TBR Vol 4 No 3 - The Broadkill River Press

Transcription

PRICE $4.00
May, 2010
Linda Blaskey interviews Joshua Isard in this issue!
Don’t miss Steven Leech’s article on Henry Seidel Canby and Christopher Ward!
The Broadkill Review
c/o John Milton & Co.
104 Federal Street,
Milton, DE 19968
Editor and Publisher:
James C. L. Brown
Editorial Advisory Board:
Grace Cavalieri
H. A. Maxson
Fleda Brown
Howard Gofreed
Linda Blaskey
Gary Hanna
John Elsberg
Edward M. Lukacs
Scott Whitaker
Michael Blaine
hadrow deforge
Phillip Bannowsky
Australia and South Pacific Editor: Maryanne
Khan
To submit work to The Broadkill Review, please send
no more than six poems or one short story to:
the_broadkill_review @earthlink.net. Simultaneous
submissions must be identified as such. Submissions
must be in MS Word format and sent as a single
attachment, or be contained within the text of your email. No photos at this time, or fanciful renderings of
your work. These make downloading your text difficult
and time consuming. Allow up to three months for
response, as we fill each issue with the highest quality
material.
Subscriptions cost a first time fee to individuals of $12,
$15 annually to libraries, but you must send an e-mail
requesting the publication to our e-mail address, above,
and a check made payable to John Milton and Company, mailed to 104 Federal Street, Milton, DE 19968.
6 pdf issues will be delivered to your e-mail-box. You
must renew your subscription once a year ($6 individuals, $12 libraries), and you are in charge of. updating
your e-mail information with us. Bounced issues will
result in your subscription being dropped. Alternatively, we will mail you a cd with all six issues on it at
the end of the year for $15, which includes shipping
and handling, if you select this option.
Advertising rates for an ad in each of the year’s six
issues: eighth of a page, $50; quarter page $95; half
page $180; full page $350.
Inside this issue:
P.
P.
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1 BRP to Publish Five Titles
Inside
issue:
2 Letters
andthis
Notes,
Credo
3
1 TBR Editor Linda Blaskey
Interviews
Joshua
Isard,
P. 2 Letters
and Notes,
Credo
P. 3 Coordinator, Arcadia
University’s new Summer
P.
Creative Writing Institute
P.
P.
P. 8 Poetry by Elisavietta Ritchie
P.
P. 11 Non-fiction by Steven Leech
P.
P. 13 Artist Profile by Steven Leech
P.
P. 18 Scott Whitaker Reviews
Wendy Ingersoll’s new book
P.
Grace Only Follows
P.
P.
P. 19 Poetry byPhillip Calderwood
P. 20 Poetry by Lenny Lianne
P.
P.
P. 20 Poetry by Elisavietta Ritchie
P.
P. 22 Fiction by Joseph LoGuidice
P.
P. 23 Poetry by Lyn Lifshin
P.
P. 32 “Under the Wedgehorn”
a RegularNonfiction Column
P.
by Philip Bannowsky
P.
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P. 36 Poetry by Shelley Grabel,
P.
P. 38 Poetry by Lisa Ellis
P. 38 Poetry by Wendy Ingersoll
P.
P. 40 Fiction by Maryanne Khan
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P. 44 Literary Birthdays
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P. 45 More Essential Books
P.
P. 46 Contributors’ Notes
P. Literary Birthdays
ISSN # 1935-0538
Volume 4, Issue 3
Five Books to Debut Under
Broadkill River Press Imprint
(Milton, De) The Broadkill River Press is please to announce that it will
bring out five deserving works this calendar year. The five works in
question are Sounding the Atlantic, a collection of poetry by Martin
Galvin, a regular contributor to The Broadkill Review, That Deep and
Steady Hum, a collection of poetry by Mary Ann
Larkin, Domain of the Lower Air, a collection of
short stories by Maryanne Khan, who serves as the
Australia and South Pacific Editor for The Broadkill
Review, The Shape of Water, a collection of poetry by
Laura Brylawski-Miller, and The Year of the DogThrowers, a collection of poetry by Sid Gold, a regular contributor to The Broadkill Review.
In addition to three of these authors having
some connection to The Broadkill Review, four of them, Martin Galvin,
Mary Ann Larkin, Laura Brylawski-Miller and Sid Gold are also all previous award winners in the annual Washington Writers Publishing house
competition.
