Hilary Sideris’s Animals in English

 

Hilary Sideris’s Animals in English (Dos Madres Press),

reviewed by Gregory J. Wolos




In the prologue to her poetry collection Animals in English, Hilary Sideris explains that she “was writing a series of poems in the voice of Temple Grandin,” who, because of her autism, “spent her youth and most of her adult life learning to speak the language of ‘normal’ humans so that she could tell us how animals . . . perceive, feel, and experience the world in pictures.” Sideris hopes that she can parallel Grandin’s intention “by translating Grandin’s experiences and insights into the language of free verse.” The “voice” of these poems is Sideris’s representation of Grandin’s: through the activist’s epistemological framework, the reader is brought closer to the inner worlds of animals, a rendering which expands our awareness of the greater existence we humans share with our fellow creatures.

In the collection’s opening poem, “Nantasket Lights,” Sideris begins her act of ventriloquizing Grandin. The poem details Grandin’s childhood frustration with language: “I didn’t think in words. Still don’t,” and describes how she was removed from school for slapping a classmate who mocked her repetitive attempts to tell a story by calling her “tape recorder.” What Sideris’s child-Grandin was trying to describe was a physical sensation, the pleasure of being “pushed up against a wall” while riding the tilting wheel of the Rotor at Nantasket Park. The comforting feeling of compression is continued in the next poem, “Squeeze Chute,” which describes how cattle are “clamped” in a metal cage to get there shots, a process which actually calms them down “like swaddled newborns.” Sideris’s Grandin suggests that she would find comfort in “a squeeze chute of my own.”

“Squeeze Chute,” as do more than half of Sideris’s poems, begins with an italicized quotation taken from a set of books cited at the volumes conclusion which are by or about Grandin. In the poem “Rapid Erratic Movement” the epigraph reads “It doesn’t jump out at normal people the way it does at me or a cow.” Sideris’s poem goes on to describe a child-Grandin who is “obsessed” with motion, such as “flags/ flapping in the wind,/the light reflecting off a fan’s rotating blades.” The narrator compares herself to a cat chasing a laser dot, “mindless,/ obsessed, their world/ a skittish dot,” and continues on to contrast her behavior with the purposefulness of a child, who, “cheered on by our mothers,/ makes a castle with/ a bucket & shovel.” Grandin, like the animals with which she empathizes, is observational, not planful, like the purposeful child. The epigraphs to Sideris’s poems tell us the activist “saw pictures inside her head,” and that during her thinking process had “no words in my head at all,” a revelation Sideris transliterates in her poem “Certain Infinites” as “Words came unnaturally,/ I learned to speak/ mimicking mom, who/ conjugated like a queen.” Sideris’s poems and the epigraphs upon which they are based suggest that Grandin was a difficult to child to raise, her condition nearly impossible to properly diagnose.

The epigraph to the poem “1950” describes how childhood autism was once believed to be “a reflection of bad parenting, and most especially of a chillingly remote . . . refrigerator mother.” The poem itself describes how, as child-Grandin “painted walls/ with my feces, Doctors told her [mother]/ she was the cause,/ there was no cure.” Yet while Grandin seemed immune to “normal” parenting, the poem “Ariel” reveals her intuitively empathetic relationship with a horse she was learning to ride: “She shows you/ how to ride, knows/ when you want/ to canter, gallop,/ trot—dances with/ you when people/ can’t or won’t.” The horse, it is suggested, observes the details of the child’s discomfort and adjusts to accommodate them; to demonstrate Grandin’s empathetic understanding of animals, Sideris’s poem “Signs of Horse Distress” parallels the autistic child’s suffering with the distressed awareness of an animal like Ariel: “Head high,/ eyes wide, ears/ pointing toward/ the person of/ concern or pinned/ back, flat. Sweat/ without exercise./ Tail swishing/ without flies.”

