We’ve marked these blogs with a blue arrow. 

Blogs that are date specific — that is, they refer to upcoming events — are marked with a red arrow.

Notes on Contributors

Chapter And Verse Literary Reading Series

Jamaica Pond Poets

Friday, February 10, 2012 at 7:30 pm, Loring-Greenough House, 12 South Street, Jamaica Plain Centre. Featured Poets MARY BONINA , KEN TANGVIK, and GARY WHITED. More…

The House of Seven Gables: Bringing Cultural Awareness Across Borders of Time and Place

Rhina P. Espaillat

I’d like to mention another cultural organization whose aims go beyond the stewardship and preservation of a national landmark to include service to the community: The House of the Seven Gables, one of the historical and literary jewels of Salem. Having been there years ago, I remembered it as a repository of wonderful artifacts that help to render the early history of New England palpable to those lucky enough to have a tour of the place. It’s full of items that illuminate the way people lived in 18th and 19th century Salem: how they cooked, served and entertained; what they wore and read; all the daily minutiae of real life, including some priceless gossip. More…

SOUTH OF BOSTON POETRY TRAIL  VOL 2 NO   16
February  2012

Jack Scully

Find about upcoming poetry readings in your area, and opportunities to submit your poetry! More…

Spoken word — from child’s play to a permanent place in the mind

Jacquelyn Malone

Remember that childishly perverse jingle from elementary school: “I see London, I see France, I see so-and-so’s underpants”? That frivolous little chime started ringing in my head recently, perhaps because of two movements in our society. First is the campaign to stop bullying in the schools. I must admit that as a child I loved that chant and got a first grader’s excited giggle at being able to parrot it aloud with other children. I don’t think I meant anything malicious – though the poor victim might have thought otherwise. It was the pure joy a spontaneous recitation. More…

Judging a Book by Its Blurb

Michelle Gillett

Last year, several friends asked if I would write a blurb for their forthcoming books. Nothing delights me more than knowing a friend has succeeded in getting a book of poems published.  I enjoy sitting down and rereading poems I am often familiar with, have often critiqued and discussed. Now here they are—parts of a whole and the whole creates a different and richer meaning, one I must translate into clear, concise language. I must capture the essence of the collection and convince a potential buyer of the book to purchase and read it.  It is a challenge and a pleasure. More…

POETRY: THE ART OF WORDS/MIKE AMADO MEMORIAL SERIES

Jack Scully

The Plymouth Center for the Arts 11 North St, Plymouth, February 12, 2012. Poetry Features Charles Coe and Mignon Ariel King. Music Feature Nathan J. Notesworth. More…

Football

Carla Panciera

Ah, January.  Wind chill and dark nights, black ice and white outs, arctic air masses and snow days, ice melt and road salt.  What a season for evocative language– and as if all these aren’t poetry enough, consider this, gem of all January gems for those of us who love football:  postseason.  It’s a rich time of the year indeed, full of nose tackles and nickel backs, wide-outs and slot receivers, signal callers, pash rushers and those pesky wild cards.  It’s deep backs and H-backs, it’s cover 2’s and man, slant routes and bombs, long squibs and hang time, end-arounds and keepers, i-formations and safeties coming on a blitz.  The end zone, the red zone, the deep threat, the tuck rule.  It’s blindsides, bootlegs, bump and runs. It’s dime packages, double teams and safeties roaming free.  Shotguns, pump fakes, quick counts, stiff arms, sweeps, draws, and the option. More…

Discussions of African American Poetry

Lisa Olstein

One of the things I love most about poetry (find enlivening, necessary, joyous) is the way it creates habitats for associative movements of mind. Poems are exquisitely capable of progressing in ways underprivileged by our culture’s dominant (normative) modes of logic and narrative, ways that much more truly reflect how we think and feel as we sort, at lightning speed, through the various kinds of input—sensory/perceptual, emotional, intellectual—and multiple time zones—the present’s circumstances, the past’s memories (implicit and explicit), the future’s ideations—that make up the reality of any given moment.  More . . .

Calliope—poetry craft workshops in collaboration with West Falmouth Library

Alice Kociemba

Calliope – Poetry Readings at West Falmouth Library is celebrating its fourth anniversary this January. Our series has grown by leaps and bounds and we are grateful to all the wonderful featured poets and open mike readers who have read thus far. This year, Calliope’s theme is “From First Draft to Feature” and is supporting the development of poetic craft through a series of three workshops. Plans are also in the works for a series on The Performance of Poetry, especially aimed for featured and open mike readers to develop their own, and effective style of relating to the audience. More . . .

