CD COLLINS OCT, 7 2008 5PM

Oct 7, 2008 C.D. Collins


With ever-shifting personae, CD Collins’ narratives and pyrotechnic poetics transport the listener from the hills of Kentucky, along the boulevard Champs-Elysees and to the urban landscape she now calls home.

Collins has performed in various Boston area venues including The Charles Playhouse, The Landsdowne Playhouse, and Club Passim, as well as appearing in poetry venues and academic settings along the East Coast, South and Midwest.

Ms. Collins' short fiction has appeared in numerous publications, including StoryQuarterly, The Pennsylvania Review, Imagine, The South Dakota Review, Salamander and Phoebe. When accompanied by her band, Ms. Collins presents a captivating blend of Chamber Rock with Spoken Word that one reviewer described as “pure magic.”

Pincurl’s cassette Slow Burn was released in October 1997, followed by a compact disc, Kentucky Stories, released in March 1999 and funded by a grant from the St. Botolph Club Foundation. This disc won Best Spoken Word CD at the Boston Poetry Awards 2000.

Collins received two grants from the Somerville Arts Council — one in music, one in literature — and Cambridge Poetry Awards for Best Erotic Poem, Best Love Poem and Best Narrative Poem. The latter poem, “Promised Candy,” is included on her latest compact disc, Subtracting Down, a compilation of Post-Modern Mountain Storytelling & Song recorded with her band, Rockabetty. Also included on the CD is the track “Blood Orange,” which has been featured on the National Public Radio show “Here and Now.”

Five of CD’s poems — “The Fox, 1968,” “Promised Candy,” “Subtracting down,” “Self-Portrait with Severed Head,” and “Demimonde”—are included in the anthology The Boston Poet: Volume 1, Issue 1: Virgin Voyage.

Ms. Collins is an active member of The Writers’ Room of Boston.

She may be contacted at (617) 666-2778 or info@cdcollins.com.

Sept 9, 2008: Shirley Gerald Ware

9/9/08 5PM: Shirley Gerald Ware, is the author of three published books. She states:

" All three of my books �Just Kids,� �Somebody Too� and �The Final Goodbye� are available online at Amazom.com, from the publishers or you can order an autographed copy from the author. Besides, publishing books, Shirley is the publisher of Fresh! Literary Magazine, an online and quarterly publication of local and worldwide adults and teens writers of short stories, poetry and articles. Fresh! Literary Magazine was founded ten years ago and has since demonstrated tremendous growth worldwide. We�re nonprofit and therefore welcome donations of any amount. The author and publisher is accredited for writing numberless short stories, articles, book reviews and poems, many has won awards and honorable mentions."

Radio talk show host Maxine Thompson, "On the Same Page" interviewed her. Her current interview included her Editor, James Patrick Smith with Smoki Bacon and Dick Concannon, and THE LITERATI SCENE. The show will be aired September 26, at 7:30pm and repeat September 27, at 10:30am. The interview will run on 18 different channels at different times in New England.

One of her poems title �My Mother�s Eyes,� has been accepted for publication in �Mom Writers Literary Magazine� in March. She has a bachelor�s degree in English Writing from Northeastern University. I am currently writing my fourth children book. Submissions are welcome or visit us online and enjoy a good read.We encourge our readers to send feedback, if you read something you like, we would love to hear about it.

Aug 19 5 Mario Barros

My guest Aug 19 5PM Mario Barros (Lenguaviva)

Mario Barros (Lenguaviva)

www.lenguaviva.org



ARTISTIC RESUME



Mario Barros (Lenguaviva) (Santa Clara, Cuba, 1953). Humorist, writer, actor and composer. Has combined his teaching and artistic careers in a successful way. In Cuba Mr. Barros co-wrote the college level textbook The Literature of the United States (Pueblo y Educación, La Habana, 1981). From 1985 to 1991 his satiric stories regularly appeared in Cuban newspapers and magazines. In 1987 he founded the comedy group Lenguaviva (“Living Language”) that gained an outstanding reputation in theater, radio and TV. Mr. Barros wrote more than seventy songs and skits for the Lenguaviva repertory and won two national comedy awards with the group. In the United States Mr. Barros directed the Somerville High School Drama Club for seven years and put more than twenty shows on stage with it. Five of those plays were written by him and have been collected under the title Five Insomniac Plays. Mr. Barros is also the author of the collection of short stories El color no cae del cielo (Galadriel Ediciones, Montevideo, 2007); the novel KleanKuts, Inc. and humorous commentaries published in several online magazines. Currently, again as Lenguaviva, Mr. Barros writes humorous commentaries in Spanish and English that have been published in Boston area papers El Mundo, Siglo21, El Planeta (where he also edits the humorous page El Bus de Lenguaviva), The Somerville Journal and The Somerville News. He has also written and conducted El Bus de Lenguaviva, a weekly radio show on WUNR Radio International, 1600 AM, Boston, and presents his one-man show CUENTAMETUVIDA (TELL ME ALL ABOUT IT) in venues throughout the Boston area. Book signing presentations have taken him to Santiago de Chile, Montevideo and Miami. In March 2008 The Boston Globe published an extensive article (Super Mario Barros) on his life and works. Mr. Barros resides in Massachusetts, where he came from Cuba in 1995

Aug 12, 2008: Bibliographer of Boston Literature:Gerald Richman

My guest on Aug 12 5PM will be Suffolk University English Professor Gerald Richman the creator of the online: Annotated Bibliography of Fiction Set in Boston.


Introduction

I. History


In the mid-1980s I inherited the Boston: A City in Fiction course at Suffolk University, Beacon Hill, Boston, from retiring colleague Ed Clark, who, in response to a call for relevance, had started the course in the 1960s along with courses on African-American literature. He passed on to me his reading list for the semester: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Henry James’s The Bostonians, Jean Stafford’s Boston Adventure, Dan Wakefield’s Starting Over, Edwin O’Connor’s The Last Hurrah, Dorothy West’s The Living Is Easy, and novels for a term paper, William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham, James Carroll’s Mortal Friends, and Daniel Smith’s A Walk in the City. He also gave me a list including five additional “Novels by Black Writers Set, Wholly or Partially, in Boston.” These books formed the basis of the course I have taught for the last twenty years and for the Annotated Bibliography I compiled in my search for new readings for class and for student papers. By December 2007, Ed’s initial two-page reading list had grown to 40 pages. Since then, thanks to a sabbatical granted to me by the College of Arts and Sciences at Suffolk University for Spring semester 2008, the bibliography has grown to over two hundred pages with the addition of thousands of entries and detailed annotations.

Originally in typescript, with my expanding use of technology, the bibliography became a word processor file and by the mid-1990s a web page. Thanks to the excellent resources provided online by WorldCat, Google Books, Amazon, Internet Archives, Wikipedia, several universities, and many professional scholars and private devotees of romances, detective and suspense novels, and comic books, this bibliography is the most powerful I can imagine, providing for entries (when available) links to the full texts (especially useful for rare 18th, 19th, and early 20th century texts held only by a few research libraries), Library of Congress subject headings, and links to Amazon and Google Books for searchable texts, back covers, reviews and summaries, and scholarly analyses. To those of us who came of age before the Internet, the easy availability of these splendid resources is a modern miracle.

With so many details in a project like this, despite constant efforts, there are undoubtedly hundreds, indeed thousands, of errors. I would be very appreciative if users of this bibliography would email me (grichman@suffolk.edu) corrections,

Elizabeth Quinlan July 15 2008 5PM

My guest will be poet Elizabeth Quinlan whose new collection is titled: "Promise Supermarket" ( Ibbetson Street 2008) with an introduction by Martha Collins.

"As consciously and effectively as a short novel, Promise Supermarket depicts the life of a family moving ever downward, from a house on a hill to a one-room cellar apartment. . . . One of the marvels of this book is that Elizabeth Quinlan is able to depict the immense difficulties of her childhood with both quiet understatement and clear detail, allowing us to share her experience with the deep involvement that fully inhabiting a new literary space, however bleak, may give. . . . The magic of Promise Supermarket is to turn the power of visual imagination and memory into unforgettable stories—to “grow treasures” out of what was planted in the treeless ground of a difficult but tenderly remembered childhood. —Martha Collins, from the foreword

Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer With Doug Holder : The Interview

MEMBER PROFILE


Written by Vanessa Vartabedian


Ibbetson Street Press, which was originally started by Doug Holder and his wife Dianne out of their house on Ibbetson Street in Somerville in 1998, now resides at 25 School Street and has just published their 16th Issue of “Ibbetson Street”, a collection of poetry, with their 17th to be released soon. The publication started as a copied and stapled booklet of participating poets, and is now a properly bound publication that is discussed in college classrooms and collected in university libraries across the country. Ibbetson Street Press has also published many books and other collections of poetry along the way. I Refused to Die by Susie Davidson is their most recently acclaimed release, which centers around the testimonies of Boston-area Holocaust survivors.

