FaceNews accepts my little piece..thanks,Erika!
September 9, 2009
Where Were You When..?
(a poet comments on 9/11)
It was supposed to be a day of high heel shoes and sale boots for the end of the Fall season. First day,walking in the park across DC manicured lawns and crows covered within hazard striped boxes around the edges,bird flu was about, lots was happening in our NE elitist world and fear was one thing present before the fires even whispered. My TV had essentially been left on a Christian broadcast station,so I took it as some form of fictional, ‘the end is nigh’ broadcast and crossed my heart this was a demented lesson from television producers. I skated the edges of the park as i Pods and worn brow shoes crossed the Autumnal grass with me,the homeless faces looking into space,into the great Metro area. Today was my first day of a part time job,Union Station being only a block away now; I call my hubby who could see the Pentagon from his roof he said “Look to your North,there’s smoke over there-and someone else saw the hit,watched it broil as he stubbed out a cig on the roof of a nearby office building”! I walk into the chaos of Union Station,into Nine West and there is manic chaos,the girls shaking,freaking over the glass counters,and handbags—what to do? I play acted a Dominatrix “If you take the metro,get on it now!” There would be right comment in that,the trains promptly closed after an hour of ferrying citizens to Maryland Virginia and beyond,the rest of us would walk to our Capitol Hill homes,back to the cloistered stoops of surrealist society.You could spy the mirrored glasses on the park’s outer edges,standing like statuary watching nothing,not even us,but listening to earphones through handsets attached to cuffs on stark white shirts, deftly serious,un-natural,bizarre,no voices though, little sound escaping.We hold hands, black girls,white girls fat men,even the homeless; wondering what city this was— a small boat of comfort comes over as you see your brownstone and sit down again before the TV-the day of work already at an end. Your room-mate comes home 9 hours later having traipsed from Dupont Circle back here to the Hill you think of dinner,then forget then try to call relatives ,friends in NYC-blackout,of course. There is no sadness really,that comes later, you find out the room-mates close friend was one of the men killed on the fated flight through a farmer’s field into the earth of quiet Pennsylvania to spare the rest of us a blow, you find out your aunt has a window sill in the Bowery covered in 16 inches of silt. and that flags still fly in NY,and here too,half-mast; DC,our hub—but,after all is said and done,years masticate by,and you’ve still no idea what happened. But, when someone asks “Do you recall where you were during nine eleven”? You shake your head,and tell it as though you survived it yourself.
review by Jane Crown
Dead End Road
author:Richard Wink
126pp.
BeWrite books
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dead-End-Road-Richard-Wink/dp/1906609365/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249567736&sr=8-1
Richard Wink’s new full length book of poems; Dead End Road
is a tour de force of simple beauty,but you may ask yourself is simplicity in writing as powerful if it is as mainlined to the senses as a firework of language? The answer is yes,when the words fall so easily,so stoutly,that no pyrotechnics need be used,one has a graceful deep collection of work that attains amazing heights.I am weary of high brow language in the academe,low brow bombings of the Gonzo style writer.There are lush and graceful,pure and softer images present here in Dead End Road Richard eschews common language to take us to the divinity of humanity.
It is a book I can cuddle up to near my sunny window frame and sit for hours getting to know the characters within–the forlorn housewife,the working class man and his woe are just two that pierce my mind after having read this book.
Richard does indeed add that sense of a pastoral quality to his poetry.I bid you look at this brilliant gem from one of the poems Housewife-a favorite of mine..
Underwater she understands/soap buds gather like white druids/
over stubborn tired eyelids. Elegance,anguish,perfection I cry!
His poems have a denseness of character,a rural and sometime even urban softness that draws you into their circumference.These images are not fuzzy,they are stolid,framed directly to your head space and nailed promptly to your psyche,they are searing images–as cleanly,serenely and cruelly painted as any Dickens novel!
