Poet and bon vivant Steve Glines April 14 2009 5PM

My guest:

April 14, 2009: Steve Glines, in addition to being the editor of Wilderness House Literary Review, is an essayist, journalist, storyteller, occasional poet and bon vivant. His motto is, “The best is barely good enough.” Steve has published six books, only one of which might be considered even remotely “literary,” a travelogue about Fiji. He has been published in Ibbetson Review, the Belmont Citizen, the Littleton Independent, Unix Review, Technology Review and the Boston Globe among others. He has never been published in the Paris Review, the AntiochReview, Crazyhorse, The Atlantic Monthly and the Kenyon Review. To these awesome credentials it should be added that he has never received a McArthur Award nor been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Still, for some reason, people like what he writes and, on occasion, even pay him for it.

April 2, 2009: Special Feature! / Doo Wop to Hip Hop : Conversation between Afaa Michael Weaver and Major Jackson

April 2, 7PM



Doo Wop to Hip Hop ( A special production of "Poet to Poet Writer to Writer")



An Evening of Conversation with poets

Major Jackson and Afaa Michael Weaver


Moderator

Gloria Mindock, Editor and Publisher
Cervana Barva Press


Major Jackson
Associate Professor
University of Vermont


Afaa Michael Weaver
Alumnae Professor of English
Simmons College


Producer
Doug Holder
"Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer"
Ibbetson Press
The Somerville News



( Major Jackson)

( Afaa Michael Weaver)





Renowned African American poets Afaa Michael Weaver and Major Jackson to be filmed in Somerville, Mass.




Renowned African American poets Afaa Michael Weaver and Major Jackson to be in a filmed public discussion at Somerville Community Access TV.

( Somerville, Mass.)

The Somerville Community Access TV Show: “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer” poettopoetwritertowriter.blogspot.com will sponsor a public discussion featuring renowned African American poets Afaa Michael Weaver and Major Jackson on April 2, 2009 7PM ( Poetry Month).

Somerville poet Afaa Michael Weaver has won the prestigious PUSHCART PRIZE (2008) for his poem “American Income,” published in POETRY magazine and in his collection "Plum Flower Dance" ( U/Pitt Press.)

Henry Louis Gates, historian and professor at Harvard University writes of Weaver:

"Afaa Michael Weaver is one of the most significant poets writing today. With its blend of Chinese spiritualism and American groundedness, his poetry presents the reader (and the listener, for his body of work is meant to be read aloud) with challenging questions about identity, about how physicality and spirit act together or counteract each other to shape who we are in the world. His attention to the way language works is rare, and the effects of that attention on his poetry are distinctive and expansive."




Major Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry: Hoops (Norton: 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Hoops was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literature - Poetry. He has received critical attention in The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Parnassus, Philadelphia Inquirer, and on National Public Radio's 'All Things Considered.' His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Callaloo, The New Yorker, Post Road, Poetry, Triquarterly, among other literary journals and anthologies. He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Last year, he served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Major Jackson is an Associate Professor of English at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.





In a public chat in the SCAT television studios in Somerville, titled "Two Generations of Black Male Poets, moderated by Gloria Mindock,these two poets share the experience of their lives as blackmen who came of age in large American cities: Baltimore and Philadelphia.

They will discuss the music, visual art, and literature that were influential in their times, from The Temptations to Grandmaster Flash and Chuck D, from Ron Milnerto Susan Lori Parks, and more. They will share intimate moments in their lives and some of their own work as well as that of poets they know and admire in an evening setting in the burgeoning artistic community north of Cambridge to be recorded in front of the live audience. The program's producer is Doug Holder, the host of "Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer" an interview show that airs on SCAT every Tuesday afternoon.