Commentary on Hummer Essay

Rhina Espaillat

Hummer’s essay on Vachel Lindsay is very interesting.  These poems of his are a revelation of sorts, so different in tone–but not in manner–from the ones that everybody of my generation knows. He feels like a precursor of rap, because of his snappy meters and repetitions and swift flow; there’s something almost “smart-alecky” about his lines, oddly out of synch with the moral earnestness and naive good intentions that make him feel dated. Even the way he seems to turn against jazz and the saxophone in these poems, in favor of the romanticized Irish harp, suggests a kind of narrowness, an inability to love opposites, to hold two things in focus at the same time. But isn’t that particular faculty for creative ambivalence exactly what poetry is good at? More…

Human Error Publishing January Vachel Lindsay

Paul Richmond

The mystery of Vachel Lindsay
One of the most visible poets in America
Consider the father of the Beats
Nearly forgotten
I didn’t recognize the name
Vachel Lindsay   More . . .

POETRY: THE ART OF WORDS/MIKE AMADO MEMORIAL SERIES

Jack Scully

A line up of a Plymouth Center reading series. More . . .

MassPoetry blog — December 2011

MassPoetry blog — November 2011

CHAPTER AND VERSE LITERARY READING SERIES

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2012 at 7:30 pm
Loring-Greenough House, 12 South Street, Jamaica Plain Centre (See parking note below)

Featuring:

MARY BONINA’S newest poetry collection is Clear Eye Tea (Cervena Barva Press). She is the author of two chapbooks, Living Proof and Lunch in Chinatown, poems inspired by the experience of teaching recent immigrants the English language in their workplaces. Her poetry has been featured in Salamander, Hanging Loose, English Journal, Gulf Stream, and other journals and anthologies. She has received an Honorable Mention for her memoir, My Father’s Eyes, from the University of New Orleans, and she was a finalist in the Teacher’s Voice competition.

KEN TANGVIK’S collection of urban short fiction titled Don’t Mess with Tanya: Stories Emerging from Boston’s Barrios was published in 2011 by Aberdeen Bay Publishers. Many of the stories in this book are based on experiences he had in working with young adults in Boston. Ken Tangvik is a professor at Roxbury Community College and is a specialist in multicultural fiction. He is also the co-founder of the Hyde Square Task Force, a Jamaica Plain-based award-winning nonprofit that engages at-risk teens in the arts, college prep, and community organizing.

GARY WHITED is a poet, philosopher, and psychotherapist. He grew up on the plains of eastern Montana, and a strong sense of place pervades his poetry, whether that place is the prairie, the city, or the inner spaces we inhabit. His poems have appeared in Salamander, Bellowing Ark, Red Owl Magazine, and Diamond Dust. He received an International  Merit Award from the Atlanta Review, and an Editor’s Prize from Plainsongs. Gary Whited has been a featured reader at many venues in eastern Massachusetts, and he is a member of the Jamaica Pond Poets.  

COME JOIN US FOR POETRY, FICTION, and REFRESHMENTS (of course!)

Chapter and Verse takes place in the historic Loring-Greenough House at 12 South Street in Jamaica Plain Centre, just across from the Monument.

Suggested donation $5.00 or whatever you can afford. (We mean this. We would rather have you than your money.) Free refreshments are served.

Parking Information: The Loring-Greenough House has a parking lot, but  several spaces are reserved for ZIP Cars. Please respect these spaces, and also please try not to park on the grass. There is ample unrestricted street parking and a large, free public parking lot off Centre Street, between Burroughs and Thomas Streets, just a block from the Loring-Greenough House.

There is also a parking lot off the right side of Burroughs Street, behind the stores on Centre Street.

For information check our website at http://jamaicapondpoets.com or email dorothy.derifield@gmail.com or call 617-325-8388.

The House of Seven Gables: Bringing Cultural Awareness Across Borders of Time and Place

I’d like to mention another cultural organization whose aims go beyond the stewardship and preservation of a national landmark to include service to the community: The House of the Seven Gables, one of the historical and literary jewels of Salem. Having been there years ago, I remembered it as a repository of wonderful artifacts that help to render the early history of New England palpable to those lucky enough to have a tour of the place. It’s full of items that illuminate the way people lived in 18th and 19th century Salem: how they cooked, served and entertained; what they wore and read; all the daily minutiae of real life, including some priceless gossip.