Richard Wink is a word-smith in Dead End Road .He is very astutely capable at loosely following not only us but self,keeping a distance that says he knows us,he knows who he is watching,yes,self too.This is a collection that does not clack high in the cheek,that does not yell or bluster,it is a subtle shifting creature of daily lives and life,dancing sweetly in the mirror.It is the reality of a world filled with engaging,curious people,it is us,in short.Filled either with pain or glory,it is truth in all it’s agonies of dark
rough,fearsomely painted beauty.
This Sunday AND Monday are two great interviews with the poets– Leo Briones and John Macker!
All shows are 2pst-3mst-4cst and 5est pm time LIVE!
If you miss us then,catch us on the flip side in the archives..
janecrown.com
Sunday:
Leo Victor Briones was born in El Paso, Texas in 1963. His father came from a family of “mueblerias” or furniture makers who fled the Mexican Revolution for border town of El Paso. His mother’s family, first generation immigrants, but well established in the social circles of Northern Mexico, West Texas, and New Mexico. His grandmother’s second cousin was the lauded Mexican muralist, David Alfaro Siqueiros. Briones credits his blending of art and with social justice to this family lineage. “Siqueiros believed that any form of art should be available to all people — even the desperately poor. And that art should have a social conscience. I too believe that art should have a purpose whether for social change or spiritual transcendence,” reflects Briones. Mr. Briones’ debut book The Poet Remains was published in October of 2006. The Poet Remains a mixture of meditations, love poems and Beat poetry was well received and was highlighted at The Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word in Memphis, Tennessee. Subsequently Mr. Briones was invited to a poetry reading series across several states including venues in Columbia and Charleston,SC; and Savannah and Atlanta, GA. Leo Victor Briones has been honored as the featured poet at the famous Beyond Baroque in Venice California as well as other Spoken Word venues in the Los Angeles area. Recently, Mr. Briones finished the manuscript for his second book of poems Postcards from the Apocalypse. The work deals with issues of the post, post, post Modern world from love to war and everything in-between. Leo Victor Briones owns his own communications firm in Los Angeles, California. A single father he has two curious, engaging and strictly high maintenance sons; Andres 14 and Diego 10.
Monday:
John Macker lives in Northern New Mexico in an old roadhouse on the Santa Fe Trail that is currently in the last throes of an aggressive, decade long restoration. Books and broadsides of poetry include For The Few, The First Gangster, Burroughs At Santo Domingo, black/wing (cd with John Knoll), Adventures in the Gun Trade, his opus about Billy The Kid, Rimbaud and Cochise, and most recently, Woman Of The Disturbed Earth (Turkey Buzzard Press,2007) A new cd, Reading At Acequia Booksellers, is produced by Bruce Holsapple/Vox Audio, Magdalena, NM. Over the last 20 years, has given public readings and conducted workshops
throughout the West, most recently at Sparrows Performance.
final review for for my chapbook from Polymer Grove “Her Delicate Shoe” for this year.Amazingly,this chap has nearly entirely sold out,my publisher has a few copies left for sale,but on my end,am entirely out of them!
You can contact him here for a copy:
Robert Grossklaus :
<dphunkt@mac.com>
We will likely be doing a second run when the New year comes to fruition,as my second chap will also be out with Lummox Press at that time–and I will be happy to give a discount for those wishing to purchase both through me.
Review by Robert Cooperman–author of “The Long Black Veil”
Jane Crown’s “Her Delicate Shoe” is a compelling poetical read. Eschewing the verbal pyrotechnics that has bedeviled so much of contemporary American poetry, Crown chooses a plain style to tell us about herself, her loves, and losses. Hers is a poetry rooted in reality, not speculation or fancy footwork. And since it is a poetry that revels in the seemingly quotidian, Crown’s is a poetry that while celebrating the small, loving joys of everyday life, also recognizes that everything comes to an end, nothing is permanent, the nature of life is loss.
Nowhere is that recognition of loss and the inevitability of ultimate destruction more eloquently described than in “The Fatalists,” a short poem, ostensibly about the Jains or Jainists, that Sub-continental sect that “make{s} sure not an iota of/life be slain..” In wonderfully plain style diction Crown tells us:
“They continue to shrink in numbers ever since inception,
Respecting life
as they have.”
Even the best are doomed, it seems.