8th Annual Dogfish Head Poetry Prize
Competition Guidelines Set
(Milton, DE) Submission Guidelines for the
8th Annual Dogfish Head Poetry Prize for a
chapbook-length manuscript of poetry by a
resident of the Delmarva Peninsula . The
reading period for the 8th Annual Dogfish
Head Poetry Prize will begin Memorial Day
and end on Labor Day, 2010. For the first
time, organizers announced, entrants will be
able to submit their manuscripts on-line as email attachments in MS Word 03 (or earlier)
to dogfishheadpoetryprize@earthlink.net
Alternatively, send ten copies of your manuscript and a self-addressed postcard for acknowledgement of receipt to: The Dogfish
Head Poetry Prize, c/o John Milton and Company Quality Used Books, 104 Federal Street,
Milton, DE 19968.
Manuscripts should be no more than
forty pages in length, including title page,
table of contents, acknowledgements page and
author’s bio. Winner agrees to provide a color
photograph for the cover and to maintain seThe Broadkill Review is a member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP), the Delaware Press
Association (DPA), and the Independent Mid-Atlantic
Publishers (IMAP), and is listed in Dustbooks’ International Directory of Literary Magazines and Small Presses
and the Writer’s Market and Poet’s Market
crecy until the Prize is presented at the 12th
Annual John Milton Memorial Celebration of
Poets and Poetry in Milton Delaware. Winner
agrees to appear in person at the event and
will be invited to read from their prize-winning
work, with a meet-and-greet book-signing afterwards.
The Dogfish Head Poetry Prize consists of $200 and two cases of Dogfish Head
Craft Brewed Ale. In addition to the award,
the chapbook manuscript will be published by
The Broadkill Press, and imprint of Broadkill
Publishing Associates. The winner will receive
ten copies and the right to purchase additional
copies at deep discount. Sam Calagione, CEO
and Founder of Dogfish Head Craft Brewed
Ales is a former English Major who decided to
pursue opening a microbrewery instead of an
MF in Creative Writing. Past winners of the
Prize are James Keegan, Emily Lloyd, Michael
Blaine, Scott Whitaker, Anne Colwell, Linda
Blaskey, and David Kozinski.
Independent
IndependentMid-Atlantic
Mid-Atlantic
IMAP
IMAP
Publishers
PublishersGroup
Group
V OLU ME 4 , I SSUE 3
T HE B R OA DK I LL REV IE W
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Letters and Notes from Our Readers
My day job sometimes makes it so
difficult for me to read the things I
want to read! I'm just sitting down to
enjoy this issue now.. I did notice
your Credo, where you mention giving feedback to writers. I wanted you
to know that I'm always happy to
receive feedback; I hesitate to ask for
it because I figure editors have
enough ways to spend their time
without my asking for more of it.
Best,
Tery Griffin
BTW, my sister was very pleased
with the review and photo of her
book My Boys. As was I -- thank
you. You may be interested that both
of our books just won first place in
our respective divisions in the Del.
Press Association 2010 Communications Contest - hers in memoir, mine
in book of verse. Feels good!
Wendy Ingersoll
PS I'll put subscription renewal in
the mail tomorrow.
thank you thank you looks excellent
Respectfully,
Kelley J. White
Issue jam-packed with good stuff.
And I like being sandwiched between Edmund Spencer and Sir Walter Raleigh. And the rest of the journal seems devoted to one ER. My
head is swelling. Thanks-- More
anon as I have more time to read (at
is nearly midnight now)-Elisavietta Ritchie
That looks great! Thank you so
much for including my story and for
sending a copy of the magazine.
Cheers!
Leah Darrow
I know you thanked me for considering The Broadkill Review, and you
are welcome, but we writers owe
a bigger thanks to you, and to all
that work to keep their magazines
going. It's not always easy to put
them together, and it can be time
consuming work. I appreciate your
consideration of my writing. Below
is a very short bio. Please let me
know if you would like something
longer.
Best Regards,
Joe
Hi Jamie, I'm still working my way
through the latest, and as always
substantial, TBR. I have more articles in the offing about Delaware
literature….It is a piece about the
"Wilmington" novels of Henry Seidel
Canby and Christopher Ward. It's
short -- only a little more that 1300
words. I've been revising the original
and am within days of feeling good
enough about it to send a copy for
your consideration in TBR.
I'm also currently reading
Out of the Hurly-Burly by Max
Adeler (Charles Heber Clark), which
takes place in New Castle in the late
19th century. After I've read and
digested it, I plan to read Ella Tybout's novel from the very early 20th
century, Poketown People. Tybout's
novel also takes place in the environs of New Castle, actually closer to
Delaware City. Placing the two together, in a kind of compare and contrast fashion, may prove to be another article about yet another aspect of Delaware literature, but
more about that later.
