Interviewer vs. Interviewer

Interviewer vs. Interviewer
( Click on picture to view) Elizabeth Lund--Host of Poetic Lines interviews Host of Poet to Poet-- Doug Holder

Friday, November 24, 2017

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

Tuesday, November 07, 2017

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 Quarterlys Rebecca Lard Award, and, twice, the New England Poetry Clubs Erika Mumford Prize for poetry about travel and international culture. His poems have appeared in PloughsharesSolstice, 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)

Thursday, November 02, 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."