This sense of loss and decay is seen also on a personal level, in the final poem in the chapbook, “Aging,” in which Crown, or her persona, laments, “My aging body possesses/Varicose veins of an uncharming blue,” an accurate description of the way that most celestial of colors has a way of turning ugly when it comes to varicose veins. The poem goes on to catalogue the way the physical, outer body breaks down with age. Still, there is wit, even humor even in Crown’s bleak assessment of “I possess pitiful musculature and thinning/Bones…” For the same speaker can also comment, “My ass has become but blasphemy of chocolates/And beer.” The biblical/Shakespearean language allows us to see that the speaker sees her fate in an ironic way.
And even beyond ironies there are joys along the way, as in “My Bicycle Lover,” in which Crown, at the thought of her lover, who is possibly just a kid, “I smile wide like sweet, cold coffee/you sing in the sun, you peddle in the breeze.” There is such affection, such sunny enjoyment of youth in this poem. But that’s the way life is: we’re young and in love one moment, and before we even blink, we’re old and alone. And Crown is honest enough to recognize that sad fact of life.
This sense of joy being swallowed by grief, by life, is most eloquently depicted in “Timbering Jimmy,” which recalls the poet as a young girl with her best friend and playmate, Jimmy:
“I was six, maybe seven, then, you had lively crayons
And a basement full of moldy treasures
“You had a charming West Virginia mother
Who cooked us ham with catsup, and sometimes squirrel.”
“Timbering Jimmy” perfectly captures the wild, carefree days of childhood with their Dylan Thomas-esque “Fern Hill” sense of rural magic: “And I was certain you’d learned/How to charm the Ohio river into submission too.” “Charm” is what this poem is all about, and how time and terrible events have a way of wiping out the charm of life, for
“When I was 29, my mother said in passing,/you had died in a car crash.” Notice the subtle pun on death, in “said in passing.” But the poem concludes on this note of acceptance, resignation: “Down to the Midwestern ground of memory/and recalled how/Once I had shyly loved you.” I love this closure.
I’ve barely scraped the surface of the pleasures this chapbook provides. Read it for yourself and be swept away.
The Jane Crown show this w/end!
August 21, 2009
Yes–I’m a madwoman–there are TWO shows over this w/end! !!
All shows air @ 2pst,3mst,4cst and 5est LIVE.If you miss the live airing,my archives are there,after the fact!
JANECROWN.COM
Saturday on the 22nd:
Clive Matson arrived in NYC in 1960. He quickly fell in with the Beat Generation – his first event was a reading where he met Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Diane di Prima. Herbert Huncke became his second father. Matson’s first book was published by Diane di Prima’s “Poets Press” – 1,000 copies were sold out in 1966-67. Mainline to the Heart and Other Poems was re-released in March 2009 along with significant uncollected pieces from the same period.
Clive returned to school and earned his MFA in poetry at Columbia. He has taught more than 3,000 workshops nationwide, and his how-to text Let the Crazy Child Write! (New World Library, 1998), honoring the creative unconscious, is being used by a number of groups around the world. Matson co-edited, with the late Allen Cohen, the anthology An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind – Poets on 9/11 (Regent Press, 2002), which won the 2003 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles National Literary Award. His seventh book, Squish Boots (2002), was placed, amazingly, in John Wieners’ coffin. Chalcedony’s First Ten Songs (2007) is his current enthusiasm, a passionate, erotic and spiritual voice evolved from the Mainline poems. Mostly Matson writes from the itch in his body. www.matsonpoet.com
Sunday the 23rd:
William Taylor Jr. lives in San Francisco with his wife and a cat named Trouble. His work has been widely published in the independent press and across cyberspace in such publications as Poesy, Anthills and The New York Quarterly. His poetry has twice been nominated for a Pushcart prize. He is the author of numerous chapbooks and his full length collection, Words For Songs Never Written: New and Collected Poems was published by Centennial Press in 2007. The Hunger Season, a book of new poems, was published by Sunnyoutside in 2009.
review by Jane Crown
with the patience of monuments
by Jack Henry
NeoPoiesis Press, LLC
156 pp.
no price
Jack Henry has a guilt in his own melancholia. He admonishes himself for it.There is a sense in with the patience of monuments that he wishes the light
of his soul to shine through to reach others.He’s pushing the walls out,and grabbing a hammer to be sure.