A poet by desire and passion, Doug goes against the grain of the self-involved artist’s life by his continuous effort support and create opportunity for writers and poets to become published, and by creating a sense of community among his peers. He writes a column called “Lyrical Somerville” which appears in the back of The Somerville News and features different local poets, and is also on the Board of the Wilderness House Literary Retreat which is a new retreat for writers in Littleton, MA. Another way Doug reaches out to help poets and writers express their voice is with his cable access show, “Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer” produced here at SCAT. Doug says that the show gives him the opportunity to “sit down and talk with strangers” which he said he otherwise finds very nerve-wracking. It also allows him license to inquire about their work and personal lives, and record it onto video. In this way, he creates a rich living history. The tapes are archived at Harvard and other libraries as a permanent record. His interviewees have included local and national legends in the poetry world including Diana Der-Hovanessian, who heads the New England Poetry Club, the recently deceased Robert Creeley, and Louisa Solano of the Grolier Poetry Bookshop (who had plenty of stories to share with Doug about her regular run-ins with Jack Kerouac and Robert Lowell during their days at Harvard).

Doug has had his own poetry collections published by different presses and poetry magazines. In the fall his collection called Wrestling With My Father, about his relationship with his recently deceased father, will be released by a publisher in Pittsburgh.

For more information about Doug Holder and Ibbetson Street Press, you can visit his website at http://yahoogroups.com/group/ibbetsonstreetpressupdate. For a schedule of “Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer”, visit our Programming page.



Somerville Community Access Television
90 Union Square, Somerville, MA 02143
Phone: 617-628-8826 | Fax: 617-628-1811

July 1 5PM Poet Tom Daley

July 1 2008 5PM Tom Daley is an instructor of poetry writing at the Online School of Poetry where he conducts workshops for poets and songwriters. In addition to his post at the Online School of Poetry, Tom Daley tutors beginning and experienced poets in person and by correspondence and teaches poetry writing at the Boston Center for Adult Education in Boston, Massachusetts and poetry and memoir writing at Lexington (MA) Community Education. He has been a guest instructor in ekphrastic writing at Brown University and in poetry writing and performance at Stonehill College and SUNY Cobleskill. Tom led last fall’s poetry writing workshops and classes at the Writers In the Round annual retreat for songwriters and poets on Star Island (Rye, New Hampshire) and a workshop in the creative process at the Nantucket Athenaeum.
He is a member of the award-winning poetry performance troupe, Doc Brown’s Traveling Poetry Show. In April of 2004, He produced and performed in “The Musician and the Muse,” an evening of performance poetry inspired by music and musicians from Bach to Betty Carter, from Robert Johnson to Janis Joplin at the Cambridge [MA] Multicultural Arts Center.

Tom Daley’s poetry is forthcoming or has been published in numerous journals, including Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, Diagram, 32 Poems, Salamander, Archipelago, Perihelion, Poetry Ireland Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Passages North and Hacks: The Grub Street Anthology. His manuscript, Shim, was a semi-finalist for the 2004 Bakeless Prize and a finalist for the 2005 Emily Dickinson First Book Prize offered by The Poetry Foundation. He graduated with highest honors in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina, where he won the Charles and Fanny Fay Wood Academy of American Poets Prize.

Tuesday June 10 5PM Poet Dale Patterson

On June 10 2008 5PM Dale Patterson will be our guest. Dale is a published poet (Honorable mention in the Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award 2007). Dale is also the Manager of Development and Communications for the Boston Public Library Foundation, a grant writer, an instructor at Simmons College in Boston, and former member of the board of Somerville Community Access TV.

Poet Hugh Fox June 3 5PM

My guest June 3 5PM will be poet, critic, anthropolgist, translator, playwright, iconoclast: Hugh Fox.




Hugh Fox was born in Chicago in 1932. He spent his childhood studying violin, piano, composition and opera with his Viennese teacher Zerlina Muhlman Metzger. He received a M.A. degree in English from Loyola University in Chicago and his Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He met his first wife, a Peruvian woman named Lucia Ungaro de Zevallos, while at Urbana-Campaign and was a Professor of American Literature from 1958-1968 at Loyola University in Los Angeles. He became a Professor in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University in 1968 and remained there until he retired in 1999. It was at MSU that he met his second wife Nona Grimes. They were married in 1970. He received Fulbright Professsorships at the University of Hermosillo in Mexico in 1961, the Instituto Pedagogico and Universidad Católica in Caracas from 1964 to 1966, and at the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil from 1978-1980. He met his third wife Maria Bernadete Costa in Brazil in 1978. They've been married for 28 years. He studied Latin American literature at the University of Buenos Aires on and OAS grant and spent a year as an archaeologist in the Atacama Desert in Chile in 1986.

May 27 2008-- Poet Eva Salzman

My guest May 27, 2008 at 5PM Is poet EVA SALZMAN:



Eva Salzman grew up in Brooklyn and on Long Island where she was a dancer/choreographer. At Stuyvesant H.S., her teacher was Frank McCourt, and later, at Bennington College and Columbia University, where she received her MFA, she studied with Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, C.K. Williams, Edmund White, Elizabeth Hardwick, Stanley Kunitz, Carolyn Kizer, Stephen Sandy and Jorie Graham. Her books include The English Earthquake (Bloodaxe) Bargain with the Watchman (Oxford) and, One Two II (Wrecking Ball Press), illus. Van Howell, all Poetry Book Society Recommendations/Special Commendations.

Her grandmother was a child vaudeville actress, and her mother is an environmentalist. This background, and a diverse range of jobs - as Exercise Director of a Brooklyn orthodox Jewish diet centre, out-of-print book searcher and cleaner of rich ladies' houses - all inform her writing, especially her cross-arts projects with performers and visual artists. She has collaborated with the director Rufus Norris and with composers Gary Carpenter, Rachel Leach, Philip Cashian and A.L. Nicolson. Shawna and Ron's Half Moon: An Americana Satire and One Two, commissioned by the English National Opera Studio, were performed there, at Hoxton Hall and at Greenwich Theatre. Cassandra, a mini-opera written with her composer father, Eric Salzman, has been performed in Dusseldorf, Vienna and Oslo. She won 2nd Prize in the National Poetry Competition and major prizes in the Arvon and Cardiff Poetry Competitions. Grants and awards include those from the Arts Council, Royal Literary Fund, London Arts Board and the Society of Authors

Her work has frequently been broadcast on BBC radio, and has read her work at the Royal Festival Hall, Barbican, Poetry Society, Troubadour and at festivals all over the UK, as well as in Ireland, Spain and France. In the US, she has read at the Nuyorican Café, the Walt Whitman Association and at Wesleyan Writers' Conference, where she also taught, as a Fellow two years running. Her varied teaching work has included Adjunct Professor at Friends World Programme (Long Island University, London, regular teaching for the Arvon courses, for community projects in London's East End and a residency at Springhill Prison, as well as continuing work for the Poetry Society's educational programmes, and co-devising the Open University's first Start Writing Poetry course.

Her poetry, fiction and features have appeared in the New Yorker, Kenyon, Review, Independent, Guardian, Observer, Poetry Review, TLS, London Magazine, and in the anthologies: The Firebox ed. Sean O'Brien; Hand in Hand ed. Carol Ann Duffy; Sixty Women Poets ed. Linda France; Last Words eds. Don Paterson & Jo Shapcottl; and two New Writing anthologies (British Council/Picador/Vintage) eds. John Fowles, A.L. Kennedy, Penelope Lively & George Szirtes.

She holds a West Midlands Writing Fellowship at Warwick University, where she's taught the Poetry MA, and a Royal Literary Fund Project Fellowship at Ruskin College, Oxford. Currently, she is editing an anthology of Ruskin (Oxford) work, writing fiction and an opera for Buxton Festival 2005 (composer: Ian McQueen). Her latest book, Double Crossing: New and Selected Poems (Bloodaxe 2004) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She now lives in London.

Timothy Gager author of "this is where you go when you are gone" to be guest May 20,2008.

On 5/20 at 5PM my guest will be writer Timothy Gager : poet, novelist, short fiction writer.


Timothy Gager is the author of six books of short fiction and poetry. His most recent chapbook, this is where you go when you are gone , was released in 2008 from Cerena Barva Press. He hosts the Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts every month and is the co-founder of Somerville News Writers Festival.

