Lo Galluccio" A Writer Who Struggles With Passion and Intellect

LO GALLUCCIO: A Writer Who Struggles With Passion and Intellect.

With Doug Holder

Poet, memoirist, and vocalist Lo Galluccio grew up in Cambridge, Mass, the daughter of a prominent labor attorney. She graduated Harvard College and then attended acting school in Chicago. She was an understudy at the famed Steppenwolf Theater Company, and toured Greece with a theater troupe. She worked as a poetry columnist with The Cambridge Alewife, published a poetry collection with the Ibbetson Street Press: “Hot Rain”, and has a new memoir out with the Cervena Barva Press: “Sarasota Vll.”

Galluccio was very much part of the New York City Lower East Side arts scene in the 90’s, releasing a CD with the famed Knitting Factory label. She currently works as an ESL teacher in the Allston section of Boston, and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry. I talked with her on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: You said in your interview with the Cervena Barva Press that men/mentors have taken your head off. How hard is it in the arts scene for a woman?

Lo Galluccio: I recently discovered Leonard Cohen and we did a tribute to him at the Squawk Coffeehouse in Cambridge. I read an interview with him in which he said he learned everything he knows from the opposite sex. In a song of his “Tower of Song” he writes, “They don’t let a woman kill you.” It made me reflect how many times I was metaphorically killed by male mentors. I feel I got as much as I could from the people I followed. If you are in a place like New York, especially, and you are precocious, ambitious, and temperamental and a woman, sometimes men will twist that around and have a hard time with it. I remember when I was working as a waitress, a man I admired a great deal told me “We’re done.” He was a poet I adored. I could have burned all his books. It was a matter of marital infidelity. I didn’t want to do it, so I told him no. I didn’t think this person would turn on me but he did. I was devastated, but two years later I sent him white roses—that’s how loyal I am. I have had my life threatened. I don’t think I come across as a very combative person. I have a side of me to me where I can be like a dog with a bone.

DH: Do you think things have changed for women on the arts scene from the time when you were cutting your teeth?

LG: Oh yes. It’s funny I opened up “Anne Sexton’s: Collected Works” recently, and she is someone who has had a huge influence on me. She has one poem that ends like this: “ I am sexless like Christ, beyond being a man or a woman.” And that’s Anne Sexton in the 60’s! I think people like her, Joni Mitchell, Patti Smith, paved the way for me.

DH: You cut your teeth in the East Village of NYC in the 90’s. This wasn’t the Village of the 60’s—what was the milieu like?

LG: It was in the 90’s but you had people around who dropped out of places like olumbia, like my friend Roy Nathan son (Leader of The Jazz Passengers), who told me: “You get a million chances.” I don’t really think that’s true, but I think it is a good thing to think.

DH: What was the scene like then?

LG: The milieu was experimental, it was diverse, it was pretty warm, open and communicative. A novice singer like me got to play with some top-notch people. I was told the East Village was where the “Weed trees grow,” I thought of myself as a weed tree. At this time I decided to give up an acting career that wasn’t booming. Although I was a stage actress and I did get some work.

DH: You have been an actress, vocalist, poet, journalist, educator, etc…. What hat fits you best?

LG: if I had to do it all over again I would have wanted to be a fabulous actress. I studied at the Goodman School in Chicago.. And I was very much encouraged to stay in school. But I dropped out. My Dad died when I was fifteen, so I just didn’t have enough of a foundation to stay with it. I had a wound that needed to heal in a lot of different ways, with a lot of different experience. It’s sad because I loved the craft of acting. I was an actress who was cerebral.

DH:What is your new memoir "Sarasota VII" about?

LG: The book is about how love can be warped by the memory of significant losses -- especially family deaths -- and it's a feminine statement about how desire is necessary and also how it can corrupt. It's in two parts and numbered and lettered paragraphs. Intertwined in the prose-poem narrative are scientific descriptions of Saturn's rings and the vortex of black holes....

DH: In your new memoir you write of the men in your life, the conflict of passion and intellect. Can you define that conflict? Can they coexist?

LG: You know, the brilliant reviewer Michael Todd Steffen, found a psycholinguistic dimension to the memoir. I really appreciated this, because I hope its there. Sometimes I think this book is just on long distorted rant. It is not a straight memoir.

My lover, John in the memoir, was a tremendous actor. We were both drawn to each other. When I conceptualized this book I thought of John as a black hole. Black holes are incredible vortexes of energy that have the ability to suck stars into them.

Basically the book is about the darker aspects of passion. How it can be dangerous and depleting. To live totally in a realm of sexual and visceral energy you need a place of sobriety. When I was in my 20’s and 30’s I could handle it, I don’t think I could now.

DH: Was there a writer who influenced when you wrote the memoir?

LG: Marguerite Dumas. Her memoir “The Lover” was a seminal work for me. It has a wonderful obsessive quality about it.

DH: Did your grief for you Dad’s death spur you on to become an artist?

LG: Oh yes. Grief for my Dad most definitely drove me to be an artist. The world just turned upside down for me. I confronted the concept of finality. How many unresolved things remained between us. How my father’s Italian spirit lives in me.

DH: If your father hadn’t died when you were so young how would your relationship be?

LG: I think we would have had a tremendous power struggle. That’s partly why some of my relationships have been marked by that power struggle.

DH: So you might have a better relationship to your dead father?

LG: Death opens up something. That dark tunnel—different forms of light. The first work of art that I made, that I am really proud of, is “Being Visited” on the now defunct Knitting Factory label. One of the songs was an elegy for my Dad.

Thankfully as I grow older I am able to let go of the narrative of my life. Other people pulled me outside of my grief over my father.

DH: Can you tell us about your time at the Knitting Factory in NYC? It was a hotbed of the avant-garde, no?

LG: It was thrilling to be at a club like that. I worked with John Zorn,the avant-garde saxophonist. I was green, so it had it scary moments for me.



* To purchase Galluccio's memoir "Sarasota Vll" go to http://cervenabarvapress.com

Doug Holder/Ibbetson Update/Jan. 2009/Somerville,

To the Life of the Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod

To the Life of the Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod Reuel K. Wilson. (University Press of New England One Court St. Lebanon, NH 03766) www.upne.com

The marriage of writers Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson was not an ordinary coupling. Their creative life spans more than half a century. Their collective literary opus consisted of criticism, fiction, autobiography, political journalism, travelogues, and to a lesser degree (in Wilson’s case) poetry.

In his memoir: “ To the Life of Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod ,”Reuel K. Wilson, ( now well into his 70’s) the son of Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy focuses on his parents’ life on Cape Cod in the late 1930’s to the mid 1940’s, when their marriage ended after a tumultuous seven years. Reuel Wilson writes:

“They married in Feb. of 1938. Unfortunately, neither partner could peacefully coexist with the other under the same roof…Suffice it to say that Wilson, goaded by inner demons, was capable of boorish, cruel and even violent behavior. McCarthy, who carried the stigma of childhood trauma—as a young orphan she was cruelly used by her guardians—reacted emotionally to her husband’s frequent needling and criticism…”

McCarthy, author of the novel “The Group” among others, and Edmund Wilson, well-known for his “Memoirs of Hecate County,” decided to anchor their new married life in the environs of the Cape. Reuel Wilson writes that the Cape was a good fit for the couple:

“ Because of its great natural beauty and its odd mixture of locals and self-exiled, or vacationing writers and artists, the newly married couple decided to cast anchor in Wellfleet, just fourteen miles south of Provincetown at Cape’s end.”
Their life together was one of creative output, mixed with a great deal of boozing, idle flirting, infidelities, and violent arguments, all well-documented in this memoir. So whether you are a literary purist, or a gossip-monger, you will find much of interest here.