Sideris channels Grandin as she considers the difference between language as used by “normal” humans and animals. Our own human understanding of language prejudices our conception of animal language. As the epigraph to “Prairie Dogs” explains, “instead of looking for animal language in our closest genetic relatives, the primates, we should look at animals with the greatest need for language in order to stay alive.” The complementary poem suggests their calls are intended to warn that “a predator/ is on the way, how fast,/ where from, what kind.” The epigraph to “Annabelle’s Bite” explains that “[a]nimals probably don’t have the complex emotions people do, like shame, guilt, embarrassment, greed, or wanting bad tings to happen to people who are more successful than you.” Sideris’s poem illustrates the concept: “The pet we let out/ kills with grace, Calm jaws clamp/ prey then shake/ methodically.” In “Slaughterhouse Lights” the Grandin-based epigraph emphasizes once again the similarity between animals and the autistic, asserting that “[a]utistic people and animals are seeing a whole register of the visual world normal people can’t or don’t.” The poem describes how Grandin was hired by a company to determine why pigs were stopping on a chute that would lead them to slaughter: “I got on my hands/ & knees, saw the reflecting/ lights in puddles; pigs fear not death, but sudden movement,/ rapid changes, foreign objects/ in their visual field.

Sideris’s art in Animals in English resides in her ability to complete a multi-level act of transduction in clear, simple language. Her poems are based on dual premises: first, animal language is not based on the same premises as “normal” human language; second, that the epistemological framework of those with autism, specifically the animal activist Temple Grandin, closely resembles that of animals. Sideris’s concluding poem, “Stairway to Heaven,” opens by telling the reader that “Cows think in pictures,/ not stories.” While being led to slaughter, the proceed along the chute that leads them to death as if they’re part of a herd that “spirals” over pasture land, and uncomplicated by emotions, they “never wonder where it ends.”

Doug Holder Interviews poet Gary Margolis

The Girl in the Boston Box by Chuck Latovich

 

The Girl in the Boston Box by Chuck Latovich, 435 pp. available on Amazon

review by Lee Varon

During the ongoing pandemic, many of us have re-discovered the joy of getting lost in a good book. Especially, for me, this means a mystery. The Girl in the Boston Box by Cambridge writer Chuck Latovich is a perfect present for yourself or someone you know. Steeped in Boston lore and landmarks, the book follows two apparently unrelated characters—Mark, a 40-something gay man who works as a tour guide driving Duck Boats for a living, and Caitlyn, a graduate student in architectural history at Harvard. When the book opens, Mark’s brother, from whom he’s been estranged for decades, has been murdered, leaving few clues other than the mysterious words “Boston Box” on a scrap of paper in his apartment. The police have contacted Mark to identify his brother’s body, and because it seems Mark stands to inherit a hefty sum of money his brother left behind. From the start, things don’t go quite as planned. Mark soon learns other shadowy figures are laying claim to his brother’s money. Meanwhile, in a totally separate storyline, across the river in Cambridge, Caitlyn is studying 19^th buildings with hidden rooms called Boston Boxes. Though some of these rooms seem to have been used by the Underground Railroad to hide runaway slaves in pre-Civil War days, as Caitlyn delves further she uncover dark secrets and shocking crimes involving Boston’s past.

How the story of these two strangers—Mark and Caitlyn—eventually connect is what makes up some of the excitement of The Girl in the Boston Box. The book alternates with galloping suspense between Mark and Caitlyn until their stories finally converge.

As an exciting mystery this book rates 5 stars, but it’s more than just a thriller. I can always tell I love a book when the characters stay with me long after I’ve finished reading. I found this with both characters, but especially with Mark. At the beginning he’s somewhat down and out. His long-term boyfriend has dumped him. He has no family and seemingly few friends. He lives in a shabby Brighton apartment and is clinging to his job as a Duck Boat driver. Yet despite this, Mark still has the ability to laugh at himself and to hope for better times. All in all, he’s a totally endearing character who bumbles through Boston trying to piece together the clues to his brother’s murder. Far from a one-dimensional character, Mark can be at times self-pitying, fearful, and petty, and at other times brave, noble, and selfless. I laughed out loud many times at his spot-on, sometimes ironic, observations of modern-day Bostonians and Cantabrigians. If you want to lose yourself in a truly absorbing book, pick up, The Girl in the Boston Box. You won’t regret it!

Poet Linda Conte talks about her new collection Seldom Purely

Somerville Sculptor Danielle Krcmar: She wants to put a poem/ in your home!