His Short Stories have appeared in Word Riot, 55 Word, The Binnacle, Scene Boston, Thieve's Jargon, Long Short Story, The Smoking Poet, Zygote in My Coffee, Slurve, Poor Mojo's Almanac, VerbSap, Swankwriting (83 Words), Story Garden, Write This Magazine and Further Fenway Fiction. Timothy's poetry has been published in The Ibbetson Street Journal, Poems for All, Right Hand Pointing, GUD, Edifice Wrecked, Blue Print Review, Barnstorm, Erato, Hobart, The Long Islander, The Binnacle, Spare Change, The Somerville News, High Horse, Third Lung Review, 63 Channels, Poesy XXIV and Night Train. He had 32 works of fiction and poetry published in 2007.

Timothy is the current Fiction Editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review, the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review and has edited the book, Out of the Blue Writers Unite: A Book of Poetry and Prose from the Out of the Blue Art Gallery.

A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts and is employed as a social worker

May 6 Poet Marian Kaplun Shapiro

BIO: Marian Kaplun Shapiro


May 6, 2008 Marian Kaplun Shapiro

Born in 1939 in The Bronx (New York City), Marian Kaplun Shapiro received her B.A. in English (writing) from Queens College, and her Masters and Doctorate from Harvard. She lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, where she practices as a psychologist, specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder. In addition she has a specialty in working with hypnosis to enhance creativity for writers, artists, and musicians. She is a wife, mother, grandmother, and a Jewish Quaker.

In addition to her poetry, which has appeared in various literary magazines, she is the author of a full-length book of poetry, Players In The Dream, Dreamers In The Play (Plain View Press, 2007); two chapbooks, Your Third Wish (Finishing Line Press, 2007) and The End Of The World, Announced On Wednesday (Pudding House Press, 2007); a professional book, Second Childhood (Norton, 1989), a chapter in What Is Psychotherapy? (Jossey-Bass, 1990), and in Play (Wiley, 2002) and many journal articles.



As a young person, Marian was encouraged by her poetry studies with Stephen Stepanchev, Stanley Kunitz, Alan Tate, Kenneth Koch, and Archibald MacLeish. However, it is only since 2002 that she began to submit her work, and achieve publication in over 108 journals and anthologies, winning many (non-lucrative) prizes en route. She is constantly amazed at her good fortune, which includes her husband, two children, and four grandchildren. Her poetry often reflects the splitscreen truths of violence and peace, doubt and belief, despair and abiding hope.



READINGS: Around here, at the Friends Meeting in Cambridge; at the Lexington Public Library; at the Fireside Poetry series; at the Depot Square Gallery in Lexington. In NYC, at the Bowery Poets’ Club. In NC, at Guilford College. In Maine, at the Rangeley Public Library; in NH at the Peterboro Theatre and at the Peterboro Museum; in Chicago (in July) at the Women Made Gallery.



CHILDHOOD: Grew up as an ‘only child’ in a low-cost housing project in The Bronx. Graduated from the (free) Queens College just before turning 20. Married at 20 ½, after meeting husband and getting engaged in 10 days – must have worked, since am still happily married after 48 years. Went for a masters at Harvard, and then taught English in N.Quincy HS, where I ran a creative writing class and magazine. Then had two children, and when the second was one year old, taught English for 6 years part-time to returning adults at the Carnegie Institute of Medical Technology, where I got interested in adult learning. I went back to Harvard for the doctorate, starting out in Adult Education, and switching to psychology, becoming a psychologist and therapist in private practice in 1980.



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April 15 Poet Miriam Levine

My guest will be poet Miriam Levine April 15 5PM



"I'm interested in people and their stories,"
says Miriam Levine. Her most recent book is The Dark Opens, winner of the 2007 Autumn House Poetry Prize. She is the author of In Paterson, a novel, Devotion: A Memoir, three poetry collections, and A Guide to Writers' Homes in New England. Her work has appeared in Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, among many other places.

A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts writing fellowship and grants from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, she was a fellow at Yaddo, Hawthornden Castle, Le Château de Lavigny, Villa Montalvo, Fundación Valparaíso, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

She is Professor Emerita at Framingham State College, where she chaired the English Department and was Coordinator of the Arts and Humanities Program.

Born in Paterson, New Jersey, Miriam Levine now divides her time between Florida and Massachusetts. Currently she is at work on a new novel and a poetry collection

April 1 5PM Poet/Memoirist Richard Hoffman

Writing, Literature & Publishing Faculty
Richard Hoffman
Writer-in-Residence (2001)
B.A., Fordham University; M.F.A., Goddard College
http://www.abbington.com/hoffman

April 1, 2008: My guest will be Richard Hoffman

Richard Hoffman is author of Half the House: a Memoir, and the poetry collections, Without Paradise and Gold Star Road, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize. His work, both verse and prose, has appeared in Agni, Ascent, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Poetry, Witness and other magazines. He has been awarded several fellowships and prizes, most recently a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in fiction, and The Literary Review's Charles Angoff Prize for the essay.

March 25--Poet Ed Meek

(Ed Meek center)


March 25 5PM Poet Ed Meek. Somerville poet Ed Meek has had a long, and varied career. He has worked as a wine steward at Locke-Ober's in the 1970's, and has taught English in Tehran, Iran, Curry College, community colleges, and high schools throughout the region. His work has appeared in the Paris Review, Cream City, Yankee, Ibbetson Street, and others. His latest poetry collection is "What We Love." ( Blue Light Press)

March 11- New Director of the Cape Cod Writers Center Anne Elizabeth Tom

(Cape Cod Writers Center)




March 11 5PM: My guest will be poet Anne Elizabeth Tom, the new director of the Cape Cod Writer's Center.

The mission of the Cape Cod Writers Center is to assist published and aspiring writers of all genres, abilities and ages to develop their writing skills and learn to edit, publish and publicize their works; to promote authors; to provide opportunities for writers to gather for inspiration, education and networking; and to introduce readers to authors and their works.

Anne Elizabeth Tom was born in Boston, grew up in the historic homes and museums of New England, and lived in Woods Hole, MA for several years. After earning a M. A. in Fine Arts from Tufts University, she spent 25 years as a researcher/writer, arts and museum educator, and as executive director of the 1785 Lee-Fendall House Museum in Old Town Alexandria.

A poet, founder of The Grange Hall Summer Poetry Series, and the Louise I. Guiney Center for Poets and Playwrights,Ms. Tom taught New England Literary History for the Academy for Lifelong Learning at Cape Cod Community College. She and her husband now make their home in Sandwich.

Ms. Tom is a world traveler and has lived in Los Angeles, Washington, DC and New York City, where she wrote and worked in universities and museums. While residing in Honolulu for 18 months, she earned a certificate in Intercultural Leadership from Asia- Pacific College, an affiliate of The University of Hawaii. During that time she studied Native Hawaiian culture, as it relates to North and South American anthropology, and looks forward to sharing her knowledge of the places and people of the islands in Asian-Pacific Cultural Tours, starting in winter of 2008.

She was a member of the Sandwich Cultural Council from 2001-2004, the board of The Nye Family Association from 2001- 2005, and now serves on the Advisory Committee for the Benjamin Nye House and Gardens in East Sandwich. Her other Cape affiliations include the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Cape Cod Writers Center, and the Sandwich Chamber of Commerce.

Feb 19 Poet Lisa Beatman author "Manufacturing America"

Lisa Beatman lives in Roslindale , MA, and manages adult literacy programs at the Harriet Tubman House in the South End. She won Honorable Mention for the 2004 Miriam Lindberg International Poetry Peace Prize and was awarded a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant, as well as a fellowship to Sacatar Institute in Brazil .

Lisa’s work has appeared in Lonely Planet, Lilith Magazine , Hawaii Pacific Review, Rhino, Manzanita, Political Affairs, The Boston Globe, and Pemmican. Her first book, Ladies’ Night at the Blue Hill Spa, was published by Bear House Publishing.

Her second collection, Manufacturing America: Poems from the Factory Floor, has just been released by Ibbetson Press. The collection moves through the ‘life cycle’ of manufacturing – from its roots in the Lowell, MA textile mills, through downsizing, to the "artist lofts" mined from the old buildings as manufacturing moves overseas. It documents the swan song of a formerly vital sector that historically provided a leg up to many American workers. The book is true-to-life, based on her work at a print and paper manufacturing plant in Somerville , MA.