Steve Leech
Credo
“Just reading through my poems included in the
last issue and I'm thrilled to see them -- thank
you so much! Unfortunately I had sent you a
copy of one of the poems with an error in it -- my
fault -- this is in middle stanza - the next to last
line is some brainstorming I was doing and neglected to delete. Just goes to show, we should
re-read everything before pressing that Send button! At any rate, thanks again so much for including my poems.”
The good news is that the poet who wrote me this
note after their work appeared in The Broadkill Review is such an incredibly good writer that the
“brainstorming” portion of what we had published
was still quite good, but this does bring up the point I
have made over and over about writers not bothering
to proof their own material before they send it out to
a magazine or publisher. And while I try to catch ty-
pos (I’m not perfect at this) in the realm of poetry I am
more inclined to give the submitter the benefit of the doubt
and chalk up “re-spellings” or grammatical oddities to artistic license (which nonetheless isn’t the same as having
artistic 007 license to murder the language, although you
would think that that’s exactly what some people who consider themselves “writers” think).
So please, do NOT send us your “rough” draft, or
even you polished “first” draft, or the story in which your
protagonist’s name changes somewhere in the middle of a
muddy fourth paragraph because you suddenly decided
that the new name is perfect but then forget to replace
every iteration of the character’s first name, the one you
don’t like any more. We want to see your LAST draft, the
actual perfect copy over which you have been with a proverbial fine-toothed comb.
(Please note: When contributors from England or
the Commonwealth submit to us, we deliberately do NOT
correct their spellings of such words as “colour.” While I a
a fan of Noah Webster, it was THEIR language first.)
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Carry-On Luggage
(Inside the Mind of Josh Isard)
TBR Editor Linda Blaskey Interviews
Joshua Isard, Coordinator,
Arcadia University’s Creative Writing Institute
Just like that all important flight bag, adjunct professor Joshua Isard’s mind is packed with essential stuff.
He has graciously agreed to reveal to The Broadkill
Review some of the thoughts that travel with him constantly. Thoughts on topics such as “dangerous writing”, international travel, the creative writing process,
the importance of trust, and the creation of a summer
writing program.
—LB
TBR: In your
short story,
“Ignore the Man at
the End of the
Rope” (The Broadkill Review, Vol.3,
issue 5), there is a
character, a boyhood friend of the
protagonist, who
hangs himself in
his backyard.
That character is
mentioned again
in a later story,
“False Premises” ( Inscribed,
Vol.4, issue 8).
Was this an actual
event in your life?
JI:
Kind of. (I
feel like that’s a
common answer
when people ask if something I wrote really happened.) When I was in elementary school I walked to
school with someone who lived down the street from
me, and we were friendly, but not friends. I saw him
as we went through middle school and high school because the district wasn’t that big, but after age 11 or so
we didn’t spend much time together. After I graduated
I forgot about him until my mother told me that he’d
committed suicide – he apparently had serious psychological problems – and someone later told me that he
hung himself in his back yard. That image stuck with
me for years, and then the story around it appeared
one day. I wasn’t actively thinking about the whole
thing, but there it was, so I wrote it down.
TBR: This is a quote from “Ignore the Man at the End
of the Rope” – “People reading stories are always looking
for important parts.” It seems the suicide of this young
man is an important part of your life. Do you think writers exorcise some memories by writing about
them?
JI:
I know that a lot
of my favorite writers
exorcise memories in
their work (Tom Spanbauer calls it “Dangerous
Writing”), and I think it
works for a lot of people.
It not only helps them
deal with events, but produces some great writing.
TBR: Why do you think
Spanbauer calls it
“dangerous writing”?
Because the
writer
has to access a dangerous
part of his psyche or because the writing is edgy
in that the author is putting himself out there?
JI:
I think it’s called
“dangerous” because the
author has to go somewhere inside himself or herself that they don’t want to
go, to discuss something they know won’t be comfortable.
The things we don’t talk about are the things our society
tells us shouldn’t be said, so the act of saying them is a
little dangerous.
A lot of that ends up being edgy, which is a different kind of dangerous, and has more to do with the
reception of the work. I don’t want to discount that discussion, but finding the material inside you, accepting
it’s a part of you, then expressing it – that’s the truly
dangerous process of writing.