Although according to Reuel Wilson, the Cape was not Wilson’s high literary priority, he did write a lot about it as evidenced by his copious journal jottings. Here is a passage by Edmund Wilson concerning a favorite spot on the Cape, “Gull Pond”

"—pale dullish blue, as if unawakened yet with summer—smooth as metal with only a few glistenings of light, few but intensely bright and far out a loon… a float, silhouetting its neck and its long bill…”

Much of Wilson’s serious poetry was published in a volume “Night Thoughts” (1953), and a number of poems deal with the Cape. He writes in the poem “Provincetown”

“Here never in this place I knew/such beauty by your side, such peace--/These skies that brightening imbue/with dawn’s delight the day’s release.”

McCarthy wrote a novel “A Charmed Life,” that in some ways reflected the residents of Wellfleet. Reuel Wilson writes that the characters were “marked by weird idiosyncrasies that reflect inner distortions, willing slaves to their own weaknesses…” Overall the seacoast bohemia depicted in this novel lived contented lives. The novel got only a luke warm critical reception, and because of some unflattering descriptions of the townsfolk, it made McCarthy few new friends. McCarthy left the Cape behind for good shortly after the novel was released in 1955.

Although “To the Life of the Silver Harbor…” narrowly focuses on the couples life on the Cape, a much broader perception of these literary figure can be gleaned from this arcane scope.

Two Somerville Small Presses to be on Publishing Panel at Harvard University ( New England Poetry Club) April 6 2009

( Valerie Lawson--Off the Coast)



( Gloria Mindock-- Cervena Barva Press)






Doug Holder ( Ibbetson Street Press)



The Cervena Barva Press of Somerville, Mass, and the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville Mass, as well as the well-regarded Maine-based literary journal "Off the Coast Magazine" will be represented on a small press panel at Harvard University sponsored by the New England Poetry Club. Publishers Valerie Lawson ( Off the Coast), Gloria Mindock ( Cervena Barva) and Doug Holder ( Ibbetson Street) will participate...




NEW ENGLAND POETRY CLUB first Monday POETRY READINGS 2009

Location: the Common Room of the Yenching Library Harvard University
2 Divinity Ave (off Kirkland near Memorial Hall)

Time: 7pm to 8.30pm

Free and open to the public



April 6th Panel on Publishing with Valerie Lawson (Off the
Coast), Doug Holder (Ibbetson Street Press), and Gloria Mindock
(Cervana Barva Press)

Little Things by Harry Smith

Little Things
Harry Smith
Presa :S: Press
2009 $13.95
ISBN 978-0-9800081-3-5

the opening poem is a killer story, it reads like a thriller with plot, tension and sympathy, as do all seven poems in the first section, Modern Ballads:

“…He started in on me.
I blocked his first three punches. A sideways bear
swipe knocked me down.
-’Please, Mister, lay off me. I won’t take no more.’
-I’ll break your neck.
He launched himself straight down on me and he
landed on my knife…”

my only criticism is I think the first section might work better as the last section because it feels so complete. it becomes an effort to get into the next set of poems after reading the intensity of those first ones. ending with the ballads seems a better evolution. Smith continues in a biographical vein:

“when Beethoven intoned, “must it be?”
the words inscribed above his quartet notes,
he meant that resoundingly
abysmal, simple question. smitten motes
of dancing dust…”

Smith freely plays with form in most of the poems and he lets us know in his poem, ‘a farewell to Ammons’:

“…style, you know, arbitrary one line spaces inserted, as
above, irregular uncontained couplets, line

breaks like this, floated jot jot jottings, his typical
stuff: this one about urine, his creatinine test…”

with a full range of forms, Smith gives us haiku-like glimpses through the nature of his experiences and often reminiscent of Nurada’s questions:

“is it a bad thing
to see everything as if
for the last time”

He is a story teller poet with an emphasis on small personal truths. the lives some people live effect our need to tell. “a measure of merit, your friends will find they keep the ideal climate of you mind.”

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

An Alien Here by Leah Angstman

An Alien Here
Leah Angstman
Copyright 2008
Propaganda Press
Alternating Current
PO Box 398058
Cambridge, MA 02139
$3


A little bigger than a matchbook in size, this collection lives up to its title – Leah as an alien – as female, poet, visionary – and rivets us with maniacal, often shot-gun style almost cut and pasted language. I wouldn’t call the associations completely free, but they’re often jagged, lunar, with repeating edges and expressive frames. There is a lack of clear punctuation, so more like a zine in format the little poems run in tiny type-written texts through the book, coming to full-stops with others lunging ahead.

“stale in the air you
humanize public breathing waste”

Her radiant goes way out in some cases and then contracts to a very real, visceral moment. There’s great word-play, like good avant-pop, punk and goth lyrics. The line breaks are precise and do much to craft the startling effects she achieves.

“light light-source sabertooth
interpret this jungle it is
nicotine wasteland like the air I am
breathing”

Leah likes to go to the edge of inventing language patterns that disrupt our normal constructions.

But there is a also a thread of quite elegant lyricism running throughout the often dark, post-modern, or beat, forest of brute trees. In “Afternoons like This” we have:

“there are afternoons like these
when you learn you are not in love
and when you learn you are”

Still it includes the “alien” aspect as well:

“hollow tubes inside me
draining out color”

and then a series of the artificial manipulations we use to sexually attract:

“we are dyed hair
we are boob-adjustments right before
we catch his eye….”

These poems take wild, unexpected turns in the middle or the end; you can ride them like a riddle or an absinthe high.

“your touch though is so
heavy so many bricks so
cautious but courageous
isn’t that screen story a bit like us
don’t i have her attitude
and don’t you have peter’s excuses.”

And for a moment peter is the character in the film, a peter she knows – some acquaintance-- or he could be the famous Saint.

She’s packed a lot of voltage in a miniature book you keep fingering on the train from its home in your coat pocket. From the epic poem about her ancestry, “1926,” to a poem blatantly about a sexual encounter, “Riding Bareback,” she lassos a lot of material for us to imbibe. (Caution: if you prefer less to more, you won’t like the sometimes “piled on” and finger-paint-like instinctual use of language. If you think free verse should be unbridled and slightly crazed, you will.) The latter poem, while not a totally original metaphor for sex, is fine with me, recognizable and the verse unrolls like a movie:

“he is warm
so fucking warm
and wet
covered in necessity”

And there is the awkward moment when cowboy (or horse, as it may be) wants to know if she has climaxed. And she hesitates to give him a true account so as not to offend his ego—almost a cliché by now but real enough. His bravado and subsequent baby’s sleep is the amusing habit of the human male:

“I’ll make you cum
twice
next time he says”

And there is her simple reticence to jabber:

“I have nothing to say
but
yeah”


A thumbalina rocking collection.

Leah Angstam is a poet/writer, editor, publisher, musician, actor, and visual artist raised in a small town outside Lansing, MI. Her poetry blog can be found at leahangstam.blgspot.com.



Lo Galluccio
Ibbetson St. Press

Lo’s new prose-poem memoir “Sarasota VII’ is out on Cervena Barva Press. Her fictional text, “Denebola” will soon appear in Heide Hatry’s collection on Charta Books, “Heads and Tales.” Readings in February. http:logalluccio.atspace.com.