FRAGMENT HOUSE

Interview with Doug Holder

I am a poet, so my home is littered with polished poems, drafts with coffee stains, framed pieces that I am really proud of, etc... So that's why I caught up with sculptor Danielle Krcmar--whose latest idea is to put a poem in your home.

I noticed that you use a lot of found objects in your work. Some of it comes from Carson Beach in Southie. With all the beaches we have around us--why Carson?


I do work with a lot of found objects in my work. Where I get my found objects depends on my location, I used to find old china and shoe leather fragments in bottle dumps near old house sites when I lived in Pennsylvania, near the southern tier of New York. When I lived in Western Massachusetts I would look around house foundations near the Quabbin. Because I was still making sculptures with found china when I moved to Fort Point, someone told me about Carson Beach- where there was plenty of china bits and beach glass due to a long history of dumping. I collected china and other items from the beach for years but never collected the beach glass because I didn't have a sculptural use for it at the time. When I decided to make the Fragment House piece using Beach glass. I knew where I could get it and I liked that the beach glass would have been collected from the shore, not too far from where the piece was initially sited - in Dartmouth, MA. When I was collecting beach glass for the Fragment House Project, I would always try to go to Southie at low tide, and the larger challenge was getting the plastic bags full of glass back to the car. One morning, I was able to pick up 30 pounds of glass with the help of my son, and two family friends. There are very few areas where you can get that much glass that easily and quickly. A lot of art has been made with pieces sourced from that beach- it would be interesting to curate a show of that work and talk to the artists.




You worked with the poet Mary Pinard on a Fragment House Project. You used word and images from her poems and incorporated into the house. Can you talk about this? Do homes with a history have a certain energy--a certain poetry about them?



Mary Pinard and I had talked about collaborating. When I was asked to create a site-specific piece for the DNRT ( Dartmouth Natural Resources Trust) it provided the perfect opportunity for us to work together. I loved Mary's Poem Song Net For An Estuary , and how she researches and responds to particular landscapes and their history. We walked the overall DNRT trails together to figure out a site that we were both interested in and eventually chose Bluebird Field. In the piece, Mary's full poem is etched into the window, which is the only solid surface in the house, and then select words from the poem are additionally etched into larger pieces of beach glass as a way of emphasizing those selected words. I am a little romantic about old houses, some of that may be a reaction to growing up in the suburbs in a more modern houses and having had childhood fantasies of discovering amazing heirlooms in the attic of an old Victorian house. I do think a newer house could contain poetry, but I do think older houses have a sense of poetry to them both for the age of the house itself and the accumulated life lived within its walls, but also the history of the materials- such as something like heart pine, that was 100 years old when it was milled for flooring over a hundred years ago. In the irregularly placed studs and the thicker milled lumber the sense of something being built by hand is more visible, that evidence of the work by hand is beautiful and yes - has poetry for me. I saved lumber from our interior walls when we renovated our 115 year old house, I've used some of it in another artist friend's piece and am figuring out how it might play into new work.


Tell us what your new idea is about-- linking Somerville Poets' poems with your art?



For this new idea, I am interested in working in Somerville neighborhoods as a way to provide another layer of communication while we are under lockdown, I've began thinking about this idea when lockdown first started - being masked in public, many of us didn't quite know how to interact with one another, we were avoiding each other in public because we didn't want to get close. Masks interfered with reading facial cues and made speech harder to understand, so even casual interactions between neighbors felt awkward. I found myself needing daily walks in my neighborhood - getting outside was such a relief. It was also beautiful to see people were doing community art projects like posting rainbows in their windows, or chalk drawings on their sidewalks to offer a little bit of beauty and surprise. I did a few of the sidewalk drawings with my son and it was cathartic to make something beautiful, though often very ephemeral! I was interested in doing something. I began to think about the possibility of working with a poet and attaching it to a large fence in Lincoln park, I worried it might get damaged and I was busy enough with work that it was hard to take on another project, but the idea stayed with me. And so we go into winter-- we will be indoors more and will see each other in person even less. Having someone tell you a story via a poem seems like a lovely way to make connections, both when I ask people to host poems at their houses- which I am still nervous about- and as I ask poets to work with me. Initially I imagined the poet would create a biographical poem in response to the person/ household hosting the poem, I liked the storytelling possibilities there, but I am a little concerned about managing a collaboration between 3 parties to everyone's satisfaction.