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TBR: You got your advanced writing degree from the
University of Edinburg. What prompted you to go to
Scotland?
diculous”. What do you think prompted these comments? And were they made by students taking the
course?
JI:
I’d traveled abroad a few times, but never lived
abroad. Since I transferred as an undergrad I missed
that experience, and I thought grad school would be a
great opportunity for it. It was. I had fabulous professors, and opportunities for travel you can’t get living in
the United States. That combination of school and primary experiences affects my teaching and writing to
this day. And it gave me the travel bug, so my wife and
I make sure to take one or two trips overseas each year.
TBR: You now teach at Drexel University and Arcadia
University, both in Philadelphia. Do you teach similar
courses at both universities?
JI:
Lolita is and advanced piece of literature, and I
taught it to a group of kids who, when we went over
Animal Farm, needed to be told what the Soviet Union
was. Not the details, but that it existed. The very reasonable skepticism came from other faculty members
and some friends, but the students really rose to the
occasion. That was a situation where I think the kids
learned a lot, and probably didn’t even realize how
“advanced” the rest of us consider Lolita. Reviewing
that book with CCP students is one of my top five most
gratifying experiences in teaching; it showed me that
any good student in any school will strive to meet a
challenge.
JI:
I teach composition at both Drexel and Arcadia,
but I also teach literature and creative writing at Arcadia.
TBR: You’re currently putting together and directing
a summer writing workshop at Arcadia. Could you tell
us something about that?
TBR: What are some of the challenges teaching at two
schools?
JI:
We call this course an institute, which is similar
to a hybrid course. The group will meet for one weekend on Arcadia’s campus (July 9 – 11, 2010), and then
workshop online for the next four weeks. What we’re
trying to do is to recreate the in-person workshop environment online as accurately as possible. I feel
like this is a relatively unexplored area, and I’m
excited about what we’re establishing.
JI:
Adjunct professors tend to make a living by
teaching a lot of classes; many of my friends teach five
or six in one term. I’m teaching five right now. Managing all those classes, especially when it comes to grading and preparing, is difficult. No matter how I organize things, at some point I end up with a stack of 80 papers which I have to turn around in a week. So some
weeks I put in thirty hours of work, some weeks I put in
eighty hours. It can get a little crazy, but then what job
can’t?
TBR:
Is this a credit course?
JI:
Yes. Undergraduates will earn four credits, and
graduates three credits.
TBR: This is a quote from your short story, “Mr.
Bones” (The Broadkill Review, Vol. 1, issue 6).
“Teaching has become a means for your own creation,
instilling ideas and possibilities, and having time to produce new material.” Is this true for you, in your writing?
TBR: How will you staff the program – instructors
from the university, visiting writers?
JI:
We all want to be that way, and each term we
think we’ve planned well enough so it will be, but something always comes up. A particularly frustrating student, an assignment that causes unforeseen problems…..that sort of thing takes time away from producing “new material”. I write as much as I can when
school’s in session, and plan for a major spurt of writing
during breaks. Sometimes that works, but sometimes
the muses laugh at my plans.
TBR:
TBR: You taught Nabakov’s Lolita in an Intro to Lit
course at the Community College of Philadelphia. Some
comments about your selection of this piece of literature
were “audacious”, “over the top”, and “bloody well ri-
JI:
We’re planning on utilizing Arcadia’s faculty.
We have great instructors who are excited about being a
part of the Institute.
What kind of students are you hoping to attract?
JI:
We’re looking for students with some creative
writing experience, in either a scholastic or informal
environment. It is an intermediate level course. Undergraduates and graduates are welcome, and both groups
will work on their writing with an experienced group of
peers.
TBR: Is there a contact person or a website where people can go for more information?
JI:
Anyone with questions can contact me
(isardj@arcadia.edu). The website for the program is
http://www.arcadia.edu/creative-writing-institute.htm
TBR: If the summer program is a success, does Arcadia hope it will lead to an MFA program?
JI:
We’re actively expanding our creative writing
offerings, and the Creative Writing Institute is part of
that process. We’re focusing on the Institute for right
now, but we’re also optimistic about where our expansion could lead in the future.
TBR: How does a school start and MFA program?
JI:
One way is to generate interest, through something like the Institute at Arcadia. Most of the details,
however, depend on the particular institution.
TBR: Is it too early in the process to ask how you
would envision staffing the MFA program?
JI:
Unfortunately, it is too early to ask about this
potential program. If it goes that way, there are a lot of
decisions yet to be made.