Feb 5 5PM Poet Richard Wilhelm

My guest Feb 5 at 5PM is poet Richard Wilhelm, the author of the poetry collection;"Awakenings"



Intimations of Survival in the poems of Richard Wilhelm

Review by Michael Todd Steffen




A thread of tradition in the cycle of the calendar year weaves the sequence of Richard Wilhelm’s book of poems, Awakenings (October 2007, Ibbetson Street Press), beginning with death in dull winter, proceeding to rebirth and awakening in spring, maturity and confidence in summer, ripening to harvest in autumn with premonitions of death again, still with the poet’s affirmation in the final line of the final poem,
A PASSENGER, “seeking yet another rebirth.”
Yet Wilhelm’s year is incomplete, denoting a sense of loss that resonates throughout the book. If William Carlos Williams tells us to invent “not in ideas but in things,” Wilhelm’s opening poems argue persuasively that intuitive invention is not so much in things, but in the resonance of things after their moment,

tree after Christmas tree,
put out with the trash,
some still decked in tinsel,
still fragrant with all that is over. (WHEN TOMORROW’S TRUCKS COME)

Perusing the first five poems the reader of the mainstream American poetic confidence has to ask: Where is the song of himself? By WINTER (p. 4) it is Wilhelm’s absence that has become most present. It is the world around him, the poems softly protest, in this early 21st century of aerodynamics subtly suggested in the book of nature by the creatures of the air:

An array of starlings
settles down on the Norway
maple’s snow-dusted branches.
Several birds,
as if by script,
change positions.
Stillness—
then a few more birds
flit to other branches.

Down from the same atmosphere of maneuvered flight, snowflakes are described as “sputtering,” as though from a mechanical sky, a sky that has overextended its patrol and interest:

copper leaves
cling on well
past death.

This intense awareness of things present in their denotation of “all that is over” (over, also “above”) conveys a sense of oppression, typified and announced in CRUMBLED BRICKS AND BROKEN GLASS, where Wilhelm feels “bored to a muted nausea,” more or less bound to follow his father around on a Saturday in an overheated Studebaker, fidgeting in a hardware store, riding along out past an abandoned railroad, places where his father’s memories are stirred, but the child’s are not. The visions are described point blank as seen, ominous in their state of dilapidation:

Rusted rails led past stands of sumac,
a chain link fence devoured by vines,
to an empty factory, its painted logos all but faded
from brick walls.

As if we lived in a super-constructed world already, the poet’s great fear is that demolition and deterioration are all that remain for the future, a ghetto-ization of housing and industrial parks that were erected and used up too fast:

this is all there is, this is all
there will ever be. Crumbled bricks
and broken glass…


The poet is unique in his subtlety of communicating things present, yet liberation of consciousness from the determined Now begins in the imagination, finding its first avenue to something possibly different, some change, in memory, the source of the shift in voice in AWAKENINGS where,

My senses soon whisk me
to my rural boyhood—

and in the rejuvenation of his mind, Wilhelm plays again:

We were soldiers or
Indians or desert island-
survivors. We’d crouch
in bushes, sneak up a hill
then hurl our spears into
a gully of soft wet earth…

The spears the boys hurl into the wet earth, the poet’s primary sense of manhood, only in the prior poem, NONES OF FEBRUARY, Wilhelm had discovered, “a fallen branch, dead but strong,” from which with his penknife he begins to carve out his poems, “smaller branches and knots” and a staff to sustain him walking “like a wandering monk.”
In the space allowed in this article I have touched on only a few poems, to make a point about Wilhelm’s sensibility: it is subtle, careful in the placement of word and line for connotation, and powerful when given a patient appreciation. The death of Christmas and rebirth and awakening to spring is so critical and vital to human survival, and Wilhelm has not failed to acknowledge this wondrous operation, however great the struggle against these birth pangs, however great the obstacle posed by civilization in our day which demonstrates its reliance on aggressive technology rather than on our curious communion with the earth and its plants and creatures, the suggestion of its cycles, so carefully heeded and portrayed in these poems.

We are given Wilhelm’s wide range of acceptance, from the beautiful and hopeful WE’LL GROW NEW FACES, where

If the dream comes again—
Sweet May will scent the air,

to the foreboding visions, in NIGHT OF THE BLOOD RED MOON, of an equilateral moon rising through sunset red, with the poet’s senses overcome by an equally unusual

urgency
from somewhere deep in the blood,
yearned for one I had not yet met.

Well worth reading and rereading, Richard Wilhelm’s Awakenings does the work of piercing through our superficial civilization, relating us to the cycle of our source and mother, the earth and her bearings, using familiar settings and images, set out in simple yet striking language.

Ibbetson Update/ Michael Todd Steffen/ Dec. 2007

Jan 29 2008 Errol Uys 5PM

Errol Lincoln Uys (pronounced ‘Ace’) is the author of the historical novel, Brazil (Simon and Schuster, 1986; New edition, Silver Spring, 2000).

Of this work, distinguished Brazilian critic Wilson Martins wrote: “Uys accomplished what no Brazilian author from José de Alencar to João Ubaldo Ribeiro and Jorge Amado was able to do. He is the first to write our national epic in its entirety. He is the first outsider to see us with total honesty and sympathy. Descriptions like those of the war with Paraguay are unsurpassed in our literature and evoke the great passages of War and Peace.”

Brazil won the highest critical acclaim in the United Kingdom, Germany and France, where it was a bestseller (La Forteresse Verte.) Said Le Figaro: “No one before Uys knew how to bring to life Brazil and her history. Uys’s characters are brilliant and colorful, combining elements of the best swashbuckler with those worthy of deepest reflection. Most stunning is that it took a South African now a naturalized American, to evoke so perfectly the grand but interrupted dream that is Brazil.” L’Express concurred: “A masterpiece! Brazil has the feel of an enchanted virgin forest, a totally new and original world for the reader-explorer to discover.”

Publisher’s Weekly described Brazil as “Pulsing with vigor, this is a vast novel to tell the story of a vast country. The principal characters, both real and imaginary, are hard to forget . . . Uys re-creates history almost entirely ‘at ground level,’ even more densely than Michener.”

Uys has also written the non-fiction book, Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression (TV Books, 1999; Routledge, 2003.) The Boston Globe praised this work as “A riveting document of hope and hardship. The reader can all but hear the cadence of the trains on the tracks and the lonesome wail at every whistle-stop.” Riding the Rails was chosen as one of the “10 Best Books of 1999” by Amazon’s history editor.

Uys is a writer and editor with thirty years’ experience in the United States, England and Africa. He was editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest in South Africa and senior international editor with the U.S. edition. In 1978, he began a two-year collaboration with James A. Michener that produced The Covenant. He has been a resident of Massachusetts since 1981 and currently lives in Dorchester, Boston.

Jan 8 2008: Poet David Surette

David Surette is a poet from Malden, Massachusetts. His poems reflect the undercurrents of contemporary American life.



David Surette was born July 14, 1957, at the Malden Hospital. He lived in Malden, Massachusetts for thirty-seven years. David attended the Immaculate Conception Grammar School for six years under the watchful eyes of the Sisters of Notre Dame. He finished his school days in the public schools, Beebe Junior High and Malden High, graduating in 1975.

David earned his B.A. in English from Colby College. He wrote and directed his original play Warm Angel senior year and earned the college's drama award.

After graduation, he managed the band Boys Life. He also was the band's chief lyricist, writing with his brother John, the band's singer and guitarist. David wrote the lyrics on the "A" side of their two singles and four of the six songs on their celebrated E.P.

When the band broke up in 1984, David went back to school to earn his teaching certificate and began a 15 year teaching tenure in the Waltham Public Schools.

He continued writing, not lyrics as his brother's own lyrics eclipsed his output, but fiction. He wrote short stories and completed two novels, Today's Special and Mud Season.

Malden is his first chapbook of poetry. He began the book in a summer session of the Boston Writing Project with the goal to finished it by his twenty- fifth high school reunion and the family gathering at Thanksgiving 2000, and then offered it on his website, www.davidsurette.com, in the spring of 2001. He released his second chapbook Muckers, Grinders, Shapers, Hangers, and Huns in 2002 and published over two dozen poems in various journals and magazines and became a regular reader and feature at poetry venues, libraries, schools in New England.

In 2003, he issued his third chapbook Good Shift which included "Forever and Ever" which was nominated for "Best Love Poem" at the Cambridge Poetry Awards.

David also released the single poem chapbook Acadie which was sold at Grande Pré, Nova Scotia to celebrate the 2004 Acadian Reunion.

Koenisha Publications of Michigan published Young Gentlemen's School in August, 2004. The book collects all the poems from David's three chapbooks plus ten new poems. It is available online at www.amazon.com, www.koenisha.com, and at your local bookstore.

