Jan 6, 2009: Poet, Vocalist, Journalist: Lo Galluccio

My Guest on Jan 6, 2009 at 5PM Lo Galluccio:



With Lo Galluccio it is a "coup de foudre". You're reading something like:

"...Accept kisses of water in light" and there's no help because she's hit

the mark and you wish what she writes again would reveal everything

else. Yet you don't know how much that fight will can be dangerous to you,

really like a boxer until fatal k.o.: Lo, the girl from Boston, hides other

concentric fires which your unbridled imagination already foresaw by certain

words caught in a poem entitled Bloom the River. Words like islands of

introspection, densities, intimates: "Oh sky. Shadows of these days cut

looping my hair against his wall. My profile's smoke." (from Blasphemy).

Pulsating, vibrant, throbbing verses included in a collection of poems called

Hot Rain, published by Singing Bone/Ibbetson Street Press in 2004 that first

emerged from the soul of a woman with multiple qualities of actress, poet,

singer and musician.



Roy Nathanson, already saxophone player in the legendary Lounge Lizards

and then leader of the Jazz Passengers, indeed targeted her through those

poems beginning a fruitful collaboration (she appeared in 1994 on their

In Love) until exordium in 1997 - under her own name - on renowned

Knitting Factory label, she produced the astonishing Being Visited followed

(2003) by a self-release production entitled Spell on You, further nine tracks

of uncommon and burning intensity.



Poetry can be "possession" and Lo seems "possessed by Poetry: strenght,

urgency, fury of written word. She breaks her mirror and you try to gather

some fragment of yourself into them, discovering, little by little, the soul who

those verses of flesh and blood has embodied.

Tortuoses, dramatics and also obscure verses, disseminated by pitfalls and

precipices. Words chosen with care by her, sometimes hard and pointed inside

a sensual and ethereal texture at the same time, modern and antique, part of

the world and yet distant from it, unforeseen, surprising, sounding like an

unusual gesture during a meeting with someone.



Lo Galluccio' s poetry is authentic passion, sincere, true,on the path traced by

Robert Lowell and John Berryman, voices of the "confessional poetry" and as

two symbols of womanly American poetry named Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton

(or the less know - at least in Italy - Diane Di Prima, Diane Wakoski and Denise

Levertov) but also elegant and intriguing like an Antonia S. Byatt's page.



While you're writing about this, her voice has already contaminated you like a

virus, with no help of healing, her mesmerizing voice-presence blending sounds

in your mind evoking different atmospheres between the subliminal jazz of

Ctramsplit, Back Porch or Let Em Think My Wings Iz Broke with obliquity, sinuose

recitatives, transparencies, harshness, melancholy, that you have loved in Rickie

Lee Jones or Patti Smith and maybe in that Lydia Lunch noir's touch but Lo rebuild

"ex novo", shaped to herself , to her own soul, soaked by genuine pathos, splendidly

unveiled in the shadings of These Diamonds Are My Very.

Yes, jazz above all, but also blues and also a charming cover of Sinatra's Fly Me to

the Moon or an unexpected Que Sera Sera, from a groove to the other, giving us

whole herself.



But a simple sigh could be sufficient to her, ever singing - one more time - :

Will you love me like Leda's Swan ? Can you love me like Leda's Swan ?


* Lo has a new memoir out "Sarasota Vll" ( Cervena Barva Press. )

Dec 23, 2008 5PM Marguerite Bouvard

Dec 23, 2008 5PM: Poet, writer Marguerite Bouvard


Current Project

Marguerite is currently writing a book, Mothers in All But Name. It will focus on a much neglected topic, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, friends and strangers who have acted as mothers.

Biography

Marguerite Bouvard was for many years a professor of Political Science at Regis College and a director of poetry workshops. She is multidisciplinary and has published 15 books, numerous articles in the fields of political science, psychology, literature and poetry. Both her poetry and essays have been widely anthologized. She has received fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute, the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and from the Puffin Foundation. She has been a writer in residence at the University of Maryland and has had residencies at the MacDowell Colony the Yaddo Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation, the Leighton Artists’ colony at the Banff Centre for the Performing Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Marguerite’s activities as a Resident Scholar include organizing the first Tillie K. Lubin Symposium, as well as sponsoring lecture series on women and human rights and on environmental racism. Marguerite was also a founding editor of the All Sides of Ourselves publication series. She continues to organize panels for Women’s History Month and has had two collaborative exhibits at the Dreitzer Gallery and one at the gallery in the Women’ Studies Research Center.

Dec. 9, 2008: Barbara Helfgott Hyett

BARBARA HELFGOTT-HYETT


Poet, professor and public lecturer, Barbara Helfgott-Hyett has published four collections of poetry: In Evidence: Poems of the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps (University of Pittsburgh Press: 1986), based on her interviews with U.S. GI's, was selected Booklist's "Editor's Choice." Her second collection, Natural Law (Northland Press, 1989) includes poems about the history of Atlantic City, and was the first in the Salt River poetry series. The Double Reckoning of Christopher Columbus (University of Illinois Press: 1992), an epic poem on the 1492 voyage of the Columbian expedition, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. The Tracks We Leave: Poems on Endangered Wildlife of North America, (University of Illinois Press:1996). Her new collection, Rift, is just out from University of Arkansas Press. Her poems and essays have appeared in dozens of magazines including The New Republic, The Nation, Hudson Review, Massachusetts Review, Agni, Ploughshares, The Women's Review of Books, and in twenty-five anthologies. Recipient of two Massachusetts Artists Fellowships in Poetry, the New England Poetry Club's Gertrude Warren Prize, the Herman Melville Commemorative Poetry Prize, Fellowships at Yaddo, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and other grants and awards, she has taught English at Harvard, MIT, and Boston University where she won the Sproat Award For Excellence in Teaching. She is a co-founder of The Writer's Room of Boston, Inc, and Directs POEMWORKS: The Workshop for Publishing Poets, in Brookline, MA.