But during a recent visit I learned that the House now runs a series of Settlement Projects meant to reach, not just the community at large, but in particular the area’s growing population of immigrant young people from various cultures, who need all the help they can get to become part of their new country. The Settlement Projects reach out to children and teens through programs that feature music, dance, the visual arts, language and literacy training, as well as career and college preparation.

The newest program invites students to visit the House, use it as a resource for building familiarity with the period it represents, and goes on from there to explore how the past helps to create the present, and how it can teach us to shape the future. Those visits include a guided tour of the House, and an open-ended, informal Q & A session. Having once been cast as Mrs. Brewster in a play about the Puritans, at P. S. 94—not long after I had learned to speak English—I know how far such experiences can take the young mind toward empathy and a sense of belonging.

In addition, the House and its Settlement Programs sponsor a series of special events unrelated to the House itself, but intended to enlarge and build upon the growing cultural awareness of young people and foster their own creativity and desire to learn. For example, on February 21, at 7 p.m., the House is hosting a Melopoeia performance—a session of poems by various authors, including Federico Garcia Lorca—recited with a musical background. The performers—guitarist John Tavano, vocalist Ann Tucker, and two poets, Alfred Nicol and I—hope to interest the largely Spanish-speaking students in attendance, and their families, in music, in poetry, in the history behind the poems, and in the use of the arts to convey personal experience.

For details, those interested may contact Ana Nuncio, at   anuncio@7gables.org   or Alan Collacchico, at   acollachico@7gables.org    There is also a website for directions and hours and other information:    www.7gables.org .  Since the Feb. 21 event is a fundraiser, there is an admission charge: $5 for members, $10 for non-members. Also, seating is limited, so those interested in attending should call to reserve seating: 1-978-744-0991, ext. 104. The address of the House of the Seven Gables is 115 Derby St., Salem, MA 01970. There is plenty of parking.

SOUTH OF BOSTON POETRY TRAIL

VOL 2 NO   16
February  2012

Submissions

Bits and Pieces.

Spoken word — from child’s play to a permanent place in the mind

Remember that childishly perverse jingle from elementary school: “I see London, I see France, I see so-and-so’s underpants”? That frivolous little chime started ringing in my head recently, perhaps because of two movements in our society. First is the campaign to stop bullying in the schools. I must admit that as a child I loved that chant and got a first grader’s excited giggle at being able to parrot it aloud with other children. I don’t think I meant anything malicious – though the poor victim might have thought otherwise. It was the pure joy a spontaneous recitation.

Which brings me to the second societal movement, the advent of spoken word poetry. I also have to admit that I wasn’t really keen on spoken word poetry when I first read poems that were written in a spoken word context. They were – I thought – lame.  But then many of the poems in such first-rate literary magazines as Poetry can seem lame occasionally. And as I’ve seen and read about high school kids getting ecstatic about poetry through the spoken word, I’m suddenly taken back to my own high school years when I participated in the National Forensic League competitions, and I realize how foolish my skepticism was. Most often I did the debate or persuasive speaking contests, but occasionally I would participate in oral interpretation, which was recitation of poetry. I loved those contests. They were without the tension in a contest like debate where you never knew what argument your opponent might throw at you. Oral interpretation was more like a frolic, freeing the body and the tongue to concentrate on meaning and to take the audience along with you.

When I think further back, what made me first love poetry was my mother reading it aloud to me when I was four and five – the way I read Where the Wild Things Are  to my own children. Sometime in high school she’d had an English class where students studied poetry for a whole semester. When she died that textbook was one of the mementoes she left that I most cherish. The book, published in 1926 by Allyn and Bacon, is filled with pre-modernist poems. I remember long passages from some I never read in school, like Field’s Little Boy Blue, or Holmes’s The Chambered Nautilus. Of course she read poems like The Raven, The Wreck of the Hesperus, The Barefoot Boy, Miniver Cheevy and dozens of others, all of which my mind sleepily remembers after half a century. I’ll never forget how excited I was when I moved to Boston and found out the Blacksmith House in Cambridge was the actual site of Longfellow’s The Village Blacksmith. There on that busy Cambridge street was once a spreading chestnut tree and a forge.

I can still quote many poems by heart that my mother read, though I never memorized them in class.

And that brings me back to “I see London . . . ,” which is like music. When you are a child and it gets inside your skull, you can be easily given over to it. Just so with poems – the verbalization of them gets into some automatic portion of your brain and they become permanent.