Koenisha published David's second book of poetry Easy to Keep, Hard to Keep In in 2007. It is available online at www.amazon.com, www.koenisha.com, and at your local bookstore.

David is the co-host of Poetribe, a poetry group that offers poetry workshops, open mics, featured poets and the occasional poetry slam. They meet every other Saturday at the East Bridgewater Public Library in East Bridgewater, Massachusetts. He teaches English at East Bridgewater High School.

He currently lives in southeastern Massachusetts with his wife and three children. He and the family keep horses and sheep under the watchful eyes of thier border collie Rowdy and Martini, a very opinionated chihuahua.

Dec 4 5PM Poet Robert K. Johnson

My guest Dec 4 at 5PM will be poet Robert K. Johnson author of: From Mist to Shadow:Poems


Robert K. Johnson

From Mist to Shadow:
Poems by Robert K. Johnson

ISBN 978-0-9795313-0-9
80 pages at 12.00 paperback
Ibbetson Street Press http://www.ibbetsonpress.com
25 School Street
Somerville MA 02143

Review by Laurel Johnson

Robert K. Johnson is a poet, writer, retired English professor, and student of life. Between 1975 and 2007, he’s had six collections of poetry and two non-fiction books published, plus been featured in two poetry anthologies. In this latest book, Johnson tenderly transforms the small memories, wonders and sorrows of everyday life into moments brightened and sharpened through his words.

The commonplace turns quietly sinister as Johnson remembers the unexpected suicide of a friend. “Jimmy” recalls the class clown, the day he put his head in the oven after school, and the numbing effect on the poet:

And suddenly all the bushes, trees
and flowers I stared at in our yard
looked different, strange,
as if -- year after year --
they had been hiding something from me.

“Anguish” is a simply stunning poem about a mother lost to dementia, unable to separate reality from hallucination, and the son forced to witness her decline. I cannot do this fine poem justice with an excerpt; it must be read in its entirety.

“Brother of the Prodigal Son” is a long poem that remains true to the biblical version but extracts a bitter truth unspoken in the parable. This poem, also, cannot be adequately honored with an excerpt.

“The Truth About the Past” is another powerful recollection about the father who shared memories of his own revered father’s many talents. A long-lost great aunt shatters those memories with a harsh truth:

…she described my father’s childhood,
starting when he was two
-- the year his father abandoned
his wife and son.

Life is often unpredictable. This excerpt from “On F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ’Babylon Revisited’” shows how forgotten words and acts unexpectedly return to us like bad karma:

-- all can silently arc
over our heads for days,
for blithe or busy years
until the moment they curve
back into our lives as swiftly
as a hawk’s swooping claws
puncture a rabbit’s skin.

Regardless of age, a poet is always a poet. Age settles over us all, but Johnson still sees poetry in the world around him:

…subjects for poems,
like frightened children
seeking shelter,
tug at my mind…

One critic describes Robert K. Johnson as “the poet/laureate of the ordinary moment in time.” He is that and much more. His poetry is quietly powerful and poignant. This collection lives, breathes, and transforms the ordinary through the thoughts and memories of a skilled wordsmith. From Mist to Shadow is a book you’ll want to keep and reread.

-- Laurel Johnson is a reviewer for the Midwest Book Review and other magazines.

"Further Fenway Fiction" Adam Pachter guest Nov. 20 5PM

Adam Pachter is the author of the novel Ash (ISBN 0-89754-192-8) and numerous short stories. Pachter has edited both Fenway Fiction books, and he won the Improper Bostonian magazine's inaugural fiction contest for his story "Lotion." In addition, Pachter's work has appeared in Italy from a Backpack, Boston Metro, and the Word Riot Anthology. Pachter also writes for WGBH, Boston's public television station, and teaches classes on how to write a first novel. He lives in Arlington, MA, with his wife and young daughter, whom he has taught to say "Go Red Sox" and "Coco Crisp."

Tues Nov 6 2007 5PM Nick Mamatas

My Guest Nov. 6 at 5PM will be About the book:
Under My Roof, based on Archanians by Aristophanes, is the story of telepathic tween Herbert Weinberg, whose father Daniel decides to strike a blow for freedom by building a nuclear device, planting it in the lawn jockey in his front yard, and declaring independence from the United States.

The Long Island household is predictably turned upside down. Mother is out, a local weatherman is in, and he becomes both a hostage and Minister of Information. Though troops surround the belligerent ranch house-state, the appeal of independence becomes too much for many. A daring raid to kidnap Herb and bring him back to his mother snatches the boy prince from his ancestral home. Meanwhile, the house is filling up with former American refuseniks. Can the refrigerator hold out?

However, the seed has already been planted. All over America, people are declaring their independence, and simply by traveling from lawn to lawn across "the country", Herbert is able to reunite with his father and defeat American imperialism with a final burst of his telepathic powers.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About the author:
Nick Mamatas is the author of the Civil War ghost story for Marxists, Northern Gothic, and the Lovecraftian Beat road novel for shut-ins, Move Under Ground, which was nominated for both the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild awards for first novel. His short fiction has appeared in the Mississippi Review, Razor, the German music magazine Spex and a dozen other publications. His reportage and essays have appeared in the Village Voice, The Writer, In These Times and various Disinformation and BenBella Books anthologies. A native New Yorker, Nick now lives near, but not in, Boston.

Under My Roof, based on Archanians by Aristophanes, is the story of telepathic tween Herbert Weinberg, whose father Daniel decides to strike a blow for freedom by building a nuclear device, planting it in the lawn jockey in his front yard, and declaring independence from the United States.

The Long Island household is predictably turned upside down. Mother is out, a local weatherman is in, and he becomes both a hostage and Minister of Information. Though troops surround the belligerent ranch house-state, the appeal of independence becomes too much for many. A daring raid to kidnap Herb and bring him back to his mother snatches the boy prince from his ancestral home. Meanwhile, the house is filling up with former American refuseniks. Can the refrigerator hold out?

However, the seed has already been planted. All over America, people are declaring their independence, and simply by traveling from lawn to lawn across "the country", Herbert is able to reunite with his father and defeat American imperialism with a final burst of his telepathic powers.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

About the author:
Nick Mamatas is the author of the Civil War ghost story for Marxists, Northern Gothic, and the Lovecraftian Beat road novel for shut-ins, Move Under Ground, which was nominated for both the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild awards for first novel. His short fiction has appeared in the Mississippi Review, Razor, the German music magazine Spex and a dozen other publications. His reportage and essays have appeared in the Village Voice, The Writer, In These Times and various Disinformation and BenBella Books anthologies. A native New Yorker, Nick now lives near, but not in, Boston.

Oct 23 Jane Katims 5PM

My guest on Oct 23 will be poet Jane Katims:

Jane Katims is the author and co-producer of six radio series for Wisconsin Public Radio, one earning her a George Foster Peabody Award in Broadcasting. Her series include: The Author is You, Book Trails, Worlds of Art, Wisconsin on the Move, Listening to My Feelings, and Through My Senses. She has written radio documentaries for WEN, WGBH, WBUR, and WCAS (Everybody Do What You're Doing, My Bike Got Swiped, Health Care -- Person to Person, Jack Tale Interview, The Toby Story, Birth Control -- What Choices? What to Do With My Life, Women and Music, and others).

In 2004, she was awarded a John Woods Scholarship in Fiction Writing (Western Michigan University) which entitled her to attend the Prague Summer Seminars. She is presently working on a collection of short stories, Getting the Gals Going, and a novel, Until Now and has completed a poetry collection, Dancing on a Slippery Floor..

Jane Katims earned her BA at the University of Wisconsin and her M.Ed at Lesley University. She presently teaches contemporary literature and creative writing at The Cambridge Center for Adult Education and at Tufts Institute for Lifelong Learning at Tufts University. In addition, she leads private writing workshops in poetry, memoir, and fiction writing. She has previously taught at Middlesex Community College; Buckingham, Browne and Nichols; and The Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.

Jane Katims is a member the Board of Visitors of the English Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives with her family near Boston, Massachusetts.

Oct 2 Abbott Ikeler author"Outposts"

Abbott Ikeler is the author of the poetry collection "Outposts" ( Ibbetson 2007)

B.A., Harvard University; M.A., University of Pittsburgh; Ph.D., University of London, Kings College

Abbott Ikeler taught literature and writing at Bowdoin College, the University of Muenster, and Rhode Island College before entering the corporate world. His academic achievements include a Senior Fulbright Fellowship, a book on nineteenth-century aesthetics, and numerous articles on Victorian fiction. From the mid-eighties to 2001, he held public relations and advertising positions with three multinationals and a full-service agency. Immediately before coming to Emerson College ( Boston), Dr. Ikeler was Director of Communications and Public affairs for the Internet and Networking Division of Motorola, a post he held for three years. The focus of his current research is global public relations, especially the impact of non-media influencers, such as industry and financial analysts.

