fourth book (she also writes poetry and edits the online journal zingology). It took her just over a year to write the closing, but the novel idea (yes I mean that both ways)came during a walk around town where she saw a for sale sign on a front yard. The realtor's name was Kevorkian, which got her thinking. Hudson had also just returned from Costa Rica where she spent two weeks at an artist colony and rode up to Monteverde with some friends she had made there. The result, a book worth reading.

Small Press Review: Poems from the Left Bank: Somerville, Mass.

(July-Aug 2010)



_____SOMERVILLE_____


Poems from the Left Bank
By Doug Holder
Alternating Current 2010
PO Box 183
Palo Alto CA 94302 USA
$5


Review by Hugh Fox




You want a trip into the depths, heights and widths of everyday reality of everyday in Somerville, Mass? Doug Holder’s latest is the best way to begin. You’re there! Just the kind of details that create essential unforgettable realities: “ Two old women/ Walk down my street/ Each morning/ Lugging two shopping bags/ And two widow humps/Arm in Arm/ A tight embrace/ of frail appendages/ Pushing each other/ At no more than a snail’s pace… (“Two Old Women,” p. 10) It’s true that Somerville, just next to Cambridge, is a place that seems to have stepped out of time into time into timelessness, reminiscent of Chatham, a “ward” in Chicago, back in the 1940’s…or Paris’ Left Bank (the origin of the title) more or less at the same time.

Holder has the eyes of a painter/sketcher/photographer. No one else on the scene can evoke so much reality with so few carefully chosen key descriptive words. A line here, a line there, and suddenly you’re right in the middle of his daily street reality “ “I could not decide whether to turn into it. / I was at the cusp of decision. Looking down its dramatic curves/The close habitation of sunlight and brooding shadow, the incestuous tangle of backyards/ The sudden eruption of a hill/In a stretch of flattened pavement/ The indicting chorus of Blue Jays/ Casting invective to the cold wind. (“Hamlet St., Somerville p. 11). It would be fun to see some Somerville film genius do an image-drifting film through Somerville with Holder himself reading the poems as the images drift by.

COMPLETE LIST OF AUTHORS ANNOUNCED FOR SECOND ANNUAL Boston Book Festival

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Joyce Linehan (617) 282-2510 x 1, joyce@ashmontmedia.com


COMPLETE LIST OF AUTHORS ANNOUNCED FOR SECOND ANNUAL

BOSTON BOOK FESTIVAL

TO TAKE PLACE OCTOBER 16, 2010

IN COPLEY SQUARE


(BOSTON-August 5, 2010) The highly anticipated and expanded second annual Boston Book Festival will take place on Oct. 16, 2010, in various locations around Copley Square. Festival Founder and Program Director Deborah Z Porter today announced the complete list of authors confirmed to appear at this year’s event. The featured authors represent a wide array of programming, and include Pulitzer Prize winners, Nobel Laureates, children’s writers, and writers of fiction, non-fiction and poetry.

Authors scheduled to appear at The Boston Book Festival:


Susan Abulhawa (Mornings in Jenin)

Caroline Alexander (The War That Killed Achilles: The True Story of Homer's Iliad and the Trojan War; The Bounty)
Tom Barfield (Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History)

Barry Brunonia (The Map of True Places; The Lace Reader)

Kate Bernheimer (My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales)

Lisa Birnbach (True Prep; The Official Preppy Handbook)

*Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods, A Short History of Nearly Everything, At Home)

Thanassis Cambanis (A Privilege to Die)

Nicholas Carr (The Shallows)

Kristin Cashore (Graceling; Fire)

Richard Cohen (Chasing the Sun; By The Sword)

Justin Cronin (The Passage; Mary and O’Neil)

Jef Czekaj (Hip & Hop, Don’t Stop)

Kathryn Davis (Hell: A Novel, The Thin Place)

Alan Dershowitz (The Trials of Zion)

Elyssa East (Dogtown)
David Edwards (The Lab: Creativity and Culture)

Hallie Ephron (Never Tell a Lie, The Bibliophile’s Devotional: 365 Days of Literary Classics)

Timothy Basil Ering (Snook Alone)

Haleh Esfandiari (My Prison, My Home)

Noah Feldman (The Scorpions: The Battles & Triumphs of FDR’s great Supreme Court Justices; The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State)

Joshua Ferris (The Unnamed, Then We Came to the End: A Novel)

Tyler Florence (Tyler’s Ultimate; Tyler Florence Family Meals)

Nick Flynn (The Ticking is the Bomb, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City)

Alexis Frederick-Frost (Adventures in Cartooning)

Atul Gawande (Complications; The Checklist Manifesto)

Myla Goldberg (Bee Season; Wickett’s Remedy; The False Friend)

Christina Gonzalez (The Red Umbrella)

Allegra Goodman (The Cookbook Collector, Intuition; The Family Markowitz)

Andrew Gross (Reckless; The Dark Tide)

Jennifer Haigh (The Condition; Baker Towers; Mrs. Kimble)

Eric Haseltine (Long Fuse, Big Bang)
Edward Hirsch (The Living Fire; How to Read A Poem)

James Hirsch (Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend)

Erica Hirschler (Sargent’s Daughters)

Tony Hiss (In Motion: The Experience of Travel; The View from Alger’s Window)

*A.M Homes (This Book Will Save Your Life, Music For Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers)

Ann Hood (The Red Thread; The Knitting Circle)

Michelle Hoover (The Quickening)

Marlon James (John Crow’s Devil; The Book of Night Women)

*Gish Jen (Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, World and Town)

Steven Johnson (Where Good Ideas Come From)

Kevin Kelly (What Technology Wants)

Chip Kidd (True Prep; The Cheese Monkeys)

*Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid)Jarrett Krosoczka (Lunch Lady series; Punk Farm)
Eric Kuhne (architect)

