Poet to Poet: Writer, Electronic Media Scholar, Michael C. Keith Jan 16, 2018 5PM

Writer, Media Scholar, Michael C.Keith

see it live at 5PM  http://scatvsomerville.org

About the Author

Michael C. Keith is the author/coauthor of 30 book volumes and dozens of articles on the subject of radio and broadcast studies. In addition to his non-fiction titles, Keith has published over a dozen creative works, including an acclaimed memoir: The Next Better Place––a young adult novel: Life is Falling Sideways––and several short story collections: most recently Slow Train and Perspective Drifts Like a Log on a River. Mad Hat Press will publish his next story collection, Let Us Now Speak of Extinction. His fiction has been nominated for several awards, among them the Pen/O.Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, the National Indie Excellence Award, and the International Book Award. He is professor emeritus at Boston College.

Dec 19, 2017 Poet Anne Elezabeth Pluto 5PM

Anne Elezabeth Pluto is Professor of Literature and Theatre at Lesley University in Cambridge, MA where she is the artistic director and one of the founders of the Oxford Street Players, the university’s Shakespeare troupe. She is an alumna of Shakespeare & Company, and has been a member of the Worcester Shakespeare Company since 2011. She was a member of the Boston small press scene in the late 1980s and is one of the founders and editors at Nixes Mate Review.  Her chapbook, The Frog Princess, was published by White Pine Press (1985), her eBook Lubbock Electric, by Argotist ebooks (2012), and her chapbook Benign Protection by Cervana Barva Press (2016). Recent publications include: The Buffalo Evening News, Unlikely Stories: Episode IV, Mat Hat Lit, Pirene's Fountain, The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, Mockingheart Review, Yellow Chair Review, Levure Litteraire – numero 12, The Naugatuck River Review, and Tuesday, An Art Project.

see the show live at  5PM    http://scatvsomerville.org

Dec 5, 2017 Poet Michael Casey

 

Poet Michael Casey

In 1972, Michael Casey won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Obscenities, a collection of poems drawn from his military experience during the Vietnam War. In his foreword to the book, judge Stanley Kunitz called the work “a kind of anti-poetry that befits a kind of war empty of any kind of glory” and “the first significant book of poems written by an American to spring from the war in Vietnam.” Its raw depictions of war’s mundanity and obscenity resonated with a broad audience, and Obscenities went into a mass market paperback edition, and was stocked in drugstores as well as bookstores. In the decades since, Casey’s poetry has continued to document the places of his work and life. Then and now, his poems foreground the voices around him over that of a single author; they are the words of young American conscripts and their Vietnamese counterparts, coworkers and bosses, neighbors and strangers. His compressed sketches and unadorned monologues have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, and Rolling Stone. There It Is: New and Selected Poems presents, for the first time, a full tour through Casey’s work, from his 1972 debut to 2011’s Check Points, together with new and uncollected work from the late 60s on. Here are all the locations of Casey’s life and work—Lowell to Landing Zone, dye house to desk—and an ensemble cast with a lot to say.
The publication of Michael Casey's New and Selected Poems, with his quirky portraits of ordinary Americans, is an event to celebrate. Like a photographer snapping pictures relentlessly, he must have written a poem about everyone he ever met with dead-on realism. Compared to him, the Spoon River Anthology is a work for kiddies. If Robert Frost was a poet of the rural New Englander, Michael Casey, also a New Englander, brings to life his mill town background, the guys who didn't go on to college and the larger world, but married the girls they dated in high school and got jobs in the mill. When he's sent to Vietnam he captures his fellow soldiers in their own military jargon. A master of the vernacular, he forces one to question writing in the 'correct' language when so many of us speak it quite differently, the language we think and feel in. Rare among poets, he's willing to explore colloquial speech in all its messiness, and gets it down perfectly – in fact, he's got us all down spot on. This collection, with its wide range of voices, is a unique achievement.”
— Edward Field, author of The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag and After the Fall: Poems Old and New

Poet Scott Ruescher Nov 14 5PM

To see the show live go to:  http://scatvsomerville.org 

Scott Ruescher is the author of the poetry collection Waiting for the Light to Change (Prolific Press, 2017). He has won Able Muse’s Write Prize, Poetry Quarterly’s Rebecca Lard Award, and, twice, the New England Poetry Club’s Erika Mumford Prize for poetry about travel and international culture. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Solstice, The Common Ground Review, The Boston Phoenix, and elsewhere. He administers the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and teaches English in the Boston University Prison Education Program. (updated 7/2017)

Nov 7 , 2017 5PM Poet/Publisher Michael McInnis

Michael McInnis

  " I started Nixes Mate in 2016 with Philip Borenstein and Annie Pluto. We all had been zine publishers in late 80s, revolving around my underground bookstore, The Primal Plunge, in Allston. We had this idea of doing an online Review and a yearly "best of" Anthology. When Rusty Barnes asked if there were any local presses interested in doing a small book of poetry, I decided to take the press in that direction. Our 18th book is about to come out. We have another six in the works.