March 10 Tim Devin founder of " i left this here for you to read"

March 10 5PM Tim Devin "i left this here for you to read"






"i left this here for you to read"
About this magazine
Each month or so, we release a new issue of "i left this here for you to read." We then leave them in public places (such as on park benches, on buses, in airports and dentists' offices...) for anyone to take--free of charge.
So far , we've distributed our magazine in about 35 cities in the US and Canada. We only print about 50 copies of each issue, and don't reprint any past issues. Sorry, we can't mail you any copies--we only send them to contributors.

This project was started by Tim Devin, but now involves more than 100 people. Click here to see who's a part of it.

Email us at i.left.this.here@gmail.com

We also have a facebook group page, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Tim is also the founder of "the history of somerville 2010-2100" find out more about this unusual guy!

March 3, 2009: Novelist Paul Stone

My Guest will be Paul Stone author of "Or So It Seems"



On The Road To Writing My Novel



For twelve years I was engaged in a solitary process that resulted in the publication of my first novel, “Or So It Seems”. Now, less than a year after its publication, I’m out in the world introducing this book to legions of total strangers.

Funny how the universe spins its web.

When I began writing the novel, I was lost and confused and not at all interested in writing a spiritually framed novel. My marriage had broken up, I was bitter and angry, and struggling to construct a life as a single parent of three wonderful but highly vulnerable children. And so, not surprisingly, the novel that took shape was bitter, angry and focused mainly on blame and payback.

But a funny thing happened on the road to payback.

As many of you know, we are each of us walking two paths on our life’s journey. On the first path we encounter our day-to-day struggles, our deeply held desires, our careers, our family lives, our likes, dislikes, quirks and ambitions. The second path, which you could call our spiritual journey, takes us on a much longer and far more obscure expedition. I’ll leave it to someone more knowledgeable than me to explain where that journey originates or where it is taking us, but its main characteristic is that it calls to and enlivens our deepest and truest selves.

Well, without over-stretching the comparison, this novel of mine, “Or So It Seems”, also traveled two roads in its journey to fullness, publication and, yes, self-discovery.

The point of divergence, where one road ended and another began, occurred after seven years. Truth is, I thought I had finished the novel, thought it was done. But after reviewing it, an agent suggested it needed more narrative tension. If I’m honest, it was a well-written, essentially dull tale of a man putting his life together again after divorce. I understood what the agent meant and sat down to create some suspense and tension by reordering a few elements in the plot.

A funny thing happened when I sat down at my computer, however.

The moment I started my rewrite, it was as if a voice sounded inside my head, telling me “Now you are going to write the novel you were supposed to write.” And then began another spiritual journey. Suddenly this kaleidoscope of new ideas, themes and characters started populating my simple storyline; as if by magic, my tale of one man’s divorce became a complex and humorous metaphor for everyman’s spiritual odyssey. Suddenly, my straightforward, linearly-told story became a rich, multilayered plot. And if you think I was excited or pleased, you’re not even close. I was scared to death. Had all that work, I worried—over seven years worth—been for nothing? It was frightening to think of revisiting my novel at that late date, but then again, some of those new ideas, characters and themes were so interesting, so playful, and so much more relevant to my life’s journey than anything I had written before…

Well, as it turned out, the new elements blended beautifully with the old and eventually, five years later, I found myself the author of a multi-leveled, humorous, surprisingly charming and intensely compelling novel. What one reviewer called, “A Rollicking Spiritual Page-Turner.” What I describe as ‘part odyssey, part oddball adventure and totally fantastic.’

If there’s a theme to “Or So It Seems” it clearly relates to perceptions of reality. How we’re so often distracted by what we see as the drama of our lives, that we rarely notice how that drama fits into our larger spiritual journey. Much the way I, in starting a novel about my divorce, failed to see that I had really begun a voyage of discovery, a journey that would lead towards something much larger and far more interesting than the tale of angst, bitterness and blame that had originally inspired me.

Or so it seems.