Kathryn Lasky (Guardians of Ga’Hoole)

*Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Shutter Island; The Given Day)

Marianne Leone (Knowing Jesse)

Rose Lewis (I Love You Like Crazy Cakes; Orange Peel’s Pocket)

Brian Lies (Bats at the Ballgame; Bats at the Beach; Bats at the Library)

Kelly Link (Pretty Monsters, Magic for Beginners)

Scott Magoon (Spoon; Mostly Monsterly)

Simon Mawer (The Glass Room)

Jill McDonough (Habeas Corpus)

Richard Michelson (Busing Brewster; Tuttle’s Red Barn)

Mark Moffett (Adventures Among Ants)

Nick Montfort (Book and Volume: Interactive Fiction, Racing the Beam)

Dambisa Moyo (Dead Aid)

Nicholas Negroponte (Being Digital)

*Joyce Carol Oates (them, Blonde, We Were the Mulvaneys, Sourland)

Jane O’Connor and Robin Preiss Glasser (Fancy Nancy and the Fabulous Fashion Boutique)

Mitali Perkins (Bamboo People, Secret Keeper)

Michael E. Porter (Redefining Health Care)

William Powers (Hamlet’s Blackberry)

David Rakoff (Half Empty)
Joanna Smith Rakoff (A Fortunate Age)

Aaron Renier (The Unsinkable Walker Bean)

John Rich (Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men)

Moshe Safdie (architect)

Michael Sandel (Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do?)

*Stacy Schiff (Vera, A Great Improvisation, Cleopatra: A Life)

Juliet Schor (Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth)

Rob Scotton (Russell The Sheep; Scaredy Cat Splat)

*Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom, The Idea of Justice)
David Shields (Reality Hunger: A Manifesto)

Brando Skyhorse (Madonnas of Echo Park)

Jessica Stern (Denial: A Memoir of Terror; Terror in the Name of God; The Ultimate Terrorists)

*Joseph Stiglitz (Freefall, Making Globalization Work)

Francisco Stork (Last Summer of the Death Warriors; Marcelo in the Real World)

Sir Peter Stothard (The Spartacus Road)

Maria Tatar (The Classic Fairy Tales, ed.)

Jerald Walker (Street Shadows)

*Edward O. Wilson (The Ants, The Naturalist, Anthill: A Novel)

*Kevin Young (Jelly Roll: A Blues, For the Confederate Dead, The Art of Losing)

Raffi Yessayan (2 in the Hat; 8 in the Box)

Da Zheng (Chiang Yee: The Silent Traveler from the East)


*previously announced authors


Panel hosts and moderators will include Tom Ashbrook (WBUR), Helene Atwan (Beacon Press), Joel Hyatt (Current TV), Peter Kadzis (Boston Phoenix), Bill Littlefield (WBUR’s It’s Only a Game), Neri Oxman (designer), Henriette Power (The Drum Literary Magazine), Faith Salie (actress, comedian), Megan Marshall (biographer), Nicholas Negroponte (One Laptop Per Child), Bill Littlefield (WBUR), Andrew McAfee (research scientist), James Sebenius (Harvard Business Professor), Stefanie Friedhoff (journalist), and Jared Bowen (WGBH),


Locations in the Copley Square area include The Boston Public Library, Old South Church, Trinity Church, Church of the Covenant and John Hancock Hall.


Author bios are available at www.bostonbookfest.org. The complete program of events, including times, thematic groupings and exact locations, will be announced after Labor Day. In addition, the Boston Book Festival will announce details of a street fair on Copley Plaza, including music, vendors and children’s activities. All daytime events will be free. Details of a ticketed, evening event featuring music, spoken word and other media, will be announced soon.


The inaugural festival, held in October of 2009, was an unequivocal success. Organizers estimate that 12,000 people attended the presentations, panel discussions, workshops, music performances and street fair, most of which were free. The event featured 90 authors and presenters, including some of the biggest names in the literary world, 40 outdoor exhibitors, 30 indoor events, children’s activities, and live music. Internationally-known fiction and non-fiction writers, scholars, critics and commentators spoke to packed houses at historic Boston locations.

The Boston Book Festival recently announced One City, One Story, a new initiative made possible with support from the Goldhirsh Foundation. The Boston Book Festival will publish a short story by a well-known local writer, which will be distributed as a bound booklet to 30,000 Bostonians, free of charge. It will also be available for download to anyone at www.bostonbookfest.org. Festival organizers are finalizing their choice of writer, and his or her name will be announced later this month. Distribution will take place at Boston Public Library branches, subway stations and other places where people gather, in October, in advance of the Boston Book Festival. Complete details about distribution times and locations will be available after Labor Day.

Boston Book Festival sponsors include Liberty Mutual, The Boston Foundation, Other Press, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Hotel Commonwealth, The Plymouth Rock Foundation, Hachette Book Group, Bank of America, and The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. Media sponsors include WBUR, The Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, New England Cable News, WBZ NewsRadio 1030, Mix 104.1, 103.3 WODS, WGBH, The Times Literary Supplement (of London) and The Boston Parents Paper.

Boston Book Festival Partners include Mayor Thomas M. Menino; The Mayor’s Office of Arts, Tourism and Special Events; The City of Boston Parks and Recreation Department; ReadBoston; ArtsBoston; Mass Poetry Festival; ArtsFuse; Boston Public Library; Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston, the Boston Athenæum; PEN New England; Grub Street; Trinity Church; Old South Church; Boston Children’s Museum; Cambridge Public Library, New Center for Arts and Culture; 826 Boston; Brattle Theatre, Berklee College of Music; Emerson College.

For more information about the Boston Book Festival, visit www.bostonbookfest.org.