So Hurray! For the Spoken Word movement – whether it is students writing their own poems and reciting them or students reciting the great classics of the past. The effect of the movement is the reinvigoration of poetry in the popular culture of America.

Judging a Book by Its Blurb

Last year, several friends asked if I would write a blurb for their forthcoming books. Nothing delights me more than knowing a friend has succeeded in getting a book of poems published.  I enjoy sitting down and rereading poems I am often familiar with, have often critiqued and discussed. Now here they are—parts of a whole and the whole creates a different and richer meaning, one I must translate into clear, concise language. I must capture the essence of the collection and convince a potential buyer of the book to purchase and read it.  It is a challenge and a pleasure.

But when I won The Ledge 2010 Chapbook Competition last year and was in the final stages of getting my manuscript ready for publication, I declined when the editor asked if I wanted blurbs on the back. I confess some of my decision came from chronic fear of being a wallflower—what if I ask and get turned down?  But more of it came from wanting the book to be what it was without adornment. I didn’t want a glamorous headshot of me (some of these, I have noticed are taken of the poet twenty years ago) nor any blurbs attesting to my originality and skill, my intellect and surprising imagery, how alive I am to nature, or how mature and thought-provoking my poems are. Of course, all that is true, but I wanted the poems to speak for themselves.

I am not against blurbs. I am a compulsive back cover reader; it’s like being a voyeur—who is friends with whom, are there any celebrity endorsements here? But truthfully, I gain more from looking at a poem or two and making my own mental blurb about them. If they speak to me, capture my attention, make me think, I am likely to buy the book. There’s a good chance that the cover and title will lure me to make a purchase more than any blurb ever will.

My book looks a little naked without any blurbs on the back—like the first time you put on your bathing suit when summer comes—even if your body is in great shape, you still have that winter pallor. And someone picking it up and turning it over and seeing nothing but my bio on the back might think I have no friends willing to give testimonials to my greatness. It’s true that book without blurbs might appear a little suspect to some. But the book is a slender volume, and blurbs and photos would weigh it down. It has a beautiful cover, so “why gild the lily,” as my mother liked to say.

VISUAL INVERSE
Pairing Poetry and Art

Opening Reception and Poetry Reading
Saturday February 4, 2012 @1PM
Plymouth Center for the Arts
11 North St Plymouth, MA

The original poems of Mike Amado, Louisa Clerici, Regie Gibson, Elizabeth Hanson, Chuck Harper, Lawrence Kessenich, Irene Koronas, Thomas Libby, Gloria Mindock, Tomas O’Leary, Miriam O’Neal, Rene Schwiesow, Bert Stern, Susan Cook Thanas, Sheila Twyman and Miriam Walsh.

Paired with the original visual art of

Barbara Barker, Jill Voelker, Gretchen Moran, Bill Brissette, Ben Pohl, Greg Kullberg, Edwina Caci, Kathleen Mullkins Mogayzel, Richard Mulcahy, Kathy Ferrara, Terry Kole, Ivy Frances, Linda Vopat, D Peter Collins and Pat Bianco.

Show runs through Feb 19            Free admission & refreshment

POETRY: THE ART OF WORDS/MIKE AMADO MEMORIAL SERIES

The Plymouth Center for the Arts 11 North St, Plymouth, February 12, 2012

Poetry Features

Charles Coe is the winner of an Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and now serves as grants program officer at the council. His work has appeared in numerous literary reviews and magazines. A volume of his poetry, Picnic on the Moon, has been published by Leapfrog Press. Charles also appears on two spoken-word CDs: Get Ready for Boston, a collection of stories and songs about Boston neighborhoods, and on One Side of the River, an anthology of Cambridge and Somerville poets. His poems have been set to music by composers Julia Carey, Beth Denisch and Robert Moran. In addition to poetry, Charles writes feature articles and book reviews that have appeared in publications such as Harvard Magazine, The Boston Phoenix, and The Boston Globe. Charles is also co-chair of the Boston Chapter of the National Writers Union–a labor union for freelance writers.

Mignon Ariel King is a womanist writer who has spent her entire life in Greater Boston, Massachusetts. An alumna of the Graduate Program in English at Simmons College, she is a sometime college instructor, a freelance manuscript consultant, and an online journal editor. She is currently working on three writing projects: the third book of an autobiographical poetry trilogy based on her third-generation New England roots; a loose poetic synopsis of Moby-Dick; and her second novella–which is based in Roxbury, Massachusetts.