My Guest: Feb 17 Poet Rebecca Schumejda 5PM

My Guest: Feb 17 Poet Rebecca Schumejda









"Currently, I live in New York's scenic Hudson Valley with my husband and our daughter. I write and teach English and US History at an alternative high school. I was born and raised on Long Island. I moved around, but ended up back in New York, this time landlocked, my view mountains instead of waves. I received my BA in English from SUNY New Paltz and my MA in Poetics and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.

My poetry has appeared here and there over the years. My new collection Falling Forward is upcoming from sunnyoutside press. In addition, sunnyoustide published my chapbook Dream Big, Work Harder in November of 2006 and my poem "Logic" on a postcard. In 2001, Green Bean Press published my chapbook The Tear Duct of The Storm. What seems to be a lifetime ago, I co-edited a small press zine, reuben's kincaid. "

Feb 10, 2009--- Poet Elizabeth Kirschner

Poet, lyricist, I have published three volumes of poetry, Twenty Colors, Postal Routes and Slow Risen Among the Smoke Trees, all with Carnegie-Mellon University Press. My chapbook, The Red Dragon, was published by Permafrost, and My Life as a Doll was published by Autumn House Press.

As a lyricist, I have collaborated with many composers both here and abroad. Most notably, I set my own poetry, not a translation, to Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe. Now titled The Dichterliebe in Four Seasons it had its world premiere in Vienna in fall ’05 followed by an American debut here in Boston. A CD of this music featuring soprano Jean Danton and pianist Thomas Stumpf was released from Albany Records in Spring ’07. The Dichterliebe in Four Seasons has been published by Musik Fabrik. A score can be ordered at http://www.classicalmusicnow.com/Kirschner.html.

I have taught at prominent universities including Carnegie Mellon University, Boston Universities and most recently at Boston College, where I taught in varying degree from 1990-2007

In the mid through late 80's, I worked at schools, K-12, all over New Hampshire through the Arts-in-Education program. I also presented residencies through Very Special Arts.

All my books and the CD are available at www.amazon.com

Feb 3, 2009 Molly Lynn Watt

MOLLY LYNN WATT worked for 45 years with schools for better education and with communities organizing for peace, justice, and civil rights. She retired a few years ago to devote full time to writing. She curates the Fireside Reading and is the poetry editor of HILR Review and three anthologies of Bagels with the Bards. With her husband, she co-created and performs George & Ruth: Songs and Letters of the Spanish Civil War, live and on CD. Ibbetson Street Press published her book of poems, Shadow People, in 2007. Her work appears The Boston Globe, Chicken Soup, Domestic Affairs, Eclipse, Fulcrum, G.W. Review, Hampden-Sydney Review, Occasional Moose, Peaceworks, The 2008 Poets' Guide To New Hampshire, Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine, South Carolina Review, Spare Change, Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Westview, Best of Wilderness House Literary Review, Wisconsin Review, Willard & Maple, and others.

Jan 13, 2009 5PM Biker Poet, editor, activist, Jose Gouveia

(Jose Gouveia Front)



Biker poets
New book collects best of “Biker Poetry”


Jan 13, 2009 5PM Biker Poet, editor, activist, Jose Gouveia


Rubber Side Down. Edited by Joe Gouveia, Peddlar Bridges, and Susan Buck. (Archer Books PO BOX 1254 Santa Monica, CA. 93456) $16.

Did you know there is a Biker Poet movement? Bikers are not only Hell's Angels with leather and nefarious intent, but poets, on the road, burning rubber, and spouting odes to the endless highway. Joe Gouveia, poet, motorcycle enthusiast, and new head of the “Highway Poets Motor Cycle Club” had the good sense to edit an anthology of Biker bards. The poetry club, founded by Colorado T. Sky, boasts many fine poets in their ranks. Allen Ginsberg commented on the concept of “Biker Poets”(according to a history included in the anthology):

“The Highway Poets could be, for their generation, what the Beat Poets were for ours.” And for this lively subculture of poets this could indeed be the case.