He writes poetry, memoirs and literary criticism, including a book published by Ohio State University Press on Thomas Carlyle, Puritan Temper and Transcendental Faith, and numerous articles on Dickens and Trollope. His poems have been published in The Concrete Wolf, The Somerville News, Dream International Quarterly, and Bagelbards Anthology, No. 2. A sample poem follows below.






Epiphanies



They happen on a subway platform
in the midst of mild debate,
hardly heated, on the merits of a film.
Or between courses at a restaurant
unrated by Michelin
over the indiscretions of a distant friend.
An old incompatibility
of taste or moral vision gathers
in an unremarkable moment in a quite prosaic spot
to a settled recognition on one side or the other
of a wall that can’t be climbed.
The rest—days or decades—is merest epilogue.




--Abbott Ikeler

Sept 25 Rusty Barnes cofounder of "Night Train" magazine

Sept 18 5PM

Rusty Barnes grew up in rural northern Appalachia. He received his B.A. from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Emerson College. His fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in many journals. After editing fiction for the Beacon Street Review (now Redivider) and Zoetrope All-Story Extra, he co-founded Night Train, a recently reinvented literary journal, which has been featured in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and on National Public Radio. Sunnyoutside Press will be publishing a chapbook of his flash fiction sometime in 2007. If you want to know more, check these links to an interview conducted by Wayne Yang of Eight Diagrams: Part I, Part II, Part III. Or, friend him--I mean, uh, me--at MySpace.

Sept 4, 2007 5PM Sidewalk Sam

My guest will be noted street artist and arts activist Side Walk Sam. Sam will be talking about the Sept 15th celebration of Stone Soup Poets founder Jack Powers 70th birthday that he is helping to organize.


Robert Guillemin is "Sidewalk Sam," the popular artist dedicated to creating art at the feet of pedestrians to inspire, promote spirit, enrich daily life, and address social issues. Sidewalk Sam has been called the "Johnny Appleseed of Art" and a "Pavement Picasso". He has been featured on the "Today Show", "Good Morning America", "Evening Magazine" and "Real People" and in hundreds of newspaper articles from coast to coast. He takes arts to the streets with charm and expertise that has thrilled millions of people for nearly forty years.

Through a magical blend of community art initiatives, broad-based participatory events and an unfailing joyful spirit, he organizes citizens, government agencies, cultural organizations, schools and corporations to work together for a common cause.

After studying at Boston College and receiving a bachelor’s and master’s degree in painting from Boston University, Robert followed a traditional path to becoming a successful artist. He had many commissions and exhibits, including one-man shows at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art and the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, but the structure of the art scene was not a good fit for the artist he was becoming. He believed that art’s focus on a small, elite audience caused it to turn its back on society at large. He realized that "art for art’s sake" was not the same as "art for people’s sake."

Sidewalk Sam was born when Robert stepped outside of traditional art venues and took his talents and enthusiasm to the streets. Choosing "Sidewalk Sam" as a nickname and using skills he had sharpened while a copyist at the Louvre Museum in Paris, he began to reproduce beloved masterpiece paintings on the sidewalks of Boston. "By staying in museums, galleries and the halls of academe, I felt I was missing the human experience. So I chose to bring art to the street and into daily life. I love crouching on the sidewalk, kneeling at the feet of people and having art look up to us for a change. I want art to serve people as a natural part of everyday life. I think art should bring people closer to each other and inspire people to a better vision of society."

Sidewalk Sam makes a connection with the public. They gather on street corners to watch him chalk on the ground. His art is in perfect harmony with the pedestrian experience - a polite, social event in the streets of our cities where there is often a need for civility. Using the streets as a canvas, Sidewalk Sam has rallied people around solutions to social problems, addressing issues like poverty, diversity, children and family and the environment. Now in a wheelchair, Sidewalk Sam still thinks big. He organizes large events where lots of people come together and create big artworks to show their common spirit. “I love to get people involved with each other", he says. "Art can bring society together.” He adds, “Everything in modern life is so depersonalized - I’m just trying to personalize it a little.”

Aug 7: Jacques Fluery 5PM

Poetry Tyrant reviews The Haitian Firefly's collection
A review by Doug Holder, the founding publisher of The Ibettson Street Press

Sparks in the Dark: Lighter Shade Of Blue. A Poetic Memoir. Jacques Fleury. “The Haitian Firefly” $12. Contact: haitianfirefly@yahoo.com

Jacques Fleury writes that he was born with a humongous head. He reflects: “When my mom was birthing me, I was told that she ran out of the hospital just as I was coming out of the darkness of her womb, valiantly striving to reach the light. So just as I was coming out she made a giant leap for ‘pain kind’ out of bed and bolted out of the door and caught a cab home.”

Jacques Fleury

To this day Fleury has a dramatic head both physically and metaphorically. He often adorns it with large hats and outrageous sunglasses that he wears in the dead-of-night. He is an exotic even in Cambridge’s teeming and diverse Central Square. And so is his writing. His poetry is not sedate and understated, but much like a lush, colorful, exotic plume; at times gaudy and blinding, and for the most part joyful in spite of the pain he has suffered in his 30- something years.

Fleury was born in Haiti and is a working journalist, poet, columnist, and community TV host. His first full poetry collection: “Sparks in the Dark…” is large, ambitious, and covers a lot of ground.

It’s hard being a Blackman, much less a Haitian Blackman in a white society. Fleury rages against this inequity in his poem: “Unrequited Rage:”

“How dare you judge me/ my color does not define me/ you should be appalled for Dissing me! / unleash your dirty heart/ you will find me!... / I am only a mere man pregnant with error/ a walking Disaster!!!/ So use me like a mirror, / if you want to see the reflection of your Brother!!!/

And Fleury knows that the “womb makes the man,” and he urges mothers to treat their children well, or else it’s a short passage to a worldly hell, in his poem:

“Women! Women From Your Wombs!”

“Women! Women from your wombs/ you gonna yell to break the spell/ women! Women from your wombs/ you too one day/ face drooping dripping down in the dumps/ with creases like beaten down leather/ established breasts hardened, eager and perky/ like the buds of spring./ swollen like balloons since in your mouth men/ blow bubbles…/ since from your wombs babies are born/ bearing your sins/ and looked down as / fools for sucking in anger/and resentment seeping from/ your congested chests/ have come into this world/ entangled in your mess.”

Fleury’s work is provocative and evocative, but at times it needs pruning, because it grows like wild jungle vegetation. Of course that might be the point.

Doug Holder

"Hollywood and Sunset" author Luke Salisbury July 17

July 17 5PM Luke Salisbury:


Luke Salisbury is a Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston and teaches English and Film. He is the author of The Answer Is Baseball (Times Books, 1989; Vintage, 1990) which The Chicago Tribune called the best baseball book of 1989, (A Common Reader said, “Salisbury reveals the heart of the sport better than writer I’ve read,” No. 47, April, 1991), and a novel, The Cleveland Indian (The Smith, 1992; paperback, 1996) which was nominated for the Casey Award in 1992 as best baseball book of the year, and was studied at Indiana State University in an American literature course. Blue Eden, a novel in three stories, (The Smith; hardback and paper, 1996). Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine said, “The middle tale, ‘The Number of the Beast,’ is a gem.” Hollywood and Sunset, a novel will be published by Shambling Gate Press, fall 2005. Mr. Salisbury contributed to Red Sox Century: One Hundred Years of Red Sox Baseball, Baseball & The Game of Life, Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures, DiMaggio: An Illustrated Life, Jackie Robinson: Between the Baselines, Fall Classics: The Best Writing About The World Series’ First Hundred Years and wrote Chapter 9 of a Treasury of Baseball, published by Publications International Ltd. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Ploughshares, Stories Magazine, Pulpsmith, Fan, Elysian Fields, Spitball, Nine, SABR Review of Books, Cooperstown Review, and (in translation) AERA, the Japanese equivalent of Time. He is a past vice president and national secretary of the Society For American Baseball Research (SABR). Mr. Salisbury was the first keynote speaker at Nine Magazine’s Annual Spring Training Conference (1994), and was a frequent guest on Channel 2 Boston’s “Ten O’clock News,” “The Group,” and “Greater Boston,” New England Cable News Network, Comcast’s Sports Pulse, and WBUR’s “Connection.” He was featured in AMC’s “Diamonds On the Silver Screen,” HBO’s Curse of the Bambino and wrote the Krank column for Boston Baseball from 1996 to 1999. His latest book is "Hollywood and Sunset."