Base Metals by Jessica Harman

BASE METALS
Jessica Harman
Cloudkeeper Press
2009 $7.00

‘Base Metals’ is a love story, an intimate story of loss; not just the loss of a lover but sometimes the loss of cognition, perceived reality, touch, and balance, yet balance is always present in memory:

“…everywhere,

you are the sound of the train passing
through the city at night, that soothing rattle sewing
the distance to streetlights.

the sound tastes like moonlight and smoke.
the sickle moon’s base metal sets behind a maple tree
then the stars die out, one by one.

you are memory itself…”

Harmon doesn’t rush the reader, instead she lets us feel all the details, the voice often profound with succinct truths and the voice is always clear in its presence, never pretending otherwise. these poems open, or pull aside the curtains we sometimes close against what we don‘t want to know about ourselves:

…”but to you, sunlight was a pop song,
and pop songs were great - and light hearted - you liked
to walk on the sunny side of the street -

but sunshine to me was what
dried out the dust

and lifted your bed
when the wind scattered leaves and paper cups -”

the writing of love pulses through the dim halls of writing, and are reinvented generation after generation. here the poet tells us of anther kind of love of self and love of the past as a line to the present, even when the poet traces back, traces on dust on windows closed for winter. she constantly reaffirms her presence:

“even here in this place, where the sidewalks
buzz with filaments of snow. I am a body, a template
for your needles and blood pressure gauges. I am a magnet
for your pills, their sweet and salty. I am here in this city”

the directness: Harmon writes to the reader, there are no separations; all boundaries surround the reader with an emphasis of being all the characters at play. all treated with gentle respect even the face of tragedy become universal. we are left with an insight merged by the love of being a poet:

“the poem has meandered its way through
being. a poem’s pulse
is like night
in the naked wrist - “

Harman ends the chapbook with another endearment that twists and strongly suggests, question the next move, which I will not repeat here. it is up to you to buy the chapbook and find the ending:

“…the soft - boiled waves, to let my wings be quenched by salt.
and how often does the boat need to leak for us to learn to swim?

or am I talking only to myself? we’re out there,
looking for a place to plant our feet, walk…”

once you’re delved into the works presented, you will realize the importance of such a writer. Harman deserves a wide audience.

Cloudkeeper Press has once again offered a chapbook unlike any other. I’m convinced all great poets and writings from our present day culture, are being published, only, by small presses.

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

BAGEL BARD BOOKS: BUY A DOZEN: FRESH BAKED!

THE BAGEL BARDS: THAT GROUP OF ENIGMATIC POETS AND WRITERS BASED IN SOMERVILLE,MASS HAVE A NUMBER OF INTRIGUING TITLES OUT BY AREA POETS:

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Wilderness House Literary Review Volume 1Wilderness House Literary Review Volume 1 (book)
Print: $24.95

The Wilderness House Literary Review was form out of the desires of a group of writers and poets to create an online journal for their works. As promised this is a print summary of the best of volume 1.



Bagels with the Bards No. 3Bagels with the Bards No. 3 (book)
Print: $15.95

Bagel Bard – noun. 1. A poet that is glazed and ring-shaped whose poetry has a tough, chewy texture usually made of leavened words and images dropped briefly into nearly boiling conversations on Saturday mornings— often baked to a golden brown. 2. –verb. To come together in writership over breakfast. To laugh so hard at an irreverent statement that the sesame seeds of the bagel you’ve just eaten explode from your mouth like grenade shrapnel. Welcome to the third Bagelbard Anthology. As some of you know (or can guess from the above definition) the Bagel Bards meet every Saturday morning at a designated spot. We breakfast in the original sense of eating, but also, because most of us are so busy working on our writing careers that we often find ourselves starved for great conversation. Well, the Bagel Bards breakfast hang is not only a place in which to do the aforementioned, but also to observe characters who themselves could be the subjects of poems and fiction.



Bagels with the Bards - No. 2Bagels with the Bards - No. 2 (book)
Print: $16.95

It all came to fruition the day we made our first bagel, after a few energetic drafts of the thing. It got up from the table, shook its rolling shoulders, yawned from the hollow core mouth of itself, and began to dance. At that precise moment, the miracle came as sure as the Matrix Oracle would have predicted from over her pan of cookies. Sunlight hit the bagel, and it became lines on the floor, long lines that would have been perfect for any chorus line, but instead filled themselves with words, words that made promises to all of us. These words spoke the premise. The poet is a baker although he may never have the dough. We looked at each other and knew this was our creation myth, this dance of language on some piece of paper, or in our hearts, or in the burrowed brow of the manager trying to wrap his head around the idea that poets gather in the corner of his place on Saturdays and spend a few hours living, living, living. O bard, a bagel has become a poem.

Human Derivatives in Doug Holder’s: The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel

Human Derivatives in Doug Holder’s: The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel (Cervena Barva Press)

article by Michael Todd Steffen



The man in the booth in the Midtown Tunnel, not the title of a poem but its subject, gives us, the passengers on the subway, a fleeting camera click of glimpse of a man defined in his function. He is confined to an extreme example of a human reduced from nearly all that makes him human, precisely because of how the world today is structured, encountered and processed. He is like a zoo animal. He paces the perimeter Of his cage, poet Doug Holder writes in lines reminiscent of Rainier Marie Rilke The Panther.



Holder typically takes these sorts of verbal photographs of people unusually overridden by probably what is not a definitive moment for the people as they really are, but by awkward vivid moments that would package them palatably for our quick-take-for-thrills media consciousness. People confined to monotonous jobs of function in a tunnel booth or at a post office machine, confined ridiculously for two years in a toilet, gotten up in colonial attire, apprehended at a maddened moment painting the statue of John Harvard red while tourists snap pictures.



The poet is snapping these photos partaking in the mania of his contemporary culture, and in doing so he is exercising a mimesis of the dynamics of 21st century perception, how data about ourselves is created and presented to others. As though our experience today consisted of a rapid succession of sudden images, spaced messages left, brief chats, sandwiches in wrappers on the go, news headlines, shifting windows, all with a hawks eye out for the next quirk or embarrassment to give cause to the perpetual laugh-track that must punctuate each moments joke, each segment of the day.



These are as serious implications as one would want to draw from a poet whose (can it be?) earnest intention is to humor us. Yet that Holder's perceptions are so keenly attuned to how the world works today gives an underlying substance to his seeming legerdemain, short poems of truncated lines, almost epigrammatic,laconic, tongue-in-cheek, yet at the same time oddly in the sympathetic spirit that Auden remembered in William Butler Yeats:



In a rapture of distress

Sing of human unsuccess.



And Doug Holder's disappointments succeed because, in partaking of the swift momentum of today's mediatized mindset, he stubbornly entertains his subjects as human in their dilemmas of being exposed. If the man in the booth of the Midtown Tunnel appears caged to us, how must we appear to him?



Faceless and a blur,

Behind thick plates

Of light-bleached glass.



Poignantly from so little, Holder produces a rather profound insight, articulated with lyrical simplicity:

And we will

All remain

Ignorant of

Each other.



A danger the poet risks in tailoring verse to popular contemporary expectations is that his or her work may be read with no more attention, say, than that ordinarily given to a cartoon strip or a note to the editor. Holders deft word-smithing, however, can halt us in the slaloms down the slopes, to want to mull over such coinings and scrivennings as blue uniform (Man in the Booth), It is only a hassle, (The Woman who Sat ), sea of manila (Postal Worker), the oxymoronic age's inertia (Two Old Women) and the metaphysical conceits of Bites of memory (The Last Hotdog) and of the final strophe in Postal Worker,

You feel

Ready to

Be returned to

Your sender



a dazzling compression of the momentary and mechanical with the ontological and transcendent.