Grassroots by Jared Smith

Grassroots
Jared Smith
Wind Publications
ISBN 978-1-936138-09-8

Review by Irene Koronas




Jared Smith is a prolific writer. In his most recent collection of poems, 'Grassroots,' his voice is mellow and strong like a great sequoia. We hear the prosody, his consistent, insistent voice warning the reader of dangers associated with turning out:

"…The sky is cornflower blue tonight,
mountains pasted against orange clouds.
No depth. But in this spring warmth
brought upon us Washington and Wall Street
are as far as a car can run on rum and corn.
Men with heart attacks building in their veins
are shipping coffins across the oceans
but here on the sere sands of home something
more sacred than all their dreams evanesces away.
I watch from my porch as distance falls flat with sun…"

In the excerpt of the above poem, 'monsoon,' Jared Smith's voice, like winter water rushing over boulders, "keeping watch over the dead." Smith asks the earth, questions, "I want to know what they say, what the earth signals to itself rushing outward in the cosmos" His questions are reminiscent of a long marriage:

"It's the knick-knacks on department store shelves that give it away.
I miss the way your hands used to curl about my thoughts
each morning.
So much of life is our mementos being placed in orderly sequence and then sold."

It took me a few reading before I was able to unclog my summer ears and catch the intimacy of Jared's poems, how living beside mountains move him:

"When you live up close to the mountains
disaster comes at you quickly, without worry.
The floods, when they come, are instant washings
of trees, boulders, cars, mud, flesh, and then gone.
You rebuild instantly in a landscape shaped by nature;
you don't worry about the slow-building droughts
or the warring away of cement encased institutions
because you learn where the deepest rivers flow
and where the caribou migrate among the seasons.
You learn the bitter acid tang of Oregon grapes.
You learn to keep a bit of land around you; you
learn to fill the hummingbird feeders in summer
because the bears will follow in their time, and
you never know when you'll need to find a bear."

'Grassroots' holds all the trees, all their branches from top to the bottom shade, the clean breath beside whatever nature provides; her great sentences. Smith's poems relate nature and the nature of situations.

Irene Koronas
Poetry Editor:
Wilderness House Literary Review
Reviewer:
Ibbetson Street Press

Ibbetson Street 27 Reading Aug 21 7:30PM Out of the Blue Art Gallery

Ibbetson Street 27 Reading Aug 21 7:30PM Out of the Blue Art Gallery







The release reading for the literary journal "Ibbetson Street" (27) will be held at the Out of the Blue Art Gallery Saturday, Aug 21, 7:30PM 106 Propsect St. Cambridge. We will be a featured event at Deborah Priestly's Open Bark Poetry Series.


There will be an open mic for past contributors and the public. And we hope to have featured readers from this issue including: Zvi Sesling ("King of the Jungle"), Miriam Levine, Harris Gardner, Lainie Senechal, Dorian Brooks, Dan Sklar, Robert K. Johnson, as well as Ruth Kramer Baden, who has published a new collection with Ibbetson: "East of the Moon," and others. $4 donation at the door for the support of this valuable grassroots gallery. If you have any food you would like to bring or drinks we have a large table to accomodate that. Ibbetson Poets may bring books to sell.

* There will also be an informal gathering for dinner at 5:30 PM at the Middle East Rest. in Central Square before the event. Tell me if you plan to attend so I can make reservations. http://www.mideastclub.com/

BILLIE HOLIDAY ME AND THE BLUES by A.D. Winans

BILLIE HOLIDAY ME AND THE BLUES

By A.D. Winans

erbacce-press, Liverpool UK 2009

36 pp., $8.00

Review by Terry Reis Kennedy



It’s holy. It’s blue as a bruise. It’s A.D. Winans at his best, so merged with Billie—her pain, her songs, her longing for love—that we feel their Oneness. Winans identifies with the Jazz saint’s ability to survive the worst in life, and remain committed only to her art.

These poems are hard as nails, but paradoxically smooth as honey because they are sprung from the depths of compassion, the poet’s great love of humanity—particularly the downtrodden, the abused, and the outsider. His is a love so large that, like his heroine, Winans never finds an equal partner.

In much of his published work, for example, we discover that personal, sexual love is thwarted by fate. He loves, instead, the unknown suffering, the “huddled masses”. His idealistic longing is always disproportionate; nothing can fill the void that the Truth keeps on enlarging— people are not interested in their fellow men, not interested in seeing them as brothers and sisters, only as objects to be used, abused, and cast aside.

In “Jazz Angel” one of the most evocative poems in the collection, Winans relays what he discovers walking the streets of San Francisco. Delivering the poem like a detective’s report, the straight forwardness of the words eviscerates us:

She sits alone

In her small hotel room

Above the 222 Club

At Ellis and Eddy Streets

8 months pregnant

Forced to give head

For soup and bread…….





And after showing us the woman’s life, as if he was in her room himself, which perhaps he was, he writes:



She heads for the door

Hears the night manager whisper

“Whore.”

Suspended in silence

And grief

Floating face down

In the bowels

Of the American dream….





For Winans, the Jazz Era celebrated the sensitivity of souls who had no interest in superficial values. To him, Jazzers were what William Blake had described poets as, “fallen angels”. Billie Holiday was an alien in a world hooked into money and fame. And Winans who always worked at jobs to support his art never wanted to be part of any Gentleman’s Club. In “Post Office Reflections,” he notes:



Bone-ass tired from

Sorting thousands of letters

Fingers numb from stuffing

Them into pigeonholes

& I smelled of sweat and death

& kept drinking until

I felt good

Or ran out of money

Or both

& rode the 14 Mission Bus

Home with other people

Like me

Who couldn’t do

A nine-to-five shift…





Although Billie Holiday’s archangel wings got burned up in the fires of the country’s heartlessness, its racist Klanism, its failure to perceive women as equal to men, in her performances she was she able to fly. Winans empathizes with her yearning for salvation through freedom. Consequently, he has created this tribute, not only for “The Jazz Lady” (title of a poem dedicated to her); but he sings a sad farewell to the Blues as well. For example, in “The Demise of Jazz in North Beach,” he writes:

No cool cats in North Beach anymore

No cool cats blowing the horn

No jazz at the old Purple Onion

No be-bop snapping fingers

No fallen angels spreading their legs

On the way home after

A conversation with God

No black cats improvising the blues

No white dudes riding the midnight express

No stoned soul train musicians blowing

Mean clean notes crucified suffocating

In the smoking mirrors of the mind

Gone buried in the decadence

Of collective madness

Randy Ross writes from the “Loneliest Planet…” in the midst of Somerville, Mass.