Mr. Salisbury attended The Hun School, New College, and received an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University. He once taught third grade in the Bronx, and now lives with his wife Barbara and son Ace in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

Poet Michael Mack July 10

http://www.michaelmacklive.com/


Michael Mack will be my guest on "Poet to Poet, Writer to Writer" July 10
5PM Somerville Community Access TV


Michael Mack is a poet and performer who uses his art to give form to his
feelings about having a mother with schizophrenia and in so doing educates
his audiences about the devastating illness. Courtesy of Michael Mack




The room darkens, and sad, frightening voices echo through the air. Mixing
light and shadow with the skills of an actor and the voice of a poet,
Michael Mack brings the sensations of schizophrenia to his listeners.

The experience is not his directly, but that of his mother, whose
schizophrenia was diagnosed when Michael was 5 years old. Yet the story is
his, too. What child wouldn't be affected by the inexplicable behavior of
his or her mother?

Luckily for him and his audiences, Mack was not shackled by his childhood.
As an adult, he transformed the central experience of that time into a
one-man performance that enlightens patients and clinicians, as well as
people who have never seen mental illness firsthand.

"This has been a tremendously cathartic experience," Mack, 49, told
Psychiatric News. "It keeps the memory of my mother alive, and it's a kind
of mission, opening people's minds."

Patients hear his work as their story. "It's an emotional event for them,"
he said. "It's a human story about a human tragedy that ends up with a
hopeful message."

Mack grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., the oldest of four
children his parents had in the first five years of their marriage. Years
later, he listened to his father tell the story of how he came home to find
Michael's mother in tears and asking if she was the Blessed Virgin (see
box). She was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In periods of remission, she was
a kind and attentive mother, but when the illness returned, her behavior
could threaten and disturb her children.

Once, she gave a party for neighborhood children, handing out cigarettes and
giving away toys belonging to Michael and his siblings.

"I remember it being a real fun party, but at the same time having the
feeling that something was really wrong," he recalled.

The family exhausted its insurance benefits as Mack's mother moved through
hospitals and other facilities around Washington. Eventually, the parents
divorced, and Michael's mother spent the last years of her life in a group
home in Baltimore, where she died of cancer in 2002. She never saw his
performances but expressed surprise that anyone might be interested in her
experiences. His father has seen (and responded positively to) the piece
several times and has brought friends to see it.

"I think it has helped him to see how we saw the situation as children,"
said Mack.

After high school, Mack served in the Air Force, attended community college,
and then went to Sloan School of Business at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. His march toward a conventional career detoured into the arts
when he signed up for a course in poetry taught by Pulitzer Prize-winner
Maxine Kumin. For the first time in his life, Mack poured his memories and
feelings about growing up with his mother onto paper. He became Boston's
poetry slam champion. He switched his major to creative writing and
graduated in 1988. Since then, he has worked as a technical or freelance
writer, but his personal and professional focus has been "Hearing Voices
(Speaking in Tongues)," the one-man show that he presents around the
country. His big break came in 1997, when an advocate for people with mental
illness heard Mack recite his poetry and invited him to speak to the Boston
chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

As he began writing, Mack went back to the events of his childhood and began
to see them in a different way, experiencing them as an adult, not as a
child. He came to understand what his mother and father did and why they did
it. When he was young, he felt cheated out of his childhood and was angry at
his parents, he said. But in writing the poetry that became his program's
script, he came to understand how they had responded as best they could to
the circumstances of their lives.

Mack never gives the same presentation twice. Each little scene-poem is a
story in itself. He selects elements to construct an essential story that
varies with the place and the audience.

For a general audience, he might have a "doctor" character describe symptoms
of schizophrenia, but leave that out when performing for a more
knowledgeable professional audience. Even they glean value from his show,
however. After a performance at McLean Hospital near Boston, staff members
came up to him and told him that seeing the performance was a way for them
to reconnect with the fundamental reasons they went into the mental health
field, said Mack.

"The performance helped them see the human cost of mental illness and how
they can help," he said.

He recently gave two performances in Rochester, N.Y., the first in a large
auditorium for the general public and mental health care consumers. There,
he performed for an hour and a half, enhancing the show with all the
lighting and sound technology the theater had to offer. Later, before a
smaller group of patients at the Rochester Psychiatric Center, he pared the
performance down to 30 minutes of material that spoke directly to that
specialized audience.

For most audiences, he dramatizes auditory hallucinations by immersing the
stage in total darkness for more than two minutes while speaking in the
voices that reflect psychosis. However, for patients, he may ask for the
lights to be lowered rather than turned off and ask the patients to close
their eyes to lessen the chance of fearful reactions. In either case,
patients have told him how much they appreciated his giving voice to what
they have gone through.

Performing for audiences of patients, psychiatrists, and mental health
professionals has led to another kind of insight, said Mack. His recent
presentation at the rochester Psychiatric Center entailed his first visit to
a state psychiatric hospital since he visited his mother in an aging, dingy
facility 20 years before.

"What a change!" he said. "I was so impressed with the building and how
patients and staff interacted."

June 19 Poet Bob Clawson

My Guest June 19 at 5PM will be poet Bob Clawson.






Bob Clawson was Anne Sexton’s friend and associate for the last ten years of her life. He often helped her edit drafts of her work. He also directed the musical group, “Anne Sexton and Her Kind,” which toured the country for three years.



Bob Clawson is a writer, editor, teacher, fisherman, and cook. His formal education includes a rural two-room schoolhouse, Kenyon College, Harvard, and Yale. He has visited 32 of the United States, and has been to France, Italy, Canada, Mexico, Greece, and to several island nations such as Britain, Jamaica, Cuba, Ireland, and Nantucket.



Poetry captured Clawson at Kenyon College, where he studied with John Crowe Ransom and Irving Feldman. He spent a long career in advertising where he was a writer, editor, and creative director. His time for reading poetry dwindled, but, in his words, “...it followed like a brindled hound,/just ribs and tongue and tail.”



Fifteen years ago, he left business. For the next seven years, he wrote a self-syndicated golf column that eventually reached over 100 newspapers, but it became, “Too much like work: 56-hour weeks.” In the mid-nineties, a friend asked Clawson to teach poetry to 4th graders. This triggered a powerful urge to write poetry, not just occasional drafts, but serious work. He wrote from 1996 to 1998 and studied with Bruce Weigl, Fred Marchant, Gail Mazur, Stephen Dunn, Heather McHugh, and Thomas Lux, before sending work to poetry journals.



In 1997he published his first book, Nightbreak. It went through three printings. He has published in many fine journals including The Southern Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, Yankee, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Lancet ( a weekly British medical journal), and the Shit Creek Review, among others.

Sept 11 2007 Carl Von Essen

June 12 2007 5PM My guest will be: Carl von Essen. Carl von Essen was born in 1926 and raised in Northern California. After medical studies in California and Sweden, he practiced and taught in the United States, India, and Switzerland and served the World Health Organization in Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. Throughout a long professional career spanning the globe, he devoted available time to exploring the natural world and pursuing his passion for angling. He is also the author of The Revenge of the Fishgod: Angling Adventures around the World. Carl von Essen now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, the Jungian psychoanalyst Manisha Roy.

His latest book is: ""The Hunter's Trance: Nature Spirit&Ecology."

Poet Dan Sklar May 29 5PM

June 29 5PM ---My guest will be poet and Creative Writing Director of Endicott College Dan Sklar. Dan has taught poetry, fiction, nature writing, Eastern Literature, Drama, Playwriting and Children’s Literature at Endicott College for twenty years. One of Dan’s plays was just published in “The Art of the One-Act” and his poems and stories have or will be published in the Harvard Review, Ibbetson Street, Fulcrum, and many others.

Dan is the author of the poetry collection “Hack Writer” He hold a PhD in Literature from Boston University.