In the recent year we have seen Doug Holder, a prolific and generous advocate of emerging poets in the Boston area, up in arms defending the worthiness of small press publications. Tirelessly he has organized readings and conducted interviews with local and national writers, giving them light of day on the Ibbetson Street website pages, in the Lyrical Somerville, and on the local Public Television program Author to Author. He has greatly helped give purpose to area intellectuals who meditate and labor to find expression in poetry and share as a community on Saturday mornings with the Bagels & Bards at the Davis Square Au Bon Pain. Cambridge/Somerville is a better place because of Doug Holder, and the small press made vital and serious because of the many publications he has been involved with, not least this latest collection of his own poetry that yields and yields enjoyment and meaning on reading after reading.



The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel by Doug Holder is available for $13.00 through Cervana Barva Press/P.O. Box 440357/W. Somerville, MA 02144-3222. http://cervenabarvapress.com



Check out also Bookstore: * HYPERLINK "http://www.thelostbookshelf.com" *www.thelostbookshelf.com*.

Signs, Translations by John Hildebidle

Signs, Translations
John Hildebidle
Salmon Poetry
ISBN 978-1-903392-83-6
2008 $12.00

through out this collection of poems the poet John Hildebidle directs our senses, our translations of what family or how we are creatively influenced by our most intimate situations:

“as a child, like you I moved
never so vastly, of course,
but again and again and
until it became something
deeper than habit…”

each page is an adventure, a discovery of each object, each sign, each person or food encountered on any given day:

Specialty of the House

“it looked like nothing I’d ever eaten.
surely that word on the menu meant pork.
the waiter tried so hard to explain.
my wife smirked, visibly:
“how is it? (no innocent question.)”
“what is it, I’d like to know.”
“he told you. pig’s feet. didn’t you understand?”
we sipped some wine.
“you mean you knew what I was doing
and let me go right ahead?”
“you’re a big boy.” “and often a bigger dolt,
as you know well. I rely on you to rescue me.”
“a full-time job, and more besides.”
“all that was called for in this case was a subtle hint.”
“was it that bad?” “I won’t say, one way or another.
that’s your punishment.” “you ate it all, and it was
‘the specialty of the house.’ consider it an adventure.”

the next to the last section in the book compliments the readers expectations with ‘poems on the life of Henry David Thoreau.’

“dead summer, and the air sags from use.
his tramps persist. heavy with dust,
as if the earth rose to claim
anything fool enough to roam…”

before the reader completes the reading of these poems, you will be tempted to revisit the beginning, turning back the pages many times. Signs, Translations, will sit next to my morning coffee. I will sip both with the expectations of a pick me up

Irene Koronas
Poetry editor
Wilderness House Literary Review
Poetry editor
Ibbetson Street Press

The Light at the End by Lyn Lifshin

Light at the End
The Jesus Poems
Lyn Lifshin
Clevis Hook Press 2008
ISBN 978-9821718-0-6
$12.95

Review by Irene Koronas

wow. this book of poems took me by surprise. I read through a few times before I let go of my own attitude of what was being written, once I let go did I found a sardonic collection of situations, a continual jab at the preverbal relationships women and men sometimes have. Lifshin cuts open all the wounds and images of how the sexes may act on occasion. there are, the younger than mary episodes, jesus running buck shot over innocence and innocence growing bitter. jesus represents some men:

“…some how there’d always been some
woman who found him divine
I did, for longer than many
marriages last. when opened
to him, the most ordinary
days seemed magical. blood
on our shin…”

there is enough irreverence between these sheets, pages, to feed all the readers who enjoy punk rock or hippie flowers. if the poems were set to music people might throw themselves into or onto the audience with reassurance of being caught, carried up and out:

“…me bareback, our lips and kisses reins
‘I’ve touched your perfect body,’ he sang better
than Leonard Cohen himself and in his passion,
yelped yippy I o and I squealed oh Jesus
and Christ and Lord until I was hoarse.”

it takes a few readings for me to place jesus as a Spanish lover or all the lovers or all the men the author can conjure but when I place the poems in perspective I start to laugh.

the poems are clever, interesting, and not charming. Lifshin ‘pulls off’ another book of difference. the reader will ride a stormy night or a bright blinding morning after…:

“I don’t care if it rains or freezes
as long as I’ve got my plastic Jesus”

he has risen to
walk-where the
hell has he been,
what’s happened,
our nation has turned
its back on Jesus
lost its way
sideshow suckers,
heathens killing
babies, presidents
with their pants
around their ankles
I’m on the road
that leads to Jesus
send 50 dollars to
my 800 number and
get yourself a
good road map

poet preacher Lifshin, like a sharp shooter who can hit a nickel dead center from 10 miles away, nails it


Irene Koronas/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan 2009

The Fearful Symmetries of Lo Galluccio’s Sarasota VII

The Fearful Symmetries of Lo Galluccio’s Sarasota VII

article by Michael T. Steffen



From the sepulchral artifacts of ancient Egypt to the horror films we watch in our cinemas, civilizations have attested again and again to the powerful creative articulation people find in the loss of loved ones. Far from any form of closure, grief resonates irresolutely within us, demanding response after response, a virtual wellspring of language, the poet’s torment and treasure. Formally approached, art provides a medium of exploration to channel and cultivate the enormous curiosity that loss bequeaths to us. Yet drawing expressions from these sources of our inspirations hardly depletes the well. So much happens simultaneously in our relationships: you as you are, you as I perceive or desire you, I as am and as am perceived/project myself. Factor in time and the complexity deepens: you as you are, you as you were and would want me to be this new year… Many writers feel some accomplishment in extracting an element or so from the complexity in a given piece of writing. More boldly, however, attempts now and then are made exposing the artist in a defiant embracing of as much elemental psychic transference as she or he can, resulting in some of the works we read in classes at the highest levels, The Odyssey, Hamlet, The Waste Land. I don’t mean to mince values by comparing Lo Galluccio’s Sarasota VII with the great masterpieces of world literature. (Irene Koronas in Sarasota VII sees traces of Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, to name a few.) Yet reading Sarasota VII gave me the impression of a poet drawing into that kind of perilous arena, a tamer in a cage surrounded by dangerous “symmetries.” While wary of falsely glorifying Sarasota VII, I think it important to acknowledge the work’s barest formal venture, the confrontational expectations proposed and that Galluccio was able to contain this material and shape it into one work. It attests to a great character of faith and resilience in it author.

The perceiving of multiple identities (I-thou, am, are, is, was…to become…) haunts Sarasota VII and also seeds the work with brilliant insights.



…those of us who lose a reflection of ourselves

in childhood have two lives. We know ourselves

against life and against death. As a tree knows

itself against a space of sky and against a density

of earth (I,3).



We know hot from cold, both of shared elements, water or air. So life from death, yet again of shared elements, memory and language, which make us human, the creature for whom so much of the present is composed of the past, memory, language.

And the life of the body is known from that of the mind.



The smell of barbecue rising through the open

window, caress of wind, a desire to lie on the

floor and feed kisses with kisses on some mouth,

even a woman’s, even her own. The sensation

makes her dizzy and enormous. Enormously earth-

bound and stupid. Smarter than words. The body

defies all ideas and projections of ideas. The body

wants only to move, to rest and to touch. It offers

ecstasy and expression. The mind dangles spiders,

spins cobwebs, and explanations that mummify

the rest. Split? (I,8).



This is wonderful poetry, naming—this from that, Adam in the garden, Joyce in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is the beginning of a galaxy, analysis, the splitting or separation of matter, this from that, the poetry of the discovery (rediscovery) of each thing, consummately of the beloved, the so significant other, at whose meeting we begin to synthesize, to know and identify with and in part become one with.



We kissed. Again and again. For nine months.