(Randy Ross-center)










Randy Ross writes from the “Loneliest Planet…” in the midst of Somerville, Mass.

By Doug Holder

Randy Ross, an aspiring novelist who lives in the hinterlands of Somerville, Mass. that borders on the Republic of Cambridge, is a “holy fool.” Ross, 49, who was laid off his job as an editor at PC WORLD, works day and night on his novel “ The Loneliest Planet: A Handbook for the Chronically Single.” Ross, who has an advanced degree from North Western University in Journalism, also founded the online and in the flesh group “Media Chowder.” The group is made up of local journalists, novelists, and denizens of the media world from broadcast to the internet. Ross said, “We are open to people of all levels.” The slogan of the said group is “Media Chowder: The best damned excuse for Boston-area journalists to go out drinking, period..." And indeed they meet at Sidney’s, a convivial pub just outside Central Square off of Mass. Ave in Cambridge, Mass. The group is an excellent place for folks to down a few and network with people in the field. Ross told me that AOL.COM once recruited at one of their gatherings and folks have secured gigs through the group.

Ross described his work-in-progress as a story about a never-married hypochondriac who takes a trip around the world hoping to meet his perfect mate. Along the way he gets involved in the lurid world of sexual tourism. Much of the “action” takes place in Cambodia. Ross said the book is very loosely-based on his own travels around the world. He describes the novel as a dark comedy of sorts.

Ross said of the prospects of publishing the book: “I have gone to endless conferences. I have met with about 7 agents, 3 of whom have asked to read it when it's finished in late fall/early winter, and I have gotten just enough encouragement to continue.”

Ross works part time to help keep chowder on the table, and the rest of the time he labors over his novel. He is in three writers groups, and has run workshops with local writers such as Michael Mack and Daniel Gewertz. Like many of the writers I have interviewed Ross is enamored with Somerville, Mass. He loves the proximity to his fellow scribes, and the whole vibrant milieu the “Paris of New England” offers.


*****Go to this link for more info about media chowder and Ross:

http://mediachowder.weebly.com/

MRB CHELKO: Parting words from a Somerville Poet

Unfortunately at times Somerville loses its many talented artists and writers to the allure of New York City. Poet MRB Chelko is one of them. I interviewed her shortly after she left Union Square to the "City that never sleeps." She has a recent collection of poetry out "What to Tell Sleeping Babies" published by the sunnyoutside press; a press that also left Somerville for Buffalo, NY.


MRB Chelko is a recent graduate of The University of New Hampshire's MFA program and Editorial Assistant of the unbound poetry journal, Tuesday; An Art Project. Her poems have appeared in AGNI Online, Contrary, Fourteen Hills, Portland Review, and other fine journals. She lives with her husband, Nick and dog, Chuck in Central Harlem. Her chapbook is What to Tell the Sleeping Babies (sunnyoutside, 2010).





You got your MFA at the University of New Hampshire, where Charles Simic teaches. You seem in some ways to share his spare and minimalistic style. Was he a big influence on you?







Yes. The first time I read Simic was in an intro poetry workshop at Penn State University. I was nineteen and had never encountered a poetry at once so strange and so accessible. I read all of his books and as many of the Eastern European poets who influenced him as I could. I tried to imitate his style. Ha, I was a pretty intense little wanna-be poet. Thank God I didn't actually know Simic then. He might have needed a restraining order. The Simic influence in my work is considerably watered down now, but in What to Tell the Sleeping Babies it's pretty potent. Mystery is one of the great pleasures of poetry, and, for me, spare poems allow for more mystery because they allow space for silence. Simic is master of eerie silence, but he is also master of undercutting the eerie silence. It's one of the most thrilling things about his genius There's a poem of his in which he lists all the terrible things that happened to him in his life, but the poems ends with something like When I think about these things... I burst out laughing.



You left Somerville, Mass--the Paris of New England—why?







Ha. The Paris of New England, I like that. Well... my husband Nick and I lived in Somerville for two years while I was finishing my MFA. We lived near Union Square and were quickly wooed by Neighborhood Restaurant, Block 11, Highland Kitchen, the neighbor kids, Market Basket, the dog park.... But Nick and I both wanted graduate degrees, and he was kind enough to wait until I finished mine to begin his. We moved to New York City in June so he could attend Columbia University's Urban Design graduate program. New York is a good fit for us; we're fast-paced people really, but we were very sad to leave behind a great neighborhood and beautiful friends.


You published your first collection "What to Tell Sleeping Babies" with the sunnyoutside press. Why did you send it their way?







Great question. I was in a poetry workshop a few years ago with sunnyoutsider Nate Graziano. At the end of the semester, he told me he thought David McNamara—sunnyoutside creator, beautiful book maker, and general jack-of-all-trades—would like my poems. David had published another poet I was familiar with, Jason Tandon, recently as well, so I was somewhat familiar with the press. Anyhow, I sent some stuff along to David, not a whole manuscript, just a few poems, and that was the beginning of what's now been a brilliant two-year, two project relationship with sunnyoutside. I can't say enough good things about David McNamara and his Buffalo, NY press. The books are gorgeous, the work relationship flexible and exciting. Above all, I trust that my poems will be well represented by sunnyoutisde, and that's a big deal.