Music Feature
Nathan J. Notesworth, piano sounds from Hoagy Carmichael, Chopin, Yann Tiersen, and more.

Doors open 11:30AM, music feature 12 noon, poetry feature 12:45pm, open-mic 2pm. Free admission and refreshments.

March 11- Holly Guran & Michelle Radseszewski
April 15- Michael Brown & Valerie Lawson

Visit us on-line www.ptaow.com

“This program is supported in part by a grant from the Plymouth Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency”

Football

Ah, January.  Wind chill and dark nights, black ice and white outs, arctic air masses and snow days, ice melt and road salt.  What a season for evocative language– and as if all these aren’t poetry enough, consider this, gem of all January gems for those of us who love football:  postseason.  It’s a rich time of the year indeed, full of nose tackles and nickel backs, wide-outs and slot receivers, signal callers, pash rushers and those pesky wild cards.  It’s deep backs and H-backs, it’s cover 2’s and man, slant routes and bombs, long squibs and hang time, end-arounds and keepers, i-formations and safeties coming on a blitz.  The end zone, the red zone, the deep threat, the tuck rule.  It’s blindsides, bootlegs, bump and runs. It’s dime packages, double teams and safeties roaming free.  Shotguns, pump fakes, quick counts, stiff arms, sweeps, draws, and the option.

Driving to work last week, I listened, as usual, to sports radio.  The morning’s gag:  the roving reporter heads to Copley Place Mall to see how many non-football fans (all of them women), know who Tim Tebow is.  Rather than grabbing my book bag and heading into the building where my students were no doubt milling about my locked classroom door, I stayed and listened as woman after woman who couldn’t identify players like Vince Wilfork, Drew Brees, and Aaron Rodgers identified Tebow.  I’ve loved football almost as long as I’ve loved poetry.  What can I say?  From watching Monday Night Football with my father in the 1970’s, to playing co-ed touch football in college, to sitting alone for hours on a gorgeous Sunday in September weeping with joy that the season was, at last, upon me, I had always worshiped the game.  Boyfriends then and my husband now had done one of two things:  taught me the intricacies of West Coast offenses and cover two’s or branded themselves football widows.  Boy, did I wish that reporter had interviewed me that day.  But I would never have been strolling through the mall even if I didn’t have to work.  I hate shopping.

Discussions of African American Poetry

One of the things I love most about poetry (find enlivening, necessary, joyous) is the way it creates habitats for associative movements of mind. Poems are exquisitely capable of progressing in ways underprivileged by our culture’s dominant (normative) modes of logic and narrative, ways that much more truly reflect how we think and feel as we sort, at lightning speed, through the various kinds of input—sensory/perceptual, emotional, intellectual—and multiple time zones—the present’s circumstances, the past’s memories (implicit and explicit), the future’s ideations—that make up the reality of any given moment. A multitude of beautiful examples of this abound, some of which I hope to point to soon. Presently though, this associative movement of mind so natural to poetry, to our brains, and to many other cultures’ cosmologies leads me to point out two interesting and meaningful discussions of contemporary African American poetry. Here’s how I got there:

In the last few days, my interest has been piqued, along with many others’, by the unfolding mini-drama over the portrayal of Michele Obama in New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor’s new book The Obamas (excerpted in the Times). I’ve been intrigued by Michele Obama since she entered the national scene. I went to high school with Jodi Kantor, and briefly studied journalism with the same teacher (Helen Smith), whose former students are disproportionately represented in major national publications. I’m curious about the gender issues attached to “First Ladies,” and particularly about Michele Obama’s recent statement that the new book, and perhaps people in general, want to see her as “some angry black woman.” The archetypes, stereotypes, and overall gender and racial politics swirling around in this context are fascinating and deeply important, but I’m a poet, writing in 2012, and enjoying the flood of extraordinary contemporary work being published in a seemingly ever expanding field. So, my mind turned immediately to two fascinating discussions of contemporary African American poetry, which you should check out:

Arielle Greenberg’s recent online article in American Poetry Review:

https://www.aprweb.org/article/revelatory-and-complex-column

jubilat’s African American Experimental Poetry Forum (edited by Terrance Hayes and Evie Shockley): http://www.jubilat.org/jubilat/archive/vol16/  (you have to order the issue, but it’s well worth it on this an on many other counts!)