I sent you home. I loved you. I loved the taste

of you. Knew the danger of you and you walked

home in my jacket. “I already expect to die,” you

said. Just like a survivor. I knew that better than

almost anyone else, you knew the art of survival

and how to feed yourself (I,15).



Anxiously in section 12 of Part I Galluccio asks, “Can one form a work of art without attention to form, without a basis in it?” In fact, Sarasota VII enacts a universally recognizable formation in its taking apart and synthesizing things, people, psyches, worlds. The form of human life synthesizes the fetus out of a series of meiosis or splitting of cells. That is nature’s task, initiating a life out of the initiation of two deaths, those of the lovers or sexual partners. The anxiety of that natural death ignites the intellect of the artist in defiance, whose spidery mind at some point refuses and steps back away from the completion of the natural sexual death.



you’d feed off me. Now you say, “You were lonely.”

Now you say, “You shouldn’t have let me steal your

power.” I say: “We were twins.” I say: “You shouldn’t

have needed to steal the power you admired and hated”

(I,15).



So the lost lover, the subject of Part I, failed to become the provider. Instead, “You offered heat. You breathe lies and drama… You became my theatre… (ibid).

Classically, in the Latin poet Horace’s terms, dramatic form was linear and consisted of a beginning, a middle and an end. It established the characters in the setting of a significant moment, troubled those characters with that moment, then (comedy) resolved that trouble or (tragedy) further unraveled the characters in the exaltation of their dilemmas. It’s not the lack of formative polarities that is missing in Sarasota VII. It is their linear playing out, a more obvious and logical sequence, which we are denied, perhaps which we today expect to be denied.

Galluccio owns this work, though, as a memoir, yet the notion of drama is frequently conjured so that a nifty sleight of the theatrical echoes over into the reader’s perceptions. I particularly liked the section that identified actors and criminals:



Both refuse a set place. A legitimate space. They ribbon

graffiti on the walls of worlds solid hands and straight

minds have constructed. They wear masks. What

distinguishes the outlaw, the actor? His long-term

cowardice or his continuously summoned, quickly

spurted courage? (I, 10).



Part II shifts its focus from lost lover to lost father, and also visits Galluccio’s experience with drama. Rather than being disappointed sexually, the child orphaned by the parent’s death deals with a larger, more cosmic sensation of abandonment, and the poet sings the plangent refrain, “Because I’m fatherless…”



Because I’m fatherless the director wants me to come

by his bungalow for a drink so he can confide in me

all the frustrations of his theatrical kingdom. Like

Viola in “Twelfth Night” I’m to become sympathetic

and marooned by this Duke’s forlorn appetite. I decline…

(II. I.)



Though it is refused the presentation of linear form, there is a story, a drama to Sarasota VII. Out of a similar refusal Vladimir Nabokov wrote his memoir-style novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Formally the memoir is appropriate to the spirit of post-modernism in that its narration is topical rather than temporal, its narration simultaneous rather than linear, all things happening at once in the out-of-time moment of remembering and writing.

If Sarasota VII elicits comparison with great works, it is I think because Galluccio has dared to flutter around some very long-burning flames, love and death, the rules of the mind vs. the joys and pains of the body, the comforts of being accepted vs. the stings of rejection, deeply the daughter and the father.

It would be wrong simply to flatter and inflate the author unjustly. Sarasota VII is not a bad attempt at artistic surrender in amplitude. Whether it is enough for a young literary talent to rest upon, that is the author’s decision. It is a generous gift to us readers certainly.

About The Book of Nightmares Galway Kinnell was told that it was a great poem despite its many flaws.

Impressive in scope, continuity and sustained melody, Sarasota VII bears everything necessary, high and low, to be read with enthusiasm and consideration.





Sarasota VII is available for $12.00 from Cervana Barva Press/ P.O. Box 440357/

W. Somerville, MA 02144-3222/ www.cervanabarvapress.com.

See also, Bookstore: www.thelostbookshelf.com.



Michael Todd Steffen Jan. 2009

"The Holy Fool" ( For Mike Amado 1974-2009)

THE HOLY FOOL (for Mike Amado, 1974 - 2009)

Tapping congas in a red shirt,
he brought music to all of us
from ordinary life
where magic does not rule.

Non-listeners did not challenge him
when he uttered his poems
directly from an open heart.
He was wiser than his years.

A transplant failed
and years in dialysis taught him
how to blur out time
when needed,
how to fly like an eagle
above his body.

He brought me back to youth
when animals and gypsies caught fire
and those who witnessed
became Holy Fools.

He was one, too,
turning ruin to beauty,
his mortal pain soaring
on careful wings.

--Carolyn Gregory, 1/3/09

I Will Always Remember It Well: The Chelsea Hotel

I Will Always Remember It Well: The Chelsea Hotel





I have always heard and read about the Chelsea Hotel, in the Chelsea Section of New York City. Recently I visited, and resided for a short stay in this literary landmark. Of course I remember Leonard Cohen’s lament of a song “I Remember You Well At The Chelsea Hotel,” and Dylan Thomas’ daughter talked to me about her father’s last days at the Chelsea, (during the time he drank himself to death), in an interview I conducted with her. The composer Virgil Thompson was a long-term resident; Sid Vicious and Nancy were holed up in a room there, as well as the novelist Thomas Wolfe of “You Can’t Go Home Again” fame. I am told he wrote for days on end standing up, rather than sitting at a desk. Arthur C. Clarke wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey” while staying at the Hotel. The playwright Arthur Miller spent part of his honeymoon with Marilyn Monroe at the Chelsea; Bob Dylan stayed there and composed several songs (there was a failed attempt to renovate his room recently). A friend of mine Philip Segal, a professor of English in NYC, told me over dinner during my stay at the Hotel, that he attended several parties at the Chelsea. The rooms were so small and cramped that the parties spilled out into the generous halls that were and still are peppered with artwork of all stripes. He told me that the space in the hallways is so spacious that a ballet company practiced there regularly.



The Chelsea has a reputation of being a literary and artistic flophouse of sorts. A place where the famous, not so famous, the shut-in, the dreamer and the drifter coexisted. And since I was making a trek to New York to meet with some fellow poets, I decided to book a room for a few nights.



The Chelsea, a twelve story builiding with brick and wrought iron balcony balustrades, was the first building in NYC to be listed as a cultural preservation site and historic building of note. It opened in 1884 as one of the first private apartment cooperatives. Since 1946, the hotel had been managed by the Bard family, and since 1955 Stanley Bard ran the joint, until he was ousted by a management company in 2007. Bard was a much loved manager, presiding benevolently over the residents and the guests who lived there. Bard seemed to understand the concept of the starving artist, allowing some to pay rent by paintings, etc… However the new management is much more bottom line, and since Bard left there has been controversy, as residents have mounted a campaign of banners, pranks, and protests toward getting Bard back. Ed Hamilton a resident and author of “Legends of the Chelsea Hotel…” told me that “Unfortunately, the hotel is no longer accepting permanent residents and that is a shame. The permanent tenants are as important to the hotel as the tourists.”



Upon arriving at the Chelsea my wife and I noticed a guitar store adjacent to the hotel was having a “Bernie Madoff Clearance Sale.” Now the lobby ain’t your typical Holiday Inn affair. When we entered we saw a man staring intensely at us, looking for all the world like the resurrection of Samuel Beckett. He was sitting under a suspended paper mache scultpure of a fat lady on a swing. The lobby was full of artworks, murals, etc… There was a painting of an elongated, long-faced Fido, aptly named “Chelsea Dog” that captured my attention. The front desk looked like a prop from Eugene O’Neill’s play “Hughie.” I saw that play some years ago. It starred the actor Jason Robards, who played a down-at-the-heels snake oil salesman, living out his failed life, in a failed, gone-to seed hotel.