TBR: There is a website that allows students to rate
their professors. Apparently, your students give you
high marks in the “overall”, “helpfulness”, and “clarity”
categories but consider your courses tough. How do you
feel about that?
JI:
I never read those sites, but that’s actually nice
to know. I like running a tough course, and at the same
time being available to help my students through it. I’m
of the philosophy that if a college course doesn’t challenge the students, it’s not well planned.
TBR: By the way, in the “hotness” category you get a
red chili pepper. Care to comment?
JI:
Well, it is relative to university professors, who
aren’t known for moonlighting as models. Best to keep
that one in perspective.
TBR: Who do you consider some of your biggest influences?
JI:
I’m motivated by precision, so George Orwell,
James Joyce, Amy Hempel and Chuck Palahniuk really
influence me. The thing is, they all had their own ideas
of precision, which is relieving to me, because I get to
decide on my idea.
TBR:
And what is your idea of precision?
JI:
Precise writing says exactly what the author
desires. No superfluous words or phrases, no metaphors that seem at first glance like they should make
sense, but don’t when readers consider them. This
doesn’t mean simple or minimalist; Virginia Woolf and
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Gordon Lish are both precise as far as I’m concerned.
B.R. Myers wrote a great little book about this
called A Reader’s Manifesto. He said “The problem with
so much of today’s literature is the clumsiness of its artifice – the conspicuous disparity between what writers
are aiming for and what they actually achieve.” So, to
take a bit from Myers, precision means hitting exactly
what you’re aiming for.
TBR: If you could give just one piece of advice to writers, what would it be?
JI:
Find people you trust. There’s so much advice
out there, so many people ready to criticize you, it can
be overwhelming. Decide on who you trust, whether
they’re close to you or you’ve never met them, and listen
to those people very carefully.
TBR: You mention “so many people ready to criticize
you.” What do you think of writer’s groups? And isn’t
there an inherent danger in them as far as criticism
goes?
JI:
I’m actually in a writer’s group, and we criticize
each other freely. It works because we trust each other.
The four of us met because we work at the same
university. Someone brought up the idea of meeting up
once a week and discussing writing, and for the last six
months or so that’s exactly what we’ve done, and with
great success I think. This one happened organically:
we met, we clicked, we passed around our work. I’ve
seen writer’s groups advertised in cafes and on
craigslist, but I don’t think they’d have the same success
because there’s no natural element of friendship.
One of the members of my group said on his
blog: “I don’t know if we’re ‘I’ll-help-you-move-the-body’
friends, but some boxes of books? No problem. Is this
an important ingredient? It could be.” I think it is.
TBR: You advise writers, and it is good advice, to find
someone they trust and listen to them. How does one go
about finding that someone to trust?
JI:
Well, like I said about my writer’s group, we just
happen to work at the same school. We met, we figured
out we respected each other’s opinions, and that trust
grew. I think it’s a lot of chance, but you have to keep
your eyes open. Aside from my group there are two or
three other people I trade work with, and I feel lucky to
trust that many people enough to do so.
TBR: Thank you so much for consenting to this interview. The Broadkill Review wishes you much success in
your personal writing, your teaching and in the summer
writing program and all that comes out of that endeavor
in the future.
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Creative WriTing Institute
Dates: July 9, 10, 11 on campus; four weeks of online projects
(ends 8/7) Special Price: $899, earn 3 Graduate Credits or 4
Undergraduate credits
Course Code: EN 386/486 (OP) Period: 2010 Summer II
Creative Writing: Develop Your Skills in Poetry, Fiction, or
Creative Non-Fiction
Participate in a face-to-face workshops during the weekend on Arcadia’s campus (7/9-11).
Improve your writing during an intensive four week workshop conducted online (7/12-8/7).
Get specific feedback from Arcadia’s experienced faculty.
Attend an event with James A. Michener Memorial Prize winner Richard Wertime.
This course can be taken at the undergraduate (4 credits) or graduate (3 credits) level.
About this Institute
This institute is for intermediate to advanced creative writers who want to hone their skills over four
weeks of discussion and workshops. Students will get personal feedback from Arcadia’s Creative
Writing faculty and their peers during both the weekend on campus and four weeks of online workshops.
Eligiblity and Requirements
Students who will be juniors, seniors or graduates as of the Fall of 2010, and who have taken an introductory creative writing
course—which includes a workshop—at their university.
Students new to Arcadia will be expected to submit Two pages of writing, poetry or prose, before July 9 for an in-person workshop over the weekend.