The title “Rubber Side Down,” according to an essay in the book by Martin Jack Rosenblum means to ride safely, and “we shall meet again at the next café for coffee or swap meet for spare parts-if we have kept it down safely.” To the biker, cars are cages, vehicles of conformity.

Rosenblum defines Biker poetry, or at least the Biker poetry presented in this book:
“The poetry in this book is written by folks who are outside the cultural safety zone. Some ignore technique, some deplore it, some explore it beyond where workshop academics would confine it and some take a breather from the understood confines of a literary canon sensibility to gather a better voice because of a crazy, two-wheeled power drift into experiential reverie.”

I was pleased to see a number of poets that I know and have published appear on these pages including: Linda Lerner, K. Peddlar Bridges, and Marc Goldfinger.

Goldfinger has an intriguing prose poem “The State Trooper & The Biker Get Tested.” It involves his offbeat encounter with an offbeat State Trooper while riding his late wife's bike.

Naturally, many of the poets in this collection write of the vehicle of transcendence, the motorcycle. The beloved bike provides them with freedom from the grind of everyday. In her poem “It's Okay,” Susie Howard portrays the road as a trip that flies in the face of convention:

“But the road is free of that
It is the steady air against the skin
whipping hair and clothes
and flawed thinking from my mind
with the steady hum of opposing carburetors
passing by dinosaur Buicks
traveling to destinations of work,
lifestyle, maintenance, drone hood
while I follow no map but that of whim
and its steady song of
It's okay.
It's okay.
It's okay.”

And Diane Wakoski in the “The Desert Motorcyclist” explains why it is better to ride a motorcycle than a man:

“Now I run away
to my dry desert,
the place where there is enough space
for my imagination
and nothing to drown it.

Desert motorcyclist:
that is me.
And it is the man,
never the machine
who betrays me.”

If you never have been exposed to this genre, then get a strong grip, plant your rear on a leather hide, hear those cylinders roar, and take a ride.

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

concentric fires which your unbridled imagination already foresaw by certain

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

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

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

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

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

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

singer and musician.



Roy Nathanson, already saxophone player in the legendary Lounge Lizards

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

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

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

Knitting Factory label, she produced the astonishing Being Visited followed

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

of uncommon and burning intensity.



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

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

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

those verses of flesh and blood has embodied.

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

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

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

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

unusual gesture during a meeting with someone.



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

in your mind evoking different atmospheres between the subliminal jazz of

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

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

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

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

unveiled in the shadings of These Diamonds Are My Very.

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

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

whole herself.



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

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


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

Dec 23, 2008 5PM Marguerite Bouvard

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


Current Project

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

Biography

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

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

Dec. 9, 2008: Barbara Helfgott Hyett

BARBARA HELFGOTT-HYETT


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

NOV 18, 2008: Boston Poet Laureate--Sam Cornish

Nov. 18 5PM my guest will be Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish:





Boston's poet laureate of the people
For Sam Cornish, sharing is the key
By Tania deLuzuriaga, Globe Staff | January 20, 2008

Back in the 1960s, poet Sam Cornish used to wander the streets of Boston with long hair and bare feet. Though he's a bit more distinguished looking today, in thick glasses and often sporting a jacket and tie, his free-spirited nature endures.

"I'm not a snob," said Cornish, named last week as the city's first poet laureate. "I like Rachel Ray and westerns, I collect comic books. I don't mind getting drunk on occasion, not intentionally, but because I like whiskey."

Mayor Thomas M. Menino announced Tuesday that Cornish, a former Emerson College literature professor, would be the first to fill a post the city has never had before.

"He has not just a great literary background, but a real commitment to promoting poetry across the city," said Alice Hennessey, who oversees special projects for the city, including the poet laureate selection committee.

City officials see Cornish as a poet of the people, someone who will reach across racial and socioeconomic lines to promote literacy through poetry.