Jack sees the world in an off kilter way,he finds beauty,harsh reality,and his own brand of loose truth come to the fore,daily he struggles to see clarity.
This book is an honest,unrepentant look at self,he hates self,he searches self,he owes himself the love he feels for the world around him,but yet,there is little trust in it.He wants of a form the Universe to order itself better-the world to earn his respect.
He’s a poet filled with hurt,and quite possibly been maimed a time or two,and it shows in this collection with the patience of monuments is a clever foray into a back alley
bitterness that gives up a gold mine of anguish.
Again I tout,there is some part of Jack and the work that loves deeply,needs desperately.Jack wants to be held and coddled like a young boy who can be as strong as any man,maybe more so,and recognized for it.
Jack has an original voice,and a steady hand in this book.
It’s his best imitation of life,and his worst feelings about the rest of us,and well,I suppose we have to accept we’re not perfect either.Jack tells it like it is..
“I roll from the counter/with my cocaine curfew/dispassionate rhythms /of a jazz infused cry” He feels the length of passion spent,he knows the music eeks out,but he’s not sure it is always pleasant to listen to the outer society,and not even quite sure if he can trust himself to know he is being honest with himself.But he rolls on,he keeps going full speed,jotting down the emotion,filling his world with his chaos of images,
That takes alot of brass,and a big set of artistic balls to admit,and frankly,were he not bitching,crying out or pointing his finger,he would not be Jack Henry,I have come to expect no less of him as a poet.Still,remember the tenderness of his spirit,it is
all Jack too,not coy,but truthful,direct.
Get a copy of with the patience of monuments,it’s a curious little book,and a firecracker filled with deafening sound that goes off in the dark sky,Jack’s ebony sky,illuminated by his blend of blood and magical noise swept roughly by his internal need for light.
I have four copies of my chap Her Delicate Shoe…come on,you know you love chapbooks!
email me-archers.crown@gmail.com
for details..
git one,guys!
Just got accepted into the Chiron review and a fabulous Indian poetics journal that has been going strong for 25 years!
woohoo-I can’t be all THAT bad a poet,now can I?
BTR w/end!
August 14, 2009
The switch-a-roo has come to Jane’s show–she’s on this SATURDAY-Jane interviews: Bill Gainer,Will Staple and Todd Cirillo–the authors of the fantastic poetry book
ROXY!
Also,RD Armstrong goes on live with the mighty talented Lawrence Welsh on SUNDAY!
BOTH SHOWS REGARDLESS OF DAY AIR AT 2 PM PST,3 PM MST,4 PM CST AND 5 PM EST.
janecrown.com
ON SATURDAY:
Roxy:
Is after hours poetry; when the lights go down and the memory of last call has faded into the exhaled smoke of a bummed cigarette-Roxy comes to life.The poems are rooted in the street,caress (no slam!) the frailties of the human relationship, lean toward the erotic and show that honest poetry,feelings and emotions,cannot be confined by political correctness.In fact,Roxy is not a political correct collection.Cirillo,Gainer and Staple don’t tell those gentle lies.
a blurb from the poet, Ann Menebroker about Roxy:
…”comes along three poets who write from their perspective of life.Staple reminds of us how “few the nights content of heart/to sit with a friend/in one candle’s light”Gainer writes that “you can beat the fight out of someone/ but to kill the will/was to shatter the angels”and Cirillo,in the poet Rumi’s expansive way says “I’m getting that big-feeling again”..You don’t have to be a poet to love these poems.You just have to have a heart beating behind your ribcage.”
ON SUNDAY:
Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Lawrence Welsh first hitchhiked to New Mexico and Texas in 1989. Five years later, he moved to El Paso, where he still lives.
A first generation Irish-American and former award-winning journalist, Welsh has published six collections of poetry, including Skull Highway (La Alameda Press, 2008).