Students will be expected to consistently participate in online workshops for all four weeks after the in-person meetings, during
which students will have the opportunity to develop more of their writing.
How to Register
Pre-Registration
Complete the Creative Writing Institute Questionnaire. This brief questionnaire is to ensure that you
have some experience in creative writing classes and will therefore be able to actively and effectively
participate in the workshops for the Creative Writing Summer Institute. Students new to Arcadia are
asked to submit samples of their writing in this questionnaire.
If you have never been an Arcadia University undergraduate or graduate student, click here for new student version.
If you have been (alumni) or are a current Arcadia student, click here for Arcadia student version.
Once submitted, your questionnaire will be reviewed. Expect a response within two weeks, informing
you of your acceptance to participate in the institute. If you are an undergraduate student, Clare
Quigley, academic advisor, will be contacting you.
Registration
If you have been accepted to the program, you will be automatically registered for the course.
Whether you have been accepted or not to the Institute, you will be notified by Clare Quigley or Josh
Isard.
You will receive via e-mail additional details regarding the on-campus weekend, the online component and payment options before the course begins.
Course Information
Deadline for registration is Friday, June 25, 2010.
Institute Schedule (To Come)
Meals available for purchase on campus.
Off-campus accommodations are available for participants.
Mention when you call that you read about the Summer Institute in The Broadkill Review!
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Poetry by Elisavietta Ritchie
But Can’t You Tell I’m Working?
I can’t say that. He wants to talk.
He could have seen my finger’s tap.
He did not look. He needs to chat.
I remove my borrowed specs, (I snitched
his owl-face glasses till my own are fixed,
so I can’t pull the bell jar down, lock doors).
Must smile and ask, “You’d like some tea?
The kettle’s hot.” But that is up to me.
The water’s cold, takes time to boil,
time for friendly conversation, do wait,
as he is pleased with his day’s writing jag.
I’ve nowhere used up mine, am desperate—
sixteen personae on the loose, half-fixed,
their destinies unsolved, in limbo still,
if I pause they’ll slip away and disappear—
“Did you pay these?” The pile of bills.
“Not due for a week. Tuesday’s good enough.”
“What’s for lunch?” “Snips and snails--”
I clean each lens with vigor, almost break
the fragile frames. The computer buzzes, pants
with thirst for words. My brain leaks paragraphs.
My mind’s a pousse café, liqueurs or Jello layers
stirred so lemon/cherry/orange mingle, mix.
Rainbows of gas in puddles turn a glistening black.
Yet I’m considered cheerful, friendly, kind,
and must not scream, Please just one hour more,
my love, for God’s sake let me work in peace!
First Light
When black sky grays to reveal
new fawns hatched in the grass,
the stag after another doe,
five hunters among the pines,
when the sleeper pulls sheets
higher for one hour more,
the lover nudges and whispers,
Shall we try it again?
When the crone feared in fairy tales
(her loveliness as a girl renowned)
opens lined eyes before dawn and notes
she survived her peers one more night,
when dreamers replay their dreams,
the hermit remembers his losses,
while the rest of the world awakes
to banal tasks and grand schemes.
The soldier on guard duty studies
the eastern sky aflame and recalls,
Red sky in the morning—
Shepherd, take warning.
He perceives through infrared goggles
the remains of yesterday’s battle,
the enemy who’s crept back.
He knows he won’t sleep again.
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Outsiders
“Every poet is in exile”
John Pauker,
Hungarian-American poet
I swim a sea that has no shore
or bottom, Petrarch complained,
but did he have to buck
the Immigration officer?
We are all in exile,
you from your natal land,
I from the crowd, most of us
split from our other selves.
Like carpenter bees in the boatyard,
we buzz and bump around a hull,
seek a soft patch in a plank
to chew through one ship’s walls.
Inside the galley, tea waits in the pot,
coals glow in the stove, a loaf’s uncut.
An empty hammock expects our shape.
But we can’t grind away the rot.
Stranded, we remain on the dock,
watch all the others embark,
We wave back to the child
on the third-class deck—
Look! He wears our face.
Halfway up the gangplank,
we seize the helm, check tides,
raise anchor. Our ship departs,
sail off without a chart,
the keys to our cabin lost,
to our steamer trunks,
to all our locks.
We disembark in shallows.
Unsteady ground ashore.
Stay here? Return? We find
no passports for either port.
Secrets in Iambic Pentameters
For a child who doubts I can keep them
So many secrets you will never know
long hidden in my lines on face and page.