How has the Pandemic affected your work?

Covid really threw me off and completely overwhelmed me. There was so much uncertainty and fear, and unlike many people who reported having so much time on their hands, I had more work and less time and space to do it in. I had artwork to pack and ship for our gallery, kiln firings to run for our co- curricular ceramics program, and repairs to schedule prior to upcoming budget cuts. All had to be done without the in- person help of my student workers, due to social distancing measures on campus. My teaching work became much harder and more complicated when we went on line. Teaching painting from my home mini office and sculpture and from my kitchen table to students in multiple time zones with varying degrees of internet connectivity-- was overwhelming and exhausting. Making sidewalk chalk drawings with my son was one way to be creative but it didn't seem exactly connected to my work; though we will see if it plants the seed for something in the future, as often happens. My critique group shifted to Zoom meetings and it has been the highlight of my week. Each of us works on artwork during the zoom, some of us draw portraits from the zoom and some work on ongoing studio projects. We discuss our work, our lives, teaching pedagogy, and the work of other artists as it pertains to each of those three things. It has been an amazing space to share ideas, get in process feedback on work in a way that we were not able to do pre pandemic because we did not meet as frequently. We have also been able to bring back in a critique group member who had moved across the country. It has been profound to have this group of women artists discuss work and share successes and challenges.


In June, my full-time job at Babson College was terminated due to pandemic budget cuts at my institution, which was a real shock. I still could have the opportunity to teach as an adjunct in Spring 2021, but in the moment, I had to move out of my campus studio that I had for 16 years. Most of my colleagues wrote emails to the college administration protesting the decision, which provided me some comfort, but in the end, those efforts did not reverse the decision. In October, I decided not to teach there this coming Spring, so I removed the contents of my office and my personal teaching materials this week. I wanted to do it when the students were no longer on campus. I'm a bit of a packrat/ magpie/ and since I taught, ran workshops, curated the gallery, and managed the permanent art collection I had a lot of stuff related to all those roles. It has been a long week of getting everything out and bringing it to my home and studio.

The upside of this is that I am now pursuing more public art projects and commission work. This week I moved into a shared studio space at Vernon Street. I love Somerville Open Studios and have many friends at Vernon Street, and it is beyond exciting to be back in a studio building surrounded by other artists. Every time I unlock the door to the new studio I feel a surge of happiness, it's pretty great.


Are there poems about Sculpture that inspire you?


I love the sculptor Joseph Cornell and made many assemblages as and love Dime Store Alchemy by Charles Simic. The poem Where Chance Meets Necessity speaks to the serendipitous beauty offered by found objects. The first two lines say it perfectly:


Somewhere in the city of New York there are four or five
still-unknown objects that belong together. Once together
they'll make a work of art.


...................................................four or five
still unknown objects that belong together.


the perfect economy of those words




Some of my older work with the figure was inspired by Whitman's poems. I love the visceral physicality in his poetry, as experienced here:


I mind how we lay in June, such a transparent
summer morning,
You settled your head athwart my hips, and gently
turned over upon me,

And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and
plunged your tongue to my bare-stripped heart,
And reached till you felt my beard, and reached
till you held my feet.




Why should people look at your work?


I'm interested in the potential for transformation in everyday objects and materials, my hope is that those transformations offer the viewer an opportunity for surprise and discovery through extended or repeated viewing of the work viewings of the work. My work is best experienced in person, so you can discover surface details or see how all the pieces come together to make the whole.

Doug Holder Interviews Poet Durane West on Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer

Somerville's Pier Gustafson: A Calligrapher and Graphic Designer who deconstructs the Green Line Extension

Pier Gustafson writes on his website,

"My studio in the real world is rather like the studio here in the virtual world - a bit on the busy side with lots of things going on. I may be researching a map in this corner, painting a sign-in board in that. My drawing table may be covered with sketches for a monogram which must be moved to make way for a stack of envelopes which need to be addressed."