After moving into his office at the Boston Public Library, Cornish's first duties will include organizing a poetry workshop for teens and putting together an event for Black History Month in February.

"I want to do a tour, but instead of bookshops and universities I want to go to neighborhoods, school rooms, living rooms," Cornish, who lives in Brighton with his wife, said in an interview yesterday. "Highly visible artists are too rare. 'Rare' is good for wine, but it sucks for an artist. . . . My work comes out of Boston's daily experience, I want to be able to share that with my own."

Cornish, 72, said he started writing as an angry teenager, living in the poor black neighborhoods of Baltimore. Inspired by the likes of E.E. Cummings and T.S. Eliot, he abandoned the notion of poetry within the confines of rhyme and meter, instead writing streetwise observances of his world in free verse, a practice that continues today.

He moved to Boston in the 1960s, after serving in the Army Medical Corps. He traveled back and forth between Boston and Baltimore for the next decade, settling here in the mid-1970s.

"Boston was a horror show when I first came here," he remembered, referring to racial tensions in the city. "But it was better than Baltimore."

Much of Cornish's poetry embodies the African-American experience of the past 70 years, dealing with themes such as slavery, kinship, and civil rights, in language as tough as life on the streets.

"My mother's back is bleeding/ like the avenues and streets/ of American cities is dark/ & red like barbecue," reads a poem called "The Beating," published in 1996.

While Cornish's work often deals with the black male experience, he blurs the lines between autobiography and fiction.

"Ninety-five percent of it is not me at all," he said. "I use my life as a source, I represent the story through people who resemble - but who are not - me."

When City Councilor John Tobin introduced a resolution last year to create the two-year post of poet laureate, Cornish said he turned his nose up at the prospect.

"These things usually go to people who are well connected," he said. "I am not connected. I don't give safe interviews, and I work very hard not to give any impression of intelligence."

Cornish eventually gave in to the urging of his friends and applied for the position, which pays a corporate-sponsored $2,000-a-year stipend. Hennessey said the selection committee was taken with his commitment to education and the broad spectrum of ideas covered in his poetry, choosing him over 15 other applicants.

In announcing Cornish's appointment, Menino called him "an accomplished poet who will honor our city's rich literary heritage."

In addition to working with the city's youth, Cornish hopes to hold readings and workshops for senior citizens and put a spotlight on the city's underground arts scene.

"There's a lot going on that no one knows about," he said. "In Boston you have a wonderful cultural mix. Sometimes it's a little hectic, but it's all there."

Poet Jason Tandon Nov. 11, 2008

My guest Nov 11, 2008 5PM will be poet Jason Tandon author of the poetry collection:

Wee Hour Martyrdom



Jason Tandon was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1975. He is the author of Give Over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt, winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press (due out in 2009). He is also the author of two chapbooks, Rumble Strip (also from sunnyoutside) and Flight, both of which were nominated for the 2008 Massachusetts Book Award. His poems were twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2007 and have appeared in many journals, including New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Columbia Poetry Review, The Laurel Review, Poetry International, Poet Lore, and Fugue. Tandon holds a BA and MA in English from Middlebury College and an MFA from the University of New Hampshire.

Nov 4, 2008 Lawrence Kessenich : Former Houghton Mifflin Editor and Poet

My guest Nov 4, 2008 at 5PM is Lawrence Kessenich:


"I was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1950 -- the year it was chosen "The All-American City" by Life Magazine -- and lived in a small town for a few years, but was in Milwaukee by seven years old, so I consider it my home town. Undergrad at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, took six years to get through, from 1968-1974 -- quite an era to be in college! Meandered through my twenties, and finally went to grad school in creative writing (poetry) at UMass Amherst in 1977, at 27, where I lived half-a-block from Emily Dickinson's house and encountered poets James Tate, Donald Junkins, and Joe Langland (who tried to seduce me on the banks of Quabbin Reservoir, after we drank retsina, which he hid in a tree hollow, read poetry, and went for an illegal swim in the reservoir). When I didn't get a teaching assistantship for my second semester, I had to drop out of UMass, and I applied for the Radcliffe Publishing Course, was admitted, and attended in the summer of 1978.