We took a squeaking elevator to our room on the third floor. A balding, distracted gentleman asked my wife if she knew where “The Shining” painting was (based on the Stephen King movie). We didn’t now but we ran across it later. The floor we stayed on, and in fact all the floors, are full of artwork, many from of the residents. Even the fire extinguishers were adorned with stickers and graffiti, that made them look like sites of art installation…I guess they are. There is an eclectic selection of paintings on the walls in the gothic halls, including prints of Roy Cohn (of all people), Eisenhower, Jimi Hendrix, Hunter S. Thompson, a beguiling “Horse On Oil Canvas” by Joe Andoe, a photo montage of Andy Warhol and Muhammad Ali, and a huge mural that depicts residents in dialogue: “Myra Resnick in 308 says the Chelsea rocks!” On the top floor you experience ethereal sky light, and series of suspended mobiles, wafting images on the ceilings.

Forty percent of the rooms are saved for residents, and there is a definite sense of community in the place. Ed Hamilton wrote that the Chelsea is the “Last Outpost of Bohemia.” I advise you to visit and make haste/ the way things are going /there is no time to waste!

Poet Mike Amado: The Passing of a Young Poet

( Mike Amado--middle)



Poet Mike Amado: The Passing of a Young Poet

It must have been hard to walk in the basement of Finagle-A-Bagel in Harvard Square on a cold, gray Saturday morning, and sit down with the original members of the Bagel Bards, a bunch of grizzled gray- beard veterans of the local poetry scene. Here he was, all of 30 years old, and a sufferer of advanced kidney disease to boot. And because of his health life was indeed difficult. Mike didn’t finish college even though he was quite bright, and he had to survive on disability and the limited life that came with it. I never heard him talk about a girlfriend or a love interest. It must have been a lonely life for a young guy. And so there he was at the table, shaking a bit, perhaps stuttering, but saying his piece, and exhibiting an enthusiasm and energy that could put us all to shame.

Mike became a regular, accompanied by his pal Jack Scully. Scully had sparked his interest in the Bagel Bards, after reading an article about the group in The Boston Globe, written by Ellen Steinbaum. He slowly worked his way into the hearts of all the members. He work shopped his poems, took advantage of every reading opportunity offered, started to publish in the Bagel Bard house organs, as well as a wide variety of small press magazines. Mike even started a poetry series in his hometown of Plymouth, Mass.

Last Summer (2008) Mike attended the Solstice Writing Workshop at Pine Manor College and came back to the group beaming. He made new strides in his writing, and made new contacts in the poetry world.

During his time with us Mike published two collections of poetry: “Stunted Inner Child… (Cervena Barva Press), and “Rebuilding the Pyramids: Poems of Healing In A Sick World,” with the Ibbetson St. Press.

The last time I saw Mike was at the Somerville News Writers Festival (Nov. 22, 2008) He was in his element, dressed in a resplendent Chinese tunic, chatting it up with the faculty at Pine Manor College, and the many poets and writers he knew in the community. He was excited about the prospects of his new books.

While I was at work I got an email from a poet and a close friend of Mike’s, Irene Koronas. Mike had passed away surrounded by family and friends. Mike lasted way longer than he was expected to. He was fighting this disease since he was 13.

But in the time I knew him I never got the sense that he was jaded. He continued to be a rabid music fan, always had a child-like enthusiasm for poetry, and displayed an iconoclastic sense of humor. I will miss seeing him coming through the doors of the Au Bon Pain every Saturday morning with his pal Jack who towered over his slight figure like a gentle, protective giant. I’d always say “What’s up, Mike.” And god love him, he always had a scoop.

Marguerite Bouvard: "MY ASHRAM IS MY STUDY"

Marguerite Bouvard: "MY ASHRAM IS MY STUDY"


Marguerite Bouvard is a soft-spoken, contemplative woman, but don’t be fooled. She is a poet, writer and scholar who is committed to questioning women’s role in society, how we approach illness and death, and political injustices at home and abroad. She has published 15 books that cover everything from feminism to aging, and the role of prayer in hard times.

Bouvard is presently a resident scholar at the Women’s Studies Center at Brandeis University. She has written a book: “Healing: A Life With Chronic Illness” about her experience living with “ interstitial cystitis” among other illnesses. Her latest poetry collection is; “The Unpredictability of Light.” I talked with Bouvard on my Somerville Community Access TV program “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”


Doug Holder: Can you talk about the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, and your role?

Marguerite Bouvard: I have been doing research for a lot of books and periodically I give presentations. I go into classrooms, and I am part of a study group called “World Cultures.” There are all kinds of study groups, artists, poets, and scholars from around the world at the Center. We meet in groups and share our research. And it really centers on women’s experiences.

DH: Politics and Poetry can be a lethal mix. Often political poetry becomes mere polemic, not art. Is it impossible to write good political poetry?

MB: Not at all. I was born in Eastern Europe. I read widely the Eastern European poets. Much of their political poetry was wonderful.

DH: What American political poets do you read?

MB: I don’t like American political poetry-- it is polemical. The Eastern European poets have a sense of humor. They know how to take on the “system” in a very humane way.

When dissent is stifled, and I think it is being stifled in our own country, poetry is a point where you can be free with your thoughts. In fact, I just wrote a chapter for a book that is coming out: “Post 911,” My chapter is on poetry dissent.

DH: You have lived with chronic illness for a while now. Has your writing helped you cope, is it healing, a balm? Has the illness been a muse?

MB: It hasn’t been a muse. My writing is a raft—a rickety raft on a huge ocean. It’s what keeps me going. Sometimes I can work one or two hours a day. I can do more in an hour than most people can do in a day. I’ve learned to focus intensely. Once you become ill you become part of suffering humanity. I identify with people in China who are hungry, the victims of the school collapses, etc… It is a blood wedding. You marry a dangerous situation and you accept it, you embrace it.

DH; You talk about the importance of spacing in your poems. Do you have any formal meter in your work?

MB: I don’t.

DH: Can you describe your writing?

MB: My nonfiction comes out in gushes from one side of my brain, and my poetry just finds me. I’m very imagistic. It is sparked by something I see or hear. In my new poetry collection: “ The Unpredictability of Light”, one of the poems deals with a teenager who committed suicide. It really touched me because she was the daughter of one of my friend’s colleagues. I tried to get into her mind and discover why she did it. It came to me all of a sudden. I thought I understood what happened and that’s what sparked the poem.

DH: You have said that men are praised for venturing into multiple fields, and women are criticized. Why? Any examples?

Mb: When I first got my PhD I was one of the few women who were doing this in the field. In the 60’s women were portrayed as too emotional. This was really a male oriented society and it still is in many ways.

I can contrast this. My husband is French and when we were first married and went back to Paris I found his friends’ wives were physicists, lawyers and doctors. I couldn’t have got into law school or medical school at the time.

Women are not allowed to age, we must always be young. We are not given much social space. We are not supposed to be multidisciplinary. It was ok for Wallace Stevens to be an insurance executive and a poet, or William Carlos Williams to be a doctor and a poet—but for a woman, well, she is not supposed to do that.

DH: You studied religion extensively. There is so much strife attached to organized religion. Do you think religion can bring healing?

MB: I would like to bring a distinction between religion and spirituality. They are very different. I grew up as a Catholic. I left the church. I consider myself a very spiritual person, but I don’t like to be in any organization that’s telling me what to think and what to do. No thanks. So my ashram is my study. I meditate every day. I worry about organized religion because people are killing each other over it.

DH: You talk to the dying what do you say?