Poet and editor Naomi Shihab Nye has featured his work in The Texas Observer, and the Los Angeles Daily Journal has called him “one of America’s leading writers on life in border towns.” Kathleene West, poetry editor of Puerto del Sol, has also lauded his work, noting: “It’s getting harder and harder to pull off poems with Southwest imagery, but Lawrence Welsh has worked form, content and diction to make it all new again.”
Welsh has served as a writer-in-residence at a wide range of schools and organizations, including the Border Book Festival in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and at the Booker T. Washington School for the Visual and Performing Arts in Dallas. His work has appeared in about 200 national and regional magazines and journals, including Puerto del Sol, The Louisiana Review, Hawaii Review, Onthebus, The Wormwood Review, Nexus, Chiron Review, The Café Review, Poetry Motel, Poetry Now, Pearl, Big Bridge, Flipside, The Raven Chronicles, The Santa Fe Poetry Broadside, Main Street Rag and the book Das Ist Alles–Charles Bukowski Recollected.
A winner of The Bardsong Press Celtic Voice Writing Award in Poetry, Welsh is an associate professor of English at El Paso Community College. A former guest lecturer at UCLA, he has also taught at the University of Texas at El Paso and the Southern New Mexico penitentiary. From 1995-97, he served as poetry editor of the Rio Grande Review. A nationally known spoken word artist, Welsh has given more than 50 readings during the past 10 years in Mexico, New Mexico, Texas, California and Kansas, and he continues to conduct writing workshops throughout the Southwest.
He has won numerous journalism awards, including the Society of Professional Journalists Bill Farr Reporting Award, the Copley Los Angeles Newspapers Award, the Women in Communications Endowment Award and the Jessie Steensma Scholarship. In 1992, the YMCA named him man of the year for his community service in South Central Los Angeles.Welsh is married to Lisa McNiel, a poet and teacher, and they have two young children, Megan and Patrick.
–
Shooting the Moon Diane Klammer 129 p. Monkey Puzzle Press
When I first published Diane Klammer in my magazine,Heavy Bear;I knew her work was fresh and lovely. I did not realize that when I got my hands on Shooting The Moon,I would be stunned by the brilliance at her words. This book is many things-sometimes experimental,and always intimate with perfect line breaks throughout. He work conveys images of an extraordinary elegance. She speaks of responsibility,motherhood,healing relationships,pacifism,longing for order,becoming,the mystical nature of being,domestic violence,fragility and self awareness. Her poems are life affirming,even transcendental. She is seeking a path to walk on,one she is totally aware of,and one she sometimes finds less than charming in a violent world. There is as stated-a very mystical quality to some of the poems.She seems to be divining the sun into gold as alchemists once thought possible,it has that powerful of a distillation to the quality of her poetry.But,here is Luna,this is her reference for totality. It is not a pale collection,it is big and bright,as the moon,a mystery we can stare straight into without burning our eyes. it is tender and engaging. She is honest when she speaks of family members she loves and admires,and unveils her part in this family of which she feels beholden to,but also sets herself outside of and gives you the keys to her place within it.She shows very clearly..who she is and why she is here,and she seems to have alot to say about her own need to change within it’s circumference.Her family,the human family..
She sees very clearly the delicacy in the Universe,the questions one must ask one’s self to know self. Her work is genius,crafted out of love and finesse. She uses an economy of words to express herself.There is languid imagery to keep you engaged in Shooting the Moon,evocative,and preciously a gift is this book Diane has given us. Some of the poems are narrative,some are more lyrical,but all are a fine collection that moves eloquently through time,her time,her life,her world,and coincidentally our world too. Diane has a vision like a soothsayer,she’s holding out the bones of life to see if you see it too.The book,Shooting The Moon is a book of overcoming,a collection of an Ubermenche. She wonders if we can do the same,she’s inviting you to try in Shooting The Moon.Get your pop-gun and come along,shoot some blanks,and hold on tight.Diane is a fine word-smith,willing all of us to go as far as we can to the border of intimacy in language,where to question is the entire point of being a poet.