You worked as an editorial asst. at "Tuesday; An Art Project" a very unusual and artful journal of poetry. Can you tell me about the journal and your experience there?







I am still editorial assistant of Tuesday; An Art Project actually. Most of the work I do for the journal is online: e-mailing, contact info, contracts... so I can still do it from New York. In fact, we are thinking of launching a Tuesday reading series in Brooklyn starting this fall, which I'm very pumped about. The journal is four years old now, so we're poised to expand our reach a little. It's exciting. Tuesday; An Art Project is an unbound journal of poems, photographs, and prints out of Arlington, MA. It comes in a little package twice a year. The idea is each work is an object. Some poems are postcards. Others you can put on your wall or frame or do whatever you want with. You do more than just read Tuesday; you interact with Tuesday. It's a cool concept, but the journal is much more than a concept. It's a collection of truly first-rate art. We've published tons of poets I love, Ralph Angel, Mary Ruefle, and Joshua Beckman to name a few. Working with the journal's creator and editor, Jennifer Flescher, over the past few years has been a great learning experience for me, and a blast.





I loved your poem "the unplucked fruit hangs itself." You have an image of this fly flinging itself time and time to get a t the light. Well, to use a metaphor, ain't that a bit like a poet?







Yup. It sure is. Although, in the poem, the fly is throwing itself into the light “like a bored child throws a ball.” As a poet, I am certainly not bored, but I do think the notion that we are, as writers, constantly trying to fling our bodies and our perceptions towards some great bright thing is pretty accurate. It's all about Frost's idea that a poem is a “momentary stay against confusion.” When you look at the poem, you see the light; when you look away from the poem, blackness.








Dear Whoever's Listening




You can press an orchid anyplace,

provided you've come with an orchid—




for the sake of some great something,

some final, Oh, there you are...




I say let the pigeons alone

rest on the shoulders of great men,




but I've been sitting here for hours

between a fruit basket and an open book,




trying to pick one—

Book Fair --- Haverhill Public Library-- Aug 26, 2010

PARTICIPANTS




Christopher & Nancy Obert, owners of Pear Tree Publishing and authors of “The Next Harvest, Vineyards & Wineries of New England.” (Event Organizer)



Coralie Hughes Jensen, author of the novels “Passup Point,” “Lety’s Gift” & “Winter Harvest.” (Event Organizer)



Christopher Golden, nationally famous author of many comic books, plays, horror & fantasy novels, including “Wildwood Road,” Straight on Til Morning” and Buffy the Vampire Slayer novels.



Allan Hunter, author of “The Six Archetypes of Love” and “Stories We Need To Know.”



Bruce Valley, author of “Seahawk: Confessions of an Old Hockey Goalie, “Flying Frenchmen: The Story of the Berlin Maroons and the REAL Hockeytown USA” and “Rye Harbor, Poems of the New Hampshire Seacoast.”



Claire Gibeau, author of 2 novels and 8 children’s books.



Elena Dorothy Bowman, author of “The Sarah’s Landing” Series.



Jean Foley Doyle, author of “Life in Newburyport, 1900 – 1950” and “Life in Newburyport, 1950 – 1985”



K. D. Mason, author of “Ice Harbor” and “Changing Tides.”



Lucinda Marcoux, author of “King of the Forest.”



Nate Kenyon, author of many horror books and short stories including “Prime” and “The Bone Factory.”



Tracy Carbone, short story author with stories in the “Traps” anthology and many other publications.



Scott Goudsward, author of horror novel “Trailer Trash,” editor of “Traps” and author of the non-fiction horror guidebook “Shadows over New England.”



Paul Stone, author of “Or So It Seems” and “How to Train a Rock.”



Monique & Alexa Peters, authors and illustrators of “Cooper and Me.”



Michael LaFosse & Richard Alexander, owners of Origamido Studio and authors of numerous books on origami.



Ashlyn Chase, author of “Strange Neighbors” and other Romantic Comedy.



Anna Soria, editor of “Voices of Haverhill” poetry by Greater Haverhill Poets.



Jeanine Malarsky, author of “Black Raspberries.”



Anne Ipsen, author of “Karen from the Mill”, a novel from the golden age of sail; as well as other novels.



Christina James, Author of “Naughty and Wicked Romance...With No Strings Attached” and other novels.



Cindy Davis, author of the novel “Voice from the Ashes.”



Dave Daniel, author of “Murder at the Baseball Hall of Fame.”



Ed Marshall, author and creator of the hand made poetry books “Sandalwood,” “Lilacs” and “Ripples.”



John Katsaros, author of the World War II memoir “Code Burgundy, the Long Escape.”



Kevin Conley, comic book illustrator for comics such as “Kid Houdini and The Silver-Dollar Misfits.”



Michael Bisceglia, author of the novel “Room 600.”



Michael Kilday, author of numerous Spiritual books.



Michaeline Della Fera, author of “Women at the Table.”



Nikki Andrews, author of “Chicken Bones” and “A Windswept Star.”



Pat Emiro, author of the memoir “Finger of God” and the poetry book “Expressions from His Heart.”



Roxanne Dent, author of supernatural Romance novels.



Doug Holder, founder and editor at Ibbetson Street Press – which publishes the best of the small press poetry.



William Bond, author of many business books.



The Greater Haverhill Poets, a group of poets and writers based in Haverhill, Massachusetts. Authors of the poetry compilation books “Pen & Brush,” “Voices of Haverhill” and “Poetic Fairy Tales.”

Lip by Cathryn Cofell

Lip


Cathryn Cofell
www.cathryncofell.com
Abella Audio Productions
$13.00

In the early part of the 20th century poet Basil Bunting was among the first poets to drive home the point that poetry should be spoken, that like a musical score it was not intelligible until it was heard aloud. And so performance poetry began to take shape. Yet it took until the 70’s and the arrival of slam poetry for spoken word and performance poetry to really begin to find their zenith. Today, the marriage of poetry and music continues to expand into libraries, coffee houses, pubs, art galleries and sometimes spills its lyrical beauty in gardens or on street corners. Cathryn Cofell’s CD “Lip” (music by Obvious Dog) combines her love for the written word with her love for music and her talent for public speaking into a journey syncopated with words jazzed up with musical interludes.