My first publishing job was as editorial assistant to Robie Macauley, a well-known name in the literary world, at Houghton Mifflin (pronounced ho'-tun mif'-lin, by the way -- many people don't know how to pronounce it correctly). HM's trade division was still in a brownstone on Park Street, at the time, with a manual elevator. Robie, my boss, had been a rising star writer in the 50s, went the Iowa Writers Workshop, where he dated Flannery O'Connor, and went on to edit The Kenyon Review and become the first serious fiction editor of Playboy (good stories about his time there, by the way). He came to HM as a senior editor. I had to teach myself to type faster as his assistant, because I had to type all his letters, from which I learned a lot about how to speak to writers about their work. I also shared an office with another editorial assistant right next to the office of the editor-in-chief, Austin Olney, and was in a position to see things such as John Kenneth Galbraith -- an !
enormously tall man -- duck his way under our doorways to visit Austin.

Within a year of arriving at HM, I realized that I was going to have to show that I could acquire books in order to have any chance of being promoted, so I started pursuing authors. My first two successes were W. P. Kinsella's "Shoeless Joe" (probably my best publishing story) and Rick Boyer's "Billingsgate Shoal," a mystery (which won the Edgar for Best Mystery Novel of the Year.) Both books were accepted at one editorial meeting -- which I could not attend, as an editorial assistant -- and "Shoeless Joe" won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, so those two books made people aware of me within HM, and I was soon promoted to assistant editor, and I could start traveling to NYC to visit agents. I was ultimately promoted to editor by Nan Talese, well-known literary editor and wife of Gay Talese. I had lunch at her home in NYC a couple times, and met Gay and saw his study, with its endless rows of filing cabinets containing research documents for his many non-fiction books.!


Over my 9.5 years at HM, I acquired another HM Literary Fellowship-winning novel, "Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street" by David Payne as well as other fiction and nonfiction books. I worked with Diane Middlebrook and Diana Hume George, the editors of "Selected Poems of Anne Sexton" and, for a few years of the nine she worked on it, with Diane on "Anne Sexton: A Biography" (there was a very controversial aspect of that book, which occurred during my watch, so you should ask me about that). I met Jimmy Carter, whose biography Nan Talese edited (one day she called me into the conference room as I passed by to show me several Carter family photo albums that Jimmy had lent her to find photos for the book). Our "slush pile" (unsolicited mss. reader), Dell Hammond, passed on Terry McMillan's first novel, "Mama," to me, and I ended up being her first editor. (There are some very good stories about her, so be sure to ask about that experience.) "Shoeless Joe" was sold to the movies!
and became the basis for "Field of Dreams." On the eve of my departure from HM, my wife and I were invited to Fenway Park to be extras in the movie, and I was very warmly received by the director and actors, who knew the whole story of my work with Kinsella. The director placed us so that we appeared onscreen, in the background, during in the movie.

I left HM because I was frustrated with the limitations of book acquisition -- how much time had to be spent "selling" books one wanted to acquire to fellow editors and sales, sub rights and publicity departments -- and I was also too much on the writers' side to be a very good contract negotiator. I left HM in June, 1988 -- the very month of the "Shoeless Joe" filming at Fenway Park.

Since then, I have made my living, first, as a technical editor, then as a technical writer, and, finally, as a marketing writer for various marketing agencies and marketing departments of companies. During that time, I have written children's books and novels for adults (had agents for some of these, but none sold), short stories, poetry, and, most recently short plays -- I just submitted two ten-minute plays for the Boston Theatre Marathon. (I have a number of stories about those years.) I've achieved the most success with my poetry, so far, having published in half-a-dozen magazines and had the one chapbook published (another is under consideration, and I've submitted a full-length ms. to a number of contests)."