I caught up with Gustafson, to talk a bit about his work, and the new pieces he is working on.


You are one of the original residents of the Brickbottom artist space in Somerville. Could you describe the sensibility of the artist/residents-- a reason they might fit in the milieu of our burg?


I am one of the original members of this community and have enjoyed living in this building as well as being a part of Somerville at large. I must admit that I don't travel too often towards the western half of Somerville but have enjoyed the diversity of land use and population of this more industrial corner.

You are known as a graphic artist, illustrator. and calligrapher. But also, you are now working with found art, specifically concerning the detritus of the Greenline Extension Project--right near your digs. How did the germ of the idea come about for you? Tell us about some of the things you constructed.


I am using discarded recycled cardboard and the printed graphics to depict much of the construction scene I see outside my window and around this neighborhood. The subject matter might be the building of the Green Line, but the materials are more domestic. Liquor, Amazon, grocery and Shoeboxes that I find in our recycling rooms have been the raw materials. The germ sparked when I found a bright yellow Dewalt tool box in the bin. It matched the colors of the bulldozers and cranes used in the GLX construction. I had done many drawings of the scene, but that box started my "Tonka-toy-like" constructions.




What are your feelings about the construction--do you feel Brickbottom will be changed by it?


Most everyone hates the noise of the construction. I am not bothered by it. I think once the sound walls go up we'll find the noise will seem better than the "penned in" feeling we might get once completed. I don't think we will change much because of the finished product, as out immediate area is developed with an actual building. We may feel a little different.

 When a writer confronts a blank piece of paper he often brainstorms-- a stream of consciousness goes on.  How do you approach the blank piece of paper?

Blank paper scares me to death, but a paper that has a mark on it can inspire. The boxes in the construction work have graphics that make me think in a certain way. I love making a work of art to fit a found frame or grabbing two random art tools and letting the random colors direct my thoughts and creativity.


You do a lot of commercial work, but your art is also found in museums, galleries, etc... What's the line between commercial art and art --or is there no line-- do they all flow from the same stream?


I think both fine and commercial art are two banks of the same stream. The commercial end has another person "helping" me create something for their needs...more of a collaboration, but I find it challenging and fun...and I usually get paid in advance! Making art all by myself can be a bit lonely and never be appreciated (or bought). Both banks work for me though.


Why should people buy or view your art?


Most people that see my work smile. If someone hasn't yet seen it I think they should, and I think they will smile, too. If they want to smile often, they may buy it, and take it with them. These days much of my creative endeavours is creating things digitally. I post them on instagram and facebook and get lots of exposure from people far afield. They see the original on their device for free. If I get a little heart from them, that makes me smile a bit, too.

Poem from the Covid battlefield: The Empty Covid Octopus by Julia Kanno

 

Julia Kanno writes:

I am the mother of two amazing  young men ages 27 and 17. I am from Appalachia and Botswana. I am an artist and also work in healthcare, I have self published with my co-pilot levin pfeuffer two books of prose"a storm is cuming" and "The hardest helmut." My first reading was done at Northeastern University and since then I have read at the Somerville Armory two times. I consider myself an introverted artist/writer. I give birth to my works including those that have been displayed at the Decordova Museum as well as Howard University and local gems such ast he Middle East and Out of the Blue gallery. I will be published in Tell magazine featuring my textiles and art in the spring.  Currently, I am studying behavioral science and psychology because there is a need for more people of color to be there for people of color to help end the stigma of seeking mental health.

THE EMPTY COVID OCTOPUS

J.Kanno

11/20


Tubes dance from ventilators
 like
Infected dancing
Octopus tails.
They, the infected warriors,
 stare out the window
With help from I
To look below from window
 see the soaked
drenched, devastated
 and confused faces
Of loved ones below.
Independence is robbed
Wheeled to the toilet by I
 and robbed of privacy by I
Using instructed body mechanics
To rotate and give comfort and not
to degrade a human
 and i am soooo sorry
 as I humbly
Wipe the
Yellow
Brown
Or even red black
 mud excrement
From the crease of your
butt.
Emptying your foley
Catheter
Is an honor
The smell bothers me no more
Because I am thrilled that your body
And your kidneys
Are connecting.