Ms. Cofell’s list of credits runs long. In addition to “Lip,” she has published numerous books of poetry, won 40 plus awards, and was nominated not once, but twice, for a Pushcart. Her full-time gig is in the non-profit arena and this Wisconsin girl also finds time to support the Arts, as a self-proclaimed “sucker for a good cause.” While her credits also include speaking engagements and voice-over work, I have to say that this reviewer was somewhat disappointed in the delivery of the work on “Lip.” The poetry is intense, touching on women’s themes from the get-go. The first work deals with puberty, menses, coming of age, and the evolution through the phases of a woman’s moon – yet, the performance barely skims the surface of the emotional sworls and upheavals of women’s cycles of life.

With titles like “Ms. Conception” and “Covered in Hicky’s” we continue to follow Ms. Cofell’s emphasis on women’s themes, sexuality, and fertility or lack thereof. By half way through the CD I found myself humming the old tune, “I am Woman!” (hear me roar)

The musical interludes of Obvious Dog are sound enough in the beginning and the music is allowed further showcase as the CD progresses, but is never the breath of a soundtrack beneath the lyrical spoken words.

This is a CD that addresses the evolution of women; the writing and imagery is solid and I enjoyed listening to it multiple times in my car, even as I longed for a more evocative presentation of the spoken word.



*****Rene Schwiesow is a co-host of Poetry: The Art of Words in Plymouth, MA. She co-owns an online poetry forum (poemtrain.com), has been published in various anthologies including “City Lights” and is a regular at open mic’s on the greater Boston poetry circuit.

REVIEW OF VACATIONS ON THE BLACK STAR LINE by MICHAEL CIRELLI

REVIEW OF VACATIONS ON THE BLACK STAR LINE by MICHAEL CIRELLI

(Hanging Loose Press, 2010)


REVIEWER: Manson Solomon







Michael Cirelli’s work is Good Stuff. With an agenda.



His seriousness of purpose is made clear in the epigraph: “Why hasn’t racial anxiety, shame and hatred . . . been more a theme in poetry by Caucasian-Americans? . . . To speak in a voice equal to reality . . . will mean admitting that one is not on the sidelines of our racial realities, but actually in the tangled middle of them, in very personal ways.” (Hoagland, Tony, “Negative Capability” The American Poetry Review Mar/Apr 2003: Vol 32, No.2. )



Cirelli dives right into the “tangled middle” of hip-hop culture, complete with his own personal Brown Skin Lady (well, ladies actually, since there are no less than five poems with that title, some of whom are, not insignificantly, Middle-Eastern and South Asian rather than African-American), and proceeds to



. . . surround myself with black

people, black people that

had space jive, had cosmic

language wrapped

around their fingers,

and I homaged those words

and deconstructed that swagger . . .

as I boarded

every new rocket ship



and from that vantage point he comes at us with his authentic poetry.



So far so cool. But why is this white boy speaking poetry on behalf of blacks? Can’t they speak for themselves? Well, he isn’t – he is actually speaking for himself. The hip-hoppers and rappers are speaking for themselves in the rap and hip-hop itself – it’s their authentic voice, but it ain’t poetry. Cirelli has been called a “hip-hop” poet, and if by that it is meant that hip-hop is often the subject of his poetry, fair enough. On the other hand, if it is meant to suggest that his poems are actually hip-hop themselves, then nuh-uh: he is no more a mere hip-hopper or rapper than Wordsworth was a daffodil or a waterfall. Though he often immerses himself in the rhythms of hip-hop, and many of his poems allude directly to specific hip-hop songs, his work is way too good, too sophisticated, to be mere hip-hop lyrics.



What Cirelli does is to personally enter into the hip-hop scene and write about it from within – or as within as a white boy can get -- giving us real poetry about it rather than merely mimicking it. So, for example, imbedded amongst all the hip-hoppy, rappy, yo’s in “Yo Yeah” -- including ribald footnotes containing scores of them, and even some deleted yo’s and yeah’s -- are real gems, such as: “Yo multiple literacies / Come wrap / Your mouth around / My ear so I can listen / to the ocean in there.”



Or, as in “Tawk”:



When T-Pain . . .

. . . named his album

Rappa Ternt Sanga, he wasn’t being

Ignorant, or ignant at that, wasn’t bad

at spelling . . .

. . . but he was

accounting for the texture of the dirt

in his teef . . .

. . . This makes sense to me.



Cirelli is an interpreter, a translater, a poet with hip-hop as subject who, the better to convey his message, often employs its rhythms and language. In “I Am Hip-Hop”, he says:



I claim nothing but hip-hop

I’m the white Eminem . . .



That makes me part gangsta. You know what time is it ---



When I win the Pulitzer prize, for Realness, the Nobel

for my translation of Hip-Hop.



In the first Brown Skin Lady he becomes an “extra black white boy” who “surrounded myself with all this darkness, packed my mouth / full of Shea butter & AAVE [African-American Vernacular English] until I felt black in sheep’s clothing, / which isn’t black at all, but it comforted me to be so god damn down, / so schooled in hip-hop like hip-hop was a hall pass to blackness” only to learn “that I wasn’t nearly as black as I thought.”



And in “Birthplace”:



wanting to be their “dawg” ---

but feeling like a mailman

another Elvis





So why has he taken this path? Is it only to respond to Hoagland’s injunction, or is it also something more personal?



In “Definition” he speaks eloquently of his childhood, of eating breakfast with his sister in his family’s American dream diner, staring out/ the window/ at the orange leaves / dancing on the hard edges / of the wind, before going off to Catholic school.