Although my conversations seem to flow
true tales remain confined within the cage
of my long skull, while most of those who shared
their riddles and their loves with me have died.
I too have lived adventures, and much dared.
Don’t guess. I do know better than confide.
Communiqués though skin are safe—no need
For paragraphs. What if the listener spoke?
Like marbles, I may scatter words and seeds:
the small birds twitter and the large ones croak.
I am the owl, who flies on unheard wings,
foretells when others die, but never sings.
P AGE 1 0
This April Day
This is the day after another insomniac night.
This is the day thirty-some bison fled a Maryland farm
and, corralled on a tennis court, leapt
and re-leapt the net.
I cannot leap anything anymore
but admire the bison.
A day it did not rain so at dawn
I hung out the sheets
washed at midnight.
Also a day 41 more soldiers and civilians were killed
and how many more
got their legs blown off
though on the globe far away.
The day Ed and I discussed the logic of euthanasia
but he could not put down his diabetic dog
or I my aging cat.
The day I read my poems to 42 middle-school kids
then at the end skipping lunch
each composed a strong poem of his own.
For this day I am glad
they managed to keep me alive.
[But on a September day
after Ed took his pets to the vet
he aimed the gun inside his own mouth.
At the wake I had to explain
to his relatives shocked
his days were all pain
he knew nothing was left
and nothing could keep them alive.]
SPRING, 1976
We drink expresso with whipped cream
flecked with specks of cinnamon
and chocolate, discuss the exquisite
anxiety of sinning, justify
excursions and experiments
toward further vraisemblance, verisimilitude—
who has not stolen cannot write of theft,
who has not lain can’t write of love,
though Lazarene, we tell of death imperfectly.
In lassitude of cushions piled,
we lick the sweet cream from each other’s lips,
resolve new boldness on the page.
My tiny statue of a Japanese philosopher
adventuring too near the table’s edge
has lost his head.
P AGE 1 1
Delaware Literary History
by Steven Leech
Henry Seidel Canby & Christopher Ward:
Forerunners of Wilmington’s 20th Century
Literary Movement
From his DREAMSTREETS #37 article Jerry Shields,
the late scholar on Delaware literature, comments on Henry
Seidel Canby: "Canby clearly was a prime mover in America's
literary renaissance of the 1920s and '30s. Even so, he never
forgot his Wilmington roots and managed to help a number of
fellow Delawareans get published and read."
Henry Seidel Canby and Christopher Ward were the
two firmly established authors among that flapper era group
of bohemian and avant-garde Wilmington authors. The main
character from Canby’s only novel, Our House, the budding
writer Robert Roberts, after finally finding his own voice making him capable of writing his own novel may well have been
the novel actually written by Wilmington author Christopher
Ward. The novel that Canby’s Robert Roberts was about to
write and which Christopher Ward actually wrote was One
Little Man.
Canby's novel, Our House, was published in 1919 by
MacMillan. It is a coming-of- age novel about a young man
named Robert Roberts, who comes home to Wilmington from
college in New England. His family lives on Delaware Avenue
near Trolley Square during the last years of the 19th century.
There's a war going on with Spain in both Cuba and the Philippines.
Roberts comes home to crisis. The family real estate
business is failing, then his father dies. After selling a house
on Palmer's Row as a real estate agent in his father’s firm, he
decides he must liquidate the family business, sell the family
home, "our house," set his widowed mother up with an aunt,
then take the money and run off to Greenwich Village.
In New York City he runs into Johnny Bolt, a former
college chum who has become a cultural and intellectual provocateur. One might be reminded of Jack Kerouac’s portrayal
of Neal Cassady in Canby's portrayal of Johnny Bolt, but later
in the novel there is the suspicion that Johnny Bolt has become a denizen known as the "pencil man" who surreptitiously
frequents the neighborhood. Among other characters in Our
House is Mary Sharpe, a self confessed "pagan" who is also
from his Wilmington neighborhood and shows up in Greenwich Village to round out the group. In fact, Mary Sharpe may
have been modeled after Canby’s future wife and Wilmington
poet, Marion Gause. While socializing with his group in the
Village, Roberts learns a little about class divisions, a whole
lot about philosophy and art, and that you can't see reality
until you really see who loves you. Roberts also discovers that,
" literature costs money instead of making it."
Ultimately, it's "our house" that brings everything
home. After selling the house in which he grew up, "our
house" becomes a powerful metaphor, and a context for Roberts to form his conclusions about himself and life in general.