MB: I listen. There is no set conversation. People don’t know how to converse with the ill and the dying. You tell them how sorry you are for what they are going through. You ask them how bad is the pain, and speak to their condition. Our society does not want to give them space.

DH: When a dying person tells you that he is frightened of death and what happens after, what do you say?

MB: I had all kinds of experiences while meditating and also in dreams. I feel there is another world behind here, and the dying will find peace. What’s frightening is not the other world but the passage.

DH: Do you have a conception of what the afterlife is?

MB: Well, that’s very personal. I have had intimations of it while meditating. But I do not want to get into the specifics because that’s when we get into organized religion.

DH: Do you fear death?

MB: No. When people are very ill it is a great relief to be away from pain. Life and death go together. Death is all around us. In nature it is cyclical. You see animals dying, you see flowers die. If society was healthier we would see people die. We would accompany the dying, (not avoid them) and they would pave the way for us. When my mother was dying, I held her hand, and we spoke and that was very important.


--Doug Holder



IN TRANSIT


1
I arrived here on a river
of thorns, harsh mother
who taught me
how to invent mornings, how to
clear paths in the thickets
of my head.

2

I threaded my way among
travelers pulling their carry-ons
and speaking on cell phones, their faces
shuttered, their steps erased
by the crush of other steps.
I skirted a woman struggling
with her cane. Mine
was invisible.

3

Now in this green kingdom
I listen to the grass telling
its stories to the rain as if it too
had just arrived and was busy
unrolling its parchment
of roots and wings.

--- Marguerite Bouvard ( Poetrybay 2002)

"Dirty Water” by Mary-Ann Tirone Smith and Jere Smith

A BagelBards Book Review

“Dirty Water”
A Red Sox Mystery By Mary-Ann Tirone Smith and Jere Smith
Hall of Fame Press, Kingston, RI price $22.95

Reviewed 1/1/09 by Paul Steven Stone

It’s another Sunday morning in Boston, summer’s in mid-flight and the Red Sox are on track to win their second set of bling-studded World Series rings in four years. Only it’s not just another Sunday morning in 2007. There’s a day-night doubleheader scheduled to kick off at noon, and a one-month-old baby boy abandoned in a backpack outside the players locker room at Fenway Park. And therein sounds the opening chord—sounding much like an infant’s cries—of a mystery that, before it’s done, will transit across murder, revenge, blackmail, immigrant smuggling and, enough Boston Red Sox lore and personalities to satisfy the hungriest citizens of Red Sox Nation.

The authors, a mother-son team and self-professed third and fourth generation Red Sox fans, have written a police procedural that’s as much devoted to revealing the insider’s world of Fenway Park as it is the culprits behind a multi-layered murder mystery. The fact that both the novel’s murder victims end up face down in the muddy waters of the Fens surrounding Fenway Park gives storyline weight as well as musical nuance to the book’s title. “Dirty Water” being not only a Boston-centric pop tune from the 1960’s, but more significantly the official Red Sox victory song played after every win at Fenway Park.

What adds spice to this chunky stew of baseball trivia and murder mystery is the appearance of actual Sox players and personalities who, though they only play minor roles, are brought into the storyline as living, breathing entities; pop idols for sure, but also fun-loving, sympathetic and slightly bawdy individuals. The novel’s two main characters, Boston Police Detective Rocky Patel and Sargeant Marty Flanagan offer a balance of cerebral clarity and dogged common sense, the former’s Hindu-based meditative techniques lending insight and direction to the latter’s old-fashioned Irish intuition. They know enough that, even when they’ve been led astray and fed the wrong leads, they never lose their grip on the right instincts. From the outset they’re committed to finding the killer that left the abandoned baby’s mother lying face down in…dirty water.

“Dirty Water” is a solid hit for mystery lovers and a grand slam for those Red Sox fans who enjoy reading whodunits as much as they enjoy a hometown sweep of the Yankees.


Paul Stone/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan. 1 2009


Paul Steven Stone is the author of: "Or So It Seems"

Reviewers have called it, “A Romp Through Time and Space,” “A Rollicking Spiritual Page-Turner,” and “...one of the most compelling books I’ve read in a long time.”
They were talking about my new novel, “Or So It Seems”. Check it out for yourself at http://www.orsoitseems.info or on Amazon.com
Also available at: Circles of Wisdom, Andover; Harvard Book Store, Cambridge; Porter Square Books, Cambridge; Out Of The Blue Gallery, Cambridge; Westwinds Bookshop, Duxbury

Happy New Year 2009 from the Ibbetson Street Press

( Original Ibbetson home at 33 Ibbetson Street-- Poets from the "City of Poets Anthology"--the first anthology Ibbetson Street Press published---2000)

The Ibbetson Street Press and the Ibbetson Street Journal have been around more than 10 years now. Back in 1998, while sharing bagels at the Breuger Bagels in Porter Square Cambridge, arts/editor Richard Wilhelm, and my wife poet Dianne Robitaille decided to start the Ibbetson Street Press. We started as only a magazine, but eventually started to publish books and chapbooks of poetry. Our first collections were authored by Don DiVecchio "Earth Song," "The Life of All Worlds," by Marc Widershien,among others. Now in 2009 we have published over 50 collections.

"Ibbetson Street" the magazine, has published folks like the late Sarah Hannah, Mark Doty, Afaa Michael Weaver, Diana Der- Hovanessian, Danielle Georges, Ed Sanders and others over the years. Our books, magazines, and poets have been featured in The Boston Globe, Small Press Review, Verse Daily, WGBH, WBZ(Radio), NPR (Writers Almanac), The Boston Herald, Mass Book Award, and many other places. Our books have been praised by Howard Zinn, sam Cornish, Victor Howes, Afaa Michael Weaver, Dzvinia Orlosky, Lyn Lifshin, Fred Marchant, Matha Collins, Kevin Bowen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and other notables. Ibbetson books and magazines are subscribed to and or collected by such libraries as: Yeshiva University, Brown University, Yale University, Poet's House (NYC), University at Buffalo (SUNY),Harvard University, Stanford University, to name just a few. Ibbetson Street was represented on panels at workshops at the Cape Cod Writers Center, Mass. Poetry Festival, Endicott College, UMass Boston, and in April it will be part of a panel on Small Press Publishing at Harvard University. Because of the reputation of Ibbetson Street I was invited by the Israeli literary organization "Voices Israel" to lead workshops, and read from my work in Haifa, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. ( Dec 2007) It is a pleasure to see Ibbetson Street listed in people's credits in many literary journals. Just the other day I saw it listed in the American Poetry Review, Bloomsbury Review, Poets Market and other publications.

Since 2001 we moved to 25 School St in Somerville, Mass. This has been an incredibly productive time for us. Thanks to our landlords Patricia Wild and David Myers, we have had a great place to live and write, and we thank our lucky stars we can live in such a creative place as Somerville, Mass. I must say, Somerville is a truly unique community, and the town has been very good to me and the press.

Our satellite organization the "Bagel Bards" has taken off, and we have established a community of writers, who range from the highly accomplished to the aspiring. There are so many people but I can't list them all--I thank all the Bagel Bards of course.... my long time friend and big brother Harris Gardner, our thick-skinned designer and editor Steve Glines, Robert K. Johnson--our retiring poetry editor, Linda and Ray Conte, website gurus, Tim Gager (co-founder of the Somerville News Writers Festival)," The Somerville News, Dorian Brooks ( our wonderful copyeditor and great poet), Sam Cornish, Richard Wilhelm, Gloria Mindock (fellow holy fool), Hugh Fox (My small press mentor and crazy and brilliant uncle!) Afaa Michael Weaver, Irene Koronas ( new poetry editor), and the list goes on...