Freedom from the vent during the day is like finding inner truth
Santa Clause
Or even the north star
Or getting a great deal on
Iwannalive.com
Yet..
Careful
You are still not you nor will you be
You are in a place
That I would sell my soul to not to be in.
This place is where

you are still isolated in a room with a glass window

And a speaker video system
Then
Hooked to the machine at night
That keeps you alive
While the trachea and breathing tubes
Rob your speech
And sleep
And all you have are memories of
The before

Cooking dinner for the kids
Teaching a classroom of students with wide eyes
Building houses
Being behind a mahogany bar as a bartender hearing sweet and ugly
 drunken truths.

You forget the feel of real clothes
Fresh cotton, wool, silk and even fucking polyester

The air smacking your open ass in your new uniform
your johnny
So weary and weak

You don't bother to cover yourself anymore.
Because of this you must eat baby food again
 have to learn to chew again and
Swallow
Without dying

while you crave the beef stew that
 your beloved made with a side of rye bread.
We people like I become your new family because you cannot see
that grandchild
 with the red curls
And pink lips
And upturned nose
Or that beautiful ebony little girl
That your daughter tried so hard to have
And she looks
Just like you
And your wife
That died 79 days ago from this beast.
 Without u
That would not exist
Without your sperm
 legacy and you.
The halls as you learn to walk again no longer smell like death
Or shit
Or putrid urine
Because you have been there so long
These halls now
smell like home.
After seven  months
And after put into a medically induced coma
And turned upside down
In a diaper
And rotated like a rotisserie human  the whole time
A human will
Reverted back to infancy
In rehab
You have come so far
You sit up on you own but weak and learn
About how life went on..
 Your son got discharged from the military
Your youngest daughter got eloped to that guy you never liked
Your first granddaughter died from leukemia
Your wife had a biopsy and started preparing divorce papers because
the idea of being a caregiver
 was all too much
The house you built went up for sale because of the medical bills
And your eldest son killed himself
In his garage
With a tube in his mouth
Looking at pictures of you.
cause he thought you wouldn't live
 and he
Loved you
That much.
Later..
After rehab because of I
And doctors and staff and the team
And because you fought to make it
For them
And you know nothing
Because you were not to be upset
And keep in mind we never knew the progression of these deviations
because we were focused on you.
You are wheeled out
On a Wednesday
At 3:45

Staff like I with balloons and music
Clapping
We dressed you as you wished
Dress shoes and real underwear and no diapers
And a dress shirt
Teal green
 and even a tie
Red with flowers

And pleated pants
And brown shoes
You tied your own laces
And you wanted me to untie them again to show your family
That you can do it
How you could do it.
As we open the sliding doors
The blast of organic earth and fresh air hit your face
 we have ten balloons
And you look amazing and so happy
And we wait
And wait
And there is not
One person.
But a housekeeping person
That says
"You made it man"
You clench your jaw
I clench my rage
And send you into the abyss.

To listen to the poem go to:    https://archive.org/details/aud-20201118-wa-0000-1

“the whole, lovely, kit n’caboodle” A Review of Elizabeth Gordon McKim's Lovers in the Free Fall

 

“the whole, lovely, kit n’caboodle”

A Review of Elizabeth Gordon McKim Lovers in the Free Fall, Leapfrog Press, Freedonia, NY, 2020

They don’t call Elizabeth McKim, aka e/liz, the Jazz Poet of Lynn for nothing. The 3 R’s she so skillfully employs aren’t the ‘reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmatic’ we learned in grade school. Hers are rhyme, repetition, rhythm. Listen to them as in HEY DANGER she insouciantly calls “Come on in/We’re waitin’ for this dance to begin….” repeating her invitation

“So come on in darlin’

And rev up my engine

Some call it poetry

Some call it legend”

It’s poetry, the vernacular diction of ‘rev’ mixed with the unexpected formality of ‘legend’ with its slant rhyme ‘engine’.  In The show down is soon is a dance of her embodied voice, urgent and strong, as she rollicks

The hour is late

The music is blue

The rhythm is fate

The deceptive simplicity of the short lines lets the craft in her repetition and rhyme, the music in her assonance seduce us and our bodies move with hers because in her jazz poetry the insistent ‘rhythm is fate’.