Oct 28 Gary Metras: Founder of Adastra Press

Gary Metras is the author of the poetry books: The Night Watches, Destiny’s Calendar, and Until There Is Nothing Left (Ridgeway Press, 2003), along with eleven chapbooks, most recently, Greatest Hits 1980-2006 (Pudding House, 2007). His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in such journals as The American Voice, Another Chicago Magazine, The Bellingham Review, The Boston Review of Books, California Quarterly, Connecticut Poetry Review, English Journal, New England Watershed, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry, Poetry East, Sanctuary, Wild Earth, Yankee, and Tears in the Fence (UK), along with the recent anthologies Birth, Living Frost (Iowa 2002, 2005), and Proposing on Brooklyn Bridge (Grayson, 2003).

Metras is a past recipient of the Massachusetts Fellowship in Poetry. Virginia Quarterly Review wrote of his long poem, Seagull Beach, “The book’s feel, heft, and contents are an evocative experience.” About his chapbook on teaching, Today’s Lesson, NEA Today [journal of the National Education Association] had written, “Who would have guessed that an ordinary school day can inspire extraordinary lyrical moments?....In [the title poem] “Today’s Lesson,” the simple question, ‘Can a good man do evil?’ leads readers into the magic connection between students and teacher and between Metras and his reader.” And the critic-poet, Robert Peters, in reviewing Destiny’s Calendar, said, “Metras writes moving meditations on our lives, and on his own. His language is direct and unpretentious. His music has a full and faultless sound....In almost every poem there is a surprising passage of insight....Metras is an authentic, unpretentious moving voice. These are poems to read aloud, linger over, and share with friends.” And Small Press Review said of Until There Is Nothing Left: “Metras is writing a mytho-poetry here of stones and bridges, water and our bodies, the outer and inner places, the landscapes of mind and heart....Again and again, the poet goes through the threshold of the daily into the aware life that lies somewhere beyond words yet is rendered in the poem.”

Gary Metras is the editor, publisher, and printer of Adastra Press, which specializes in hand crafted chapbooks of poetry. Adastra publishes 2-5 titles a year and has released 77 titles from 47 poets around the country. In reviewing several Adastra titles last year, the American Book Review said, “As long as fine literary presses continue to handcraft handsome books like these from Adastra, serious readers of the twenty-first century can rest assured, the book is alive and well.” And Contemporary Poetry Review, the online journal, has chosen Adastra as Publisher of the Year 2006 (July 2007). He has read his poems at bars, book stores, colleges and universities, including Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Sarah Lawrence College, University of Detroit, and Kent State University. A native of Chicopee, Massachusetts, he has worked as a store clerk, tobacco picker, short order cook, hod carrier, air traffic controller (U. S. Air Force 1966-1970), book store manager, and high school English teacher. He holds degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Goddard College. When not busy writing, printing, or fly fishing (he is on the board of directors of the Pioneer Valley Chapter of Trout Unlimited), Metras teaches writing at Springfield College and lives in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

Oct 14, 2008 John Amen founder of "Pedestal Magazine"

Oct 14 5PM






John Amen is the author of two collections of poetry: Christening the Dancer (Uccelli Press 2003) and More of Me Disappears (Cross-Cultural Communications 2005), and has released two folk/folk rock CDs, All I’ll Never Need and Ridiculous Empire (Cool Midget 2004, 2008). His poetry has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including, most recently, Rattle, The New York Quarterly, The International Poetry Review, Gargoyle, and Blood to Remember. He is also an artist, working primarily with acrylics on canvas. Amen travels widely giving readings, doing musical performances, and conducting workshops. He founded and continues to edit the award-winning literary bimonthly, The Pedestal Magazine (www.thepedestalmagazine.com).

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.



’

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.