This is from the About page on the web site:

Nixes Mate is a navigational hazard in Boston Harbor.

We want to challenge the preconceived notions of reading on the web by using off-the-shelf technology to build a best-in-breed literary magazine. More than a magazine, it's a website.

We feature writers that use all 26 letters of the alphabet and then some. We're not afraid of punctuation; semicolons don't frighten us. Not even a little bit.

We feature small-batch artisanal literature, created by writers who've been honing their craft the time-honored way: one line at a time."

Poet Allen West -Oct 17, 2017 5PM

Allen West's sense of loss informs the elegies in Allen West’s new poetry collection, Keeping Night at Bay, is countered by the tenderness they express, the beauty of their lines, and the resilience with which the poet continues to sing.  These are deeply personal poems and at the same time deeply universal in their humanity, allusiveness, and the exquisite way they intertwine with the poet’s Chinese translations accompanied by Gundi Chan’s original calligraphy.  Seldom do we encounter work that is as unabashedly emotional as the poems in Keeping Night at Bay, while also displaying such rare intelligence.  

     
Allen West was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1930, and came to the U.S. with his family after the 1941 invasion of Greece by Germany. Educated at Phillips Academy and Princeton University, he served three years in the U.S. Army, then earned a PhD in chemistry from Cornell University in 1960.  He taught at Williams College and Lawrence University until 1994, when he and his wife Emily moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there he was a tutor at Cambridge Rindge & Latin High School and a volunteer at Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. His wife died in 1999, his son in 2014. He has two daughters and three grandchildren. Since 2007 he has lived in Lexington, Massachusetts.  He began writing poetry in 1983, was a runner-up for the 1992 Grolier Poetry Prize, and won the 2000 chapbook competition of the White Eagle Coffee Store Press, which published The Time of Ripe Figs in 2002.  His full-length poetry collection, Beirut Again, was published in 2010 by Off the Grid Press

Oct 3--My Guests will be John Harrison and Kim Nagy editors of " Dead in Good Company: A Celebration of Mount Auburn Cemetry"

 

Dead In Good Company is a compelling collection  of essays, poems and wildlife photographs of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sweet Auburn, as it is affectionately known, is America's first garden cemetery.

An amazing group of authors have come together to celebrate this unique resource - including Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz; historical novelist William Martin; former Mayor of Boston and Ambassador to the Vatican, Ray Flynn; Boston author and television icon, Hank Phillippi Ryan; Pulitzer Prize winner, Megan Marshall; mystery/true-crime author Kate Flora; mystery author Katherine Hall Page; medical thriller author Gary Goshgarian (Braver); broadcasting legend Upton Bell; world renowned bird guide author and artist David Sibley; drama critic, author and host of the Theatre World Awards, Peter Filichia; screen writer, author Chris Keane; Mass Audubon's Wayne Petersen; Talkin' Birds radio host, Ray Brown; author, naturalist Peter Alden; founder of Project Coyote, Camilla Fox; Director of the World Bird Sanctuary, Jeff Meshach; senior scientist for wildlife at the Humane Society of the United States, John Hadidian; historian Dee Morris; and sports writer and commentator, Dan Shaughnessy.  Watch it live  at  http://scatvsomerville.org  at 5PM

Sept 26 5PM Timothy Gager--Poet, and Writer

Timothy Gager

I will talk with Gager about his long and prolific career and his new book of verse -- Chief Jay Strongbow is Real  (Big Table Books)  See it live at 5PM at  http://scatvsomerville.org




Timothy Gager's latest book, Chief Jay Strongbow is Real, is evidence of a new stage for the veteran poet and novelist. Before this book, Gager safely relied on his poetic insight into the struggle we all face, and his powerful phraseology; in this one, he stretches out into the worlds of politics and personality. His eye for the telling detail remains, but his work has become more expansive, more timely, and less hard-bitten. This is a mature poet showing us exactly what he's got: and it's good.
~ Rusty Barnes Author of On Broad Sound and I Am Not Ariel.

Interview with poet and writer Ed Meek--Sept 19 5PM

ED MEEK is a freelance writer and the author of three books of poetry. His work has appeared in magazines, journals and newspapers, including The Paris Review, The Sun, the North American Review, and The Boston Globe.  He is the author of " Luck," a collection of short stories.He is living the dream with his wife in Somerville and Wellfleet.   See the show live at 5 on Somerville Media Center TV  http://scatvsomerville.org 

Doug Holder interviews Lowell, MA. Poet, Publisher, Writer-- Paul Marion...

Poet Kate Hanson Foster: Aug 8 5PM Poet to Poet SMC TV

Kate Hanson Foster

 

 

Author's Bio

Kate Hanson Foster's first book of poems, Mid Drift, was published by Loom Press and was a finalist for the Massachusetts Center for the Book Award in 2011. Her poetry has appeared in Comstock Review, Harpur Palate, Poet Lore, Tupelo Quarterly and elsewhere. She was recently awarded the NEA Parent Fellowship through the Vermont Studio Center. She can be found on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/khansonfoster and Twitter https://twitter.com/khansonfoster