Hey money is tight...I still have a great gig at McLean Hospital, but I don't take anything for granted these days. But I want to thank you all for these great years!

MASSBOOKS OF THE YEAR/POETRY: Recommended Reading from the 8th Annual Massachusetts Book Awards--2008

MASSBOOKS OF THE YEAR/POETRY
Recommended Reading from the 8th Annual Massachusetts Book Awards


The Award Books
Blackbird and Wolf by Henri Cole (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In these poems the writer strives to fuse the mind and the world,meditation and observation, until what is seen becomes what is felt.

If No Moon by Moira Linehan (Southern Illinois UP). This cohesive and brave collection of lyric poetry invites the reader toexplore the author's devotion to embracing life, grieving death, and pursuing creativity.

Gulf Music by Robert Pinsky (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky explores the intersections between individual, cultural, and political memory through the idiosyncratic notion of forgetfulness.



Highly Recommended



Lawrence City by Cesar Sanchez Beras (Wellington House Publishing). Set in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the collection explores town landmarks such as the Ayer Mill clock, City Hall, and Bellevue cemetery.

Inconsiderate Madness by Helen Marie Casey (Black Lawrence Press). Casey’s poems focus on Mary Dyer, a Quaker hanged as a heretic in 17th century Massachusetts, and explore themes of belief, devotion, and the relationship between religion and
the state.

The Alchemy of Grief by Emily Ferrara (Bordighera Press). Ferrara incorporates love, loss, friendship, and transformation in poems about the pain and healing of a grieving mother.

Descartes’ Loneliness by Allen Grossman (New Directions). A combination of comedy and tragedy, Grossman’s collection of poetry about death dares to find humor and peace in loss.

Under Sleep by Daniel Hall (U of Chicago Press). Written over a ten year period as an elegy to Hall’s partner, Under Sleep utilizes a variety of poetic forms and styles to relate the effects of a loved one’s death on the living.

From Mist to Shadow by Robert K. Johnson (Ibbetson Street Press). In a poetic exploration of his own life, Johnson shares thoughts on love, literature, family, careers, and the characters who have colored his experiences.

Beloved Idea by Ann Killough (Alice James Books) Killough struggles to understand through metaphor-heavy verse her feelings toward her nation, evoking images from American religion, literature, and politics.

Easy to Keep, Hard to Keep In by David R. Surette (Koenisha Publications). Surette’s musical verses relate autobiographicalstories from his life in and around Boston.

The Situation by John Skoyles (Carnegie Mellon UP). Skoyles addresses the relationship between life and death while incorporating love, loss, and religion.

Saving the Lamb by B.G. Thurston (Finishing Line Press). These poems use images from nature to illustrate aspects of human life and of the life of the poet in particular.

Judges for the 8th MassBooks in Poetry were Claire Buck (Department of English, Wheaton College),Lawrence Raab (Department of English, Williams College) & Vanessa Vargas (Forbes Library, Northampton)

I Called Richard Yates On The Phone: Musings From A Minor Poet

I Called Richard Yates On The Phone: Musings From A Minor Poet

By Doug Holder

An editor of a new literary magazine invited me to write an essay on the role of the “Post Modern” Poet. Well, I am not sure what “Post Modern” means, but I am a poet, however minor, and hell, for what it’s worth I should know what my own small role is and even the role of the much bigger fish in the poetry sea. But I think I want to expand that question. What is the role of the writer?

Now I am not known for the intellectual heft of my writing, be it community journalism or in my straightforward poetry. But I always have prided myself on tapping into my instincts, bringing my rather provincial personal experience to the universal. So as it happens I was thinking of the late novelist Richard Yates. I was reading Yates long before he became tremendously famous from the movie with Kate Winslet, etc… “Revolutionary Road.” (based on the novel of the same title.) That book for me, was electric, as thrilling as Kerouac’s “On the Road”, but in a very different way. Both Yates and Kerouac made me go out and hungrily acquire and read everything they ever penned. They made me think outside my self-made box, made me realize the power of language and literature, and they spurred me on to read even more. From Yates, I found other chroniclers of the broad lawns and narrow minds of the suburbs in post World War ll America, like John Cheever and John Updike. And later I moved through the whole canon of contemporary American authors like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, James Baldwin, Henry Roth, to name a few.

Some people say a great poem can make you cut yourself while shaving, or make you miss your subway stop. Well, I say it makes you want to call the author on the phone.

You see, years ago I lived in a rooming house in the Back Bay of Boston, right near where Yates lived. I used to see him shamble down Mass. Ave. He looked like a homeless guy; stooped over, disheveled—a man in serious disrepair. I heard he drank at the “Crossroads’, a bar a few blocks from the hole-in-the-wall I lived in. I went in a few times but I missed him. I probably wouldn’t have had enough gumption to speak to him anyway. So I tried to call him on the phone several times, but I got no answer. But the point is that his writing affected me so much I wanted to call him; I wanted to connect, in a tangible way.

He was a man of my father’s generation. And since I am a Baby Boomer, and lived in the suburbs of New York City (as did the characters in Revolutionary Road), I knew the milieu he wrote about. My old man was a regular “Dashing Dan,” a guy who hopped the Long Island Railroad everyday to the advertising canyons of Madison Ave. So in this novel “Revolutionary Road” I had a window into the mind of a guy trapped in this “Rat Race.” I had lived on a “Revolutionary Road” in Rockville Center, NY with my parents’ requisite barbecues and the tipsy cocktail parties that my brother and I witnessed at the top of the living room stairs.

Here was a writer who was doing an exegesis of this milieu, the one I grew up in and did not question (at least when I was in the thick of it). This regimented existence, from birth, death and infinity, was tightly choreographed, and I thought that it was the only game in town.

And since, during this specific time, when I was living in the Back Bay, I happened to be a denizen of a down-at-the--heels rooming house—a bathroom down the hall affair, with other gone- to- seed residents, and playing at being an artist---well, I thought Yates really spoke to me.

I often read his books, and at times they left me reeling, even crying. Even though I never actually spoke to Yates, Yates spoke loudly to me. So what do I think is the role of the “Post Modern” Poet? I think I told you, pal.

Poet Hugh Fox: Is Still " Way, Way Off The Road"

Poet Hugh Fox: Way, Way Off The Road


In 2006 the Ibbetson Street Press published a controversial memoir of the small press: “Way, Way Off the Road” by the legendary poet, critic and translator Hugh Fox. The memoir was indeed controversial, and we got more than a few angry calls from small press figures of the 60’s and 70’s who felt Fox’s portrayal of them was less than accurate. The book covered Fox’s involvement with COSMEP, (the seminal small press organization,) his encounters with Charles Bukowski, Lyn Lifshin, Harry Smith, Len Fulton, AD Winans, and many of the other players in the small press movement. In a recent editorial in The Small Press Review Len Fulton wrote of Hugh Fox:

“For Hugh Fox the reach must be always for the grasp to be ever. He takes memory, mixes it with imagination, imagery, and an almost Teutonic lexical arsenal, and flings into the cosmos for the delectation of anyone who cares to listen.

There is enough Fox to go around, and little on this planet he has missed in his fifty-odd years of publishing. Richard Kostelanetz calls him “ the most distinguished man of “ alternative letters of our time….”

I do have limited editions of the memoir for sale… a collector’s item. The book retails at 15 dollars with four dollars for shipping and handling. (lbbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143) The book was designed and edited by Steve Glines.

Also for you Fox fans The World Audience Press http://worldaudience.org has released a 550-page “Collected Poetry of Hugh Fox: 1996-2007”.


Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Street Press