Tino Viilanueva May 15 5PM

Tino Villanueva- From his humble beginnings in Texas as the son of migrant workers, "Tino Villanueva emerged as an important voice of Chicano expression in the early 1970s," wrote Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Julian Olivares. "The poetic voice for him is an existential affirmation of being by which one achieves salvation from silence, chaos, and annihilation."
Growing up in an atmosphere of poverty and prejudice, Villanueva graduated from high school but failed his college entrance exam. Devoted to self-improvement, the young man took jobs and read extensively. Drafted into the U.S. Army in 1963, Villanueva spent two years in the Panama Canal Zone. This brought him a new understanding of his Hispanic heritage; he began reading the works of poets like Ruben Dario and José Martí.
Returning home, Villanueva enrolled at Southwest Texas University, where he produced his first poem--a sonnet--in a class for native Spanish-speakers. The poem, "Camino y Capricho eterno," was published in a local newspaper in 1968. Villanueva earned a bachelor of arts degree that same year, and moved his studies to Buffalo, New York. "Living away from the Southwest permitted him to take stock of himself and to take into account the injustices perpetrated upon him and his people," reported Olivares. Villanueva embraced the Chicano Movement, and produced the poetry collection Hay Otra Voz. "Appearing in 1972 when there were very few journals that gave space to U.S. Hispanic literary expression," Olivares continued, "Hay Otra Voz was received without any reviews." But with subsequent publications of Villanueva's poetry in journals in the U.S. and abroad, the poet began to gain more recognition.
In 1984 Villanueva began publishing Imagine: International Chicano Poetry Journal, dedicated to poetry of any language, accompanied by English translation. That same year he published Shaking off the Dark, a well-received collection that a World Literature Today critic called "a journey into the semiotic concept of biculturalism." Olivares pointed to one of the poems in the collection, "Now, Suns Later," a tribute to the poet's grandmother, as "[interweaving] light imagery emanating from two sources, the sun and the grandmother."
Villanueva's anthology, Crónica de mis años peores, acknowledges the continuing struggles faced by Hispanic Americans. But the book is "a work of triumph and of overcoming," declared reviewer Susan Smith Nash in World Literature Today. Nash concluded, "individuals are able, by sheer force of will, to overcome the effects of shaming and physical and emotional abuse is tantamount to miraculous." To a Publishers Weekly contributor, the poet's tone is "complex and hard to characterize, more on the order of wistful disappointment . . . than anything like self-pity."
In the movie Giant, a pivotal moment takes place in a Texas roadside diner, where an Anglo customer, trying to prevent the eviction of a Hispanic man by the owner, is himself severely beaten. The Anglo "to a certain extent represents the social conscience of America," remarked Tom Lewis in a World Literature Today review of the collection Scene from the Movie Giant. Villanueva turns the scene into a five-part poem, which begins with the poet at age fourteen seeing Giant for the first time. Whereas the diner scene carries much symbolic weight, Lewis added, "Villanueva's poem quietly and richly extends the movie by revealing how a lone member of its audience derived from the complex emotions it aroused in him a sense of selfhood and creativity."
PERSONAL INFORMATION
Family: Born December 11, 1941, in San Marcos, TX; son of Lino B. and Leonor (Rios) Villanueva. Education: Southwest Texas State University, B.A., 1969; State University of New York at Buffalo, M.A., 1971; Boston University, Ph.D., 1981. Memberships: American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. Addresses: Office: Department of Spanish, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA 02181. Agent: Odon Betanzos, 125 Queen St., Staten Island, NY 10314.
AWARDS
Ford Foundation fellowship, 1978-79; American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation, 1994, for Scene from the Movie Giant.
CAREER
State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, instructor in Spanish, 1969-71; Boston University, Boston, MA, lecturer in Spanish, 1971-76; Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, instructor in Spanish, 1974--. Locutor and program director for La hora Hispaña, broadcast for the Spanish-speaking community by Harvard University radio station WHRB. Military service: U.S. Army, 1964-66.
WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
Hay Otra Voz: Poems (title means "There Is Another Voice: Poems"), Editorial Mensaje (New York, NY), 1972, 3rd edition, 1979.
(With others) Literatura Chicana: texto y contexto (title means "Chicano Literature: Text and Context"), Prentice-Hall (New York, NY), 1973.
Chicanos: Antologia de ensayos y literatura (title means "Chicanos: Anthology of Essays and Literature"), Fondo de Cultura Economica (Visión de Ningun Lugar, México), 1979.
Shaking off the Dark, Arté Publico Press (Houston, TX), 1984, revised edition, Bilingual Press (Tempe, AZ), 1998.
Crónica de mis años peores, Lalo (Los Angeles, CA), 1987, translation by James Hoggard published as Chronicle of My Worst Years, TriQuarterly Books (Evanston, IL), 1994.
Tres Poetas de Posguerra: Celaya, Gonzalez y Caballero Bonald: (Estudio y Entrevistas), Tamesis Books (London, England), 1988.
Scene from the Movie Giant, Curbstone Press (Willimantic, CT), 1993.
La llaman America, Curbstone Press (Willimantic, CT), 1996.
Contributor in El Espejo/The Mirror: Selected Chicano Literature, edited by O. Romano and H. Rios, Quinto Sol Publications, 1972; and We Are Chicanos: An Anthology of Mexican-American Literature, edited by Philip D. Ortego, Washington Square Press, 1974.
Contributor of poetry to San Antonio Express/News, Persona, El Grito, Entre Nosotros, Caribbean Review, Hispamerica: Revista de literatura, Revista Chicano-Riqueña, Poema Convidado, and Texas Quarterly; contributor of essays to Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, Papeles de Son Armadans, and Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century

April 17 Poet Molly Lynn Watt

April 17 5PM My Guest will be Molly Lynn Watt:


Molly Lynn Watt carries a pen, a notebook and a journal as she travels, whether to Harvard Square, China, Ireland or Alaska to record her wonderings. She shapes adventures and questions into poems, essays and stories sometimes illustrated with photographs. She is an original member of Cambridge Cohousing community, a longtime progressive educator and a peace and justice activist. She facilitates the monthly Fireside Poetry Readings on the last Tuesday of each month (usually) with neighbors, Jenise Aminoff and John Hildebidle. Check out NoCa's events and www.cambridgecohousing.org/poetry/ for reading dates. Molly is the author of the poetry collection: "Shadow People." ( Ibbetson, 2007)

Harris Gardner-Founder of The Boston National Poetry Festival

March 27 2007: 5PM My guest will be poet/organizer/activist/ Harris Gardner http://tapestryofvoices.com founder of:




(Harris Gardner, and friends...)

THE BOSTON NATIONAL POETRY MONTH FESTIVAL Now in its SUCESSFUL Seventh !!! Year

CO-SPONSORS:Tapestry of Voices & Kaji Aso Studio in partnership with The Boston Public Library. Starts Saturday, April 14th, 2007 10:00 A.M. To 5:00 P.M. and Sunday, April 15th, 2007 from 1:00 P.M. to 4:45 P.M.. OPEN MIKE: Sunday, 2:00 to 3:30 P.M. The festival will be held both days at the library ’s main branch in Copley Square.56 Major and emerging poets will each do a twenty minute reading; also Featuring 15 elementary school students from the John Eliot Elementary School.These fifth and sixth graders will open the festival with poetry by Langston Hughes,Ogden Nash, Carl Sandburg, Shel Silverstein, Maya Angelou, other poets, and their own originalpoetry. They will be followed by prize winning poets Alden DiIanni-Morton and Shari Caplan, two seniors at Boston Latin High School. The 55 major and emerging poets will follow with a:

POETRY MARATHON. Some of the many luminaries include Diana DerHovanessian , Afaa M. Weaver, Rhina P. Espaillat, Richard Wollman, Lloyd Schwartz, Maxine Kumin, Fred Marchant, Barbara Helfgott-Hyett, DanTobin, Charles Coe, Steven Cramer, Danielle Legros-Georges, Regie Gibson, Marc Widershien, Tino Villanueva, and Doug Holder.
This festival has it all. A plethora of professional poets, celebrities, a Pulitzer Prize Winner and former National Poet Laureate, numerous award winners, student participation.Even more, it is about community, neighborhoods, diversity, BOSTON and MASSACHUSETTS. This fast growing tradition is one of the largest events in Boston’s Contribution to National Poetry Month. FREE ADMISSION !!
For information: Tapestry of Voices, (617-306-9484) or
617-723-3716 Library: (617)- 536-5400

Wheelchair accessible. Assistive listening devices available. To request a sign language interpreter or for other special needs, call (617) 536-7855 (TTY) at least two weeks before the program date.

Poet, Publisher, Playwright Diana Saenz March 6 2007

My Guest March 6 2007 5PM:

Diana Saenz was born in Los Angeles, California. She lived for a time with her grandparents in Fresno, California. She recounts her memories of Central California as among her most powerful memories, specifically recalling of the scent of Oleanders that proliferated in her grandparents' neighborhood, in Fresno.

Diana Saenz is a playwright and poet who has been writing for 35 years. Her fifteen plays have been produced in California, Massachusetts, Texas and Maine. She has written three books of poetry, and numerous articles and short stories. Saenz founded "The Boston Poet," an event calendar for poets.

Diana later founded the online journal http://www.bostonpoet.com and the Boston Poet Journal.