McKim is fascinated with the way words fit together, hide inside each other, create sound variations and echoes. Consider just this section ofthe poem MOTION/COMMOTION

I like to mosey

You like to mill

You like to rumble

I like to spill

I like to gallivant

You like to gamble

I like to sally forth

You like to ramble

Her use of words like ‘mosey’, ‘gallivant’, ‘sally forth’ gives the poeman old-fashioned ambience. The back and forth of ‘You’ and ‘I’ has a playful, rocking rhythm. Triplets like ‘rumble’, ‘gamble’, ‘ramble’, change only one vowel or one initial consonant out of three; again word play. But the prize goes to ‘sally’ hiding in ‘gallivant’.

The book’s title, Lovers in the Free Fall, indicates two large, interconnected areas. The Free Fall could be everywhere we are, where we roam, boundless, unexpected happenings, destinations, endless possibilities. Many of McKim’s poems are about movement with images of roads, highways, cars, trains, freeways, their subject matter less playful, their lines longer, their shape sometimes formal as in the sestina REFUGEES. These poems about migrants, refugees, point to desperate situations and, no matter when initially written, are relevant to current issues. Some of the wanderers are persons from McKim’s life experience, like Dave who wants to get out of cold, wintry Lynn and head for Flagstaff. But then Odysseus, as seen by his long-suffering wife Penelope who sings the blues, shows up, as do other mythic characters whose travels land them in places they didn’t want to be--Icarus, Persephone.

McKim presents dire situations and does not shrink from misery’struth. While honest about suffering, fear, loss, unfulfilled longings,her mantra, as presented in her DEDICATION, is ‘No despair/no despair/ no despair’. Human misery neither obliterates nordominates her acceptance of life’s yo-yo fullness. She’s one of the lovers in the free fall; like them she has ‘slapped down and wised up/Wised up slappedslapped down’.

Like her wanderers, her range is wide, not only in subject matter, butalso in her poetic craft. From the oral tradition, she chants, sings a ballad; from European formal patterns, creates a sestina; from her own musicality performs jazz. Consider the pulse, lineation, eccentric word choice of the opening lines of CALL

You can call me cormorant

And I will call you stranger

You can call me consonant

And I will call you danger

Contrast it with the shaped arc, the deliberately irregular length and placement of lines on the page, the imagery drawn consistently and narratively from nature in her contemporary lyric STAND STILL

Coming to a stand-

still

a heron

situated

and observant

follows

lost light

into land’s end

translates autumn air

into silence

stands

poised

while

wanton and wild

golden rod suddenly nods

harbor seals

disappear and dip

gulls

veer

sails

billow

tossed in the hollow

heron

in the shallows

holds

onto

a one legged

stand still

The dancerly movement on the page is McKim’s transfer of motionfrom the rhythm of sound to pictorially shaped image. We can feel the heron’s leg as a rod holding the center of the poem from top to bottom. Her title might be a private pun, a tease to her jazz poems, or her need to do that.

As the poet is in the free fall with all of us, so she is also one of the lovers. She speaks most often ‘in the numinous luminous name of love’ Sometimes she speaks from ‘these blazing discs of memory’ of her parents, her sisters,of those gone from life, but never from her memory, and of those still in her life and precious.

Some of her love poems present an intensity of intimacy, her language simple, direct and so strong we can feel it in our own bodies. From ‘the cusp/ of loving’ in WATCH

I watch you

from up-

side/ the head

from water-

bed, ……………..

………………….

from when you look at me

from when I look at you

from LETTER

I want to know the sound of your steps

In the city where you survive

I want to know how you breathe

from WHEN WE LOVE

We love strongly

We come as guests

And we don’t know when to leave

and, finally, from the beginning and the ending of IF I ASK

If I ask you to come home

Will you? ………………

………………….I will go

Anywhere you are going.

Wherever you go, take Lovers in the Free Fall with you.

***Karen Klein poet/dancer, founder of teXtmoVes poetry/dance collaborative, former member Prometheus Dance Elders Ensemble, retired faculty English,Humanities. Women’s Studies. Brandeis University