And in “Ars Poetica””:



I am herringbone gold chain

hanging from the neck of a Tony Soprano

devotee with dried marinara

flaking from the hairs of his perfected goatee.

Italy laughs at this version of Italian, of us,

but I embrace it because it is something

I can call my own.



On the other hand, as he tells us in RE:DEFinition, he is ambivalent about contemporary Italian-American identity, absorbed as it has become into the general culture: “My People: noun No longer Italiano not even / Wop no longer Irish / Polack”. Or again, in the My People section of “Twice Inna Lifetime”:



. . . My cousins live in Providence

where every wanna-be-thug-gangsta

goomba hangs a lynched Jesus from his neck,

and the wardrobe of African-America

off his ass. I don’t know who’s worse off.

In Brooklyn, my friends with privilege

have the privilege of understanding

privilege. We pay off student loans

from our Adventures in Ethnography.

We read culturally relevant books

from other cultures and swathe our tongues

in hip logic . . .



(In his use of ‘logic’, Cirelli, with his Catholic school education, is surely alluding to ‘logos’, the Word, a concept with a long philosophical history embodying the idea of Truth being made manifest through language.)



In RE: RE:DEFinition we get the college-age kid rolling around the world trying on different scenes. “I could surround myself / with poems in San Francisco / where the Beats have pacemakers . . .”, ending up in “Brooklyn where hip-hop is jacked electricity and beats broken and samples stolen so hip-hop (in a way) is white like me.”



Thanks to MTV et al, and booming bass technology, hip-hop is now a persistent presence in the lives of young people; as Cirelli puts it in “Anecdote of 16 Bars”:



It was the sound of black troubadors.



The projects rose up around it and were

no longer wilderness to those who hadn’t

lived there. Teenagers across the heartland



romanticized the bravado of Bronx, wanted

a lick of the red tongue, to fit into its baggy jeans.

this is the age when the word became fresh



and it took dominion everywhere.



(Perhaps, one might add, not unlike the absorption, after huge initial resistance, of jazz and swing into the mainstream, played as it is today without a second thought by totally white bands.)



And, significantly, interwoven into all this is another powerful strand, the impact of the election of Obama.:



In 2008, the poster on my wall

has a 4-letter word and a black face,

who is not an athlete, not a rapper.

I put black on a pedestal. Pray to black

five times a day. I make black the new

white . . . (“Black President”)



-- and--



I’m afraid this new intergalactic

President of ours absolves my people

. . . like it offered us stripes, like it made us

The Voyeurs of Inequity, like it added

to our bios. (Twice Inna Lifetime”)





But what about the word “Vacation” in the title? That suggests not mere “Voyeurs of Inequity” or privileged “Adventures in Ethnography”, but a sojourn: “When I vacation / on the moon, I don’t want to look like / a tourist . . . When I look into the eyes / of the aliens, I know the pain they’ve seen.”



So are AAVE and hip-hop the inside now and are Caucasian-Americans on the outside, merely vacationing on the Black Star Line (a reference to a hip-hop album which is itself a reference to African nationalist Marcus Garvey’s shipping line)? To a young man questioning the vitality of his own domesticated culture, such a vacation offers an opportunity to engage with a vibrant new energy. Cirelli injects himself into that world, and, being a poet, sings of it – to his great credit in a voice more melodic and harmonious, and of exponentially greater sensitivity, than the music it alludes to, a voice that invites us to enter into a world.



There simply isn’t room in this review to do justice to all the many excellent poems in this collection, the delightful turns of phrase, allusions and insights, or to engage with the accompanying downloadable MP3 or the non-hip-hop-related pieces . Though eminently accessible on the first reading, like all good poetry, carefully crafted and real, it warrants reading and re-reading, as new meanings arise with each sojourn.

Review of EAST OF THE MOON by Ruth Kramer Baden

Review of EAST OF THE MOON by Ruth Kramer Baden, Ibbetson Street Press, 25 School Street, Somerville, MA 02143, 2010. Book design by Steve Glines (ISCSPress.com)

By Barbara Bialick

The poetry collection, East of the Moon, is at once mythic, narrative, story telling and bursting with flavor beads of some great stand-alone poems. As she takes the reader through the lifecycles of a mature woman, age 70, we see the span of a full first collection, which has obviously been writing itself in the back of her mind for a long time. It may be a first book, but not a first-time writer. The work echoes with the awful meanings behind fairy tales, the things that the original tellers didn’t dare to say but to imply. It also seems influenced by William Blake’s voices of innocence and experience.

The cover design and inside black and white ink drawings add a lot to the fairy tale theme. But the royal blue cover and its own painting quoting “Schoen ve de le vune”—you are lovely like the moon.—makes its own stamp on the collection as it literally feels like nubuck leather boots, which mimic the boots of the Cossacks and others roaring through history, using and abusing women and everyone else.

Some examples from the book:

“She was the clever one,/Hansel had always been slow./She knew they could not go back/their stepmother would break them/their father would betray them…”
(“Gretel Ever After”).

“She told the prince, If I married you/I would become a frostbitter woman/who could not hear my children/sing or cry/…Touch me and I will kill you…He ran… /She made her lonely way over roots and rocks…(to where) a rosewood piano stood/Her hands spanned octaves./She played a Bach prelude.” (“The Sleeping Princess”)

Compare this narrative style to poetry later into the life cycle—a grandmother’s poetry:
In “Consider the Trees,” she writes sheer lyric poetry: “how I have grown like the cypress/crouched on a cliff/sentinel searching/the inhospitable sea/…all that grows/…must find a way to live.” Or “Rachel’s Birthday Poem”: “You sail into your second year/wobbling and yawing in front/I in your wake/You are the music language makes,/you are the golden heart of the plum.”

Ruth Kramer Baden has been a 1950s married mother, a creator of a local chapter of the National Organization of Women, a journalist, a consultant on children for Wellesley College, and at age 50, she graduated law school! (She practiced elder law). She’s currently working on her retirement dream of becoming a poet. Give her book a try.

"Their Tranquil Lives" by Kathleen Spivack

The following is an excerpt from Kathleen Spivack's poem "Their Tranquil Lives" that won the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award. Kathleen also won the Sow's Ear Poetry Award and has a new book out "A History of Yearning" ( Sow's Ear Poetry Review) that can be purchased at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square. The prize-winning poem appears in "A History of Yearning" collection as well.





Their Tranquil Lives






***(First Prize, Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award 2010.)


"Oh lost world of Gustav Klimt,
the jeweled and doe-eyed women
swam the walls and ceilings
of pre-Holocaust Vienna’s
ornate opera. Women’s compliance
did not need to be stated,
was pink and white
and not hidden by drapes.

World War I had not yet happened.
The city was a beaker spilling over
with bits of gold applied
which one could drink
or pour into, carefully
lavish and lucky.

Outside the window apples
shone in their dappled garden.
The women had proud
names, and pregnancies.
They rose like mermaids through
their tranquil lives,
upward and passionate.
The insides of their wrists
were white and still unmarked,
smoothed with kisses:..."




– Kathleen Spivack- ( Excerpt from "A History of Yearning" )

Dragon Well Poems by Sandy McCord

Dragon Well
Poems by
Sandy McCord
Finishing Line Press
Georgetown KY
Copyright © 2010 by Sandy McCord
Softbound, 27 pages, $12
ISBN 1-59924-582-5

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Ever want to take a trip to China, but for any number of reasons did not...well Sandy McCord’s Dragon Well transports you there in magical ways. Her poems sparkle with
mountain dew, drips of water, the ancient and the modern, and my personal favorite in
this volume, “Xizhou Market”:

Cloud ears, poison ears,
monster free fungus,
chiles in claws and stars
of anise, sticks of cinnamon,
ginger fingers, ginseng
toes, heaps of leeks,
purple satin eggplants,
fat turbans of garlic,
garlands of corn, baby
bok choy, walnuts
and chestnuts, yams
charring in charcoal,
flat lotus babas
smoking on iron grills,
cucumbers like alligators

There is more to this poem that you will want to read, as you will all of McCord’s poetic endeavors including the real meaning of “Chang Jiang,” and the poems “Yuantong Si,” “Green Lake Morning” and all the rest.

There is also the title poem which opens the chapbook opens with “in fields of tea, a deep well/holds water thick and heavy/with age, its mouth open to rain.....and concludes with
...to leaves light with spring rain/and alive with energy released from winter/washes the tongue with a flash of fierce/green, a sweet fortune of gold.

Born in Nebraska, home of former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Koozer and now living in Kentucky, home of many poets, including Wendell Berry, to name one, she took her trip to China in 2007 which resulted in this volume of wonderful poems, which are sensitive,
honest and worth the effort of reading, especially if you like the cross culture poetry.

Desolation Paradise by William James Austin

Desolation Paradise
by William James Austin


Desolation Paradise
by William James Austin
Koja Press, 2006, $15, 89 pages, paperback
Copyright © 2006 by William James Austin and Koja Press
ISBN-13 978-0-9773698-2-9

Review by Zvi A. Sesling


On the back of this volume of poetry it states, “It has been said that Austin continues Allen Ginsberg and Frank O’Hara where they left off, surpassing them both. That is a bit far fetched, as is some of the poetry in this book. Take these lines:

jesse, your electron
dance,
quantum on stage
the crusade of desire
to inform
itself
between
palpable thighs

I turned you off.
you turned me down.
you called me “subatomic”
laughing as you walked away
from me
on prince street
where engines collided,
skin and steel –
I watched you
fracture
day after day
under hospital florescent,
navigating swells
of nurse white—
I

witnessed your eyes
when they opened
“why are you here?”
“I love you”


Well, you get the point. This is just a part one of his more poems, not too related to Ginsberg or O’Hara, but none the less an interesting segment from both an interesting poem and book.

In the bio on the author it says, in addition to books, poems, essays, etc. that Austin “composed music and lyrics for Lou Rawls, the fusion group: Hammer, an embarrassing television sitcom and other rock and jazz beez and wannabeez.” At the time of the book
he was an Associate Professor of English and Philosphy, among other things at SUNY, Farmingdale. Reading this book, I wish I had been one of his students.

Somerville writers and musicians in Boston Sunday service.

Somerville writers & musicians in Boston Sunday service.

First Church in Boston was founded in 1630, led by Governor Winthrop. Sunday, July 25, the service will be led by Lucy Holstedt and Kirk Etherton.

“We could have done a pretty good job by ourselves,” says Etherton, “but including some of our incredibly talented fellow Somerville residents is going to make this a great event.” The theme of the service will be “Creating Peace.” Bert Stern will read poetry from his highly acclaimed Steerage (Ibbetson Street Press); Gloria Mindock will talk about her experience working with people who have experienced war.

Somerville musician/singer Yani Batteau will perform two songs, including one co-written by the multi-talented, (former) Somerville artist C.D. Collins. At the request of Kirk and Lucy, Ibbetson founder Doug Holder will be a featured guest—and bring some publications for sale after the service.

Poet Richard Hoffman (who lives in Cambridge and authored the multi-award-winning Gold Star Road) will also give a reading.

First Church Boston has been a Unitarian congregation for several decades. It’s located 66 Marlborough Street, a couple of blocks from the Public Garden and across from the French Library. “Summer services are held in the air-conditioned chapel upstairs,” says Etherton. “It only holds about 70 people, so it’s good to get there early.”

The service runs from 11:00 a.m ‘til noon, and will be broadcast on 88.9 FM, the radio station of Emerson College. The church’s website is firstchurchboston.org