Wilmington, renamed “Millington” in the novel, has become a
place for him to find the reality he can really see and understand as an artist. So well is this theme of Our House developed, that a review in the New York Times, on July 27, 1919,
said this:
"An interesting, delightful novel, written with that
apparent spontaneity that is one of the basic essentials of
good fiction, intimate and varied and unafraid in its knowledge of human nature and with its local coloring so rich and
so graphically portrayed that when we have finished the story
we know the town and its people as if we had lived there."
As suggested earlier, Wilmington author Christopher
Ward wrote that novel that the fictional Robert Roberts may
have been about to write at the end of Our House. Ward's
novel is about one little man named Paul Herbert Fricke. His
novel, One Little Man takes place on the streets of Wilmington, most likely in west center city and near Brandywine Park
and up to 18th Street.
One Little Man, published by Cassell & Company in
1926, is about a naive ordinary man who is always being aptly
named by those who affect his life. He is either being named
"Herbie," or "Bert," or "Pallfrey" by a cultural poseur, J. Warrington Dawson, whose malaprops work in the same amusing
ways as do the Duke's in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.
Fricke is part hapless mark and part visionary. More than
anything, he is naive, and this adds to his charm. When he
falls in love with an itinerant salesclerk named Rose, he finds
himself being conveniently hauled off to Elkton to get a
quickie marriage to her. Herbie is about to become a hapless
and star struck father. Yet, throughout the remainder of the
novel, Fricke remains a true optimistic Candide.
Ward wrote another Wilmington novel. That one was
Starling, published in 1927 by Harper. In the novel, Cynthia
Rivers gets married and becomes Cynthia Bruce, but will always be Sandy to her closest friends and college chums who
were all independent women in 1920s America. On her way in
the world with her friends, she is the first to get married, and
not to just anybody. True high class romance snags her and
Cynthia marries into a filthy rich family of old money who has
a lot of real estate along the Brandywine. Where Paul Herbert
Fricke is a poor as a church mouse, Cynthia Bruce is living in
style.
I’s easy to feel sorry for both Fricke and Cynthia.
Both learn the truth behind each’s ill fated marriage. Both
have measured up to being a parent, but both have been
trapped through each’s own brand of abandonment. While
Fricke finds true love in the task of raising a daughter without
a mother who has run off with another man, Cynthia finds
true love with another man who is a writer. But because of
her husband’s overpowering social status she must remain a
starling trapped in a gilded cage, mired in snooty intolerance
and blind inheritance. She is truly a misfit.
Christopher Ward had three careers as a writer, early
in his life he wrote parodies which were published in the Saturday Review of Literature, which was founded by Canby. One
Little Man and Starling were Ward’s two “Wilmington” novels.
He also wrote several historic adventure novels, one of which,
The Memoirs of a Rascal, remains unpublished. Ward also
wrote history, particularly local history about the American
Revolution. His book, The Delaware Continentals remains in
print, thanks to the Delaware Heritage Commission.
While Ward remained in Delaware until his dying
day, Canby managed to escape. But if there is another strain
of literary legacy among Delaware literary figures, Canby and
Ward might very well represent it.
The suggestion could be put forth that beside the Poe
strain that has influenced Delaware’s literature, that there is
a strain that more closely resembles some of the influence of
Walt Whitman, for example, who is another notable American
literary figure with some claim to a mid Atlantic identity.
Closer to us in time, enhanced by our counter culture sensibilities, Canby’s and Ward’s fiction more truly represents
what would eventually develop into a modernist 20th century
world view. While it is true that Ward became somewhat parochial and later was given to writing historical fiction, and later
just plain history, his perspective in his two Wilmington novels, One Little Man and Starling, could be construed to have a
“bohemian” or even a progressive perspective akin to the literary perspective held by Canby and the community he depicted
in Greenwich Village in Our House.
After Canby’s 1934 reminiscence of middle-brow fin
de siecle Wilmington in his The Age of Confidence, he published Thoreau in 1939. This biography of the American
thinker, commentator and Transcendentalist Henry David
Thoreau remains one of the most authoritative and consulted
works on the subject to this day. It also represents Canby’s
position in the broad cultural arena of the 20th century in
America.
Christopher Ward was not the only Wilmington area
author who Canby helped and nurtured. Another was Anne
Parrish, and by proximity, Anne’s brother Dillwyn. Through
his connections in New York with Harper & Brothers, Canby
helped both Parrish siblings publish their earliest works.
(Publisher’s Note: I found a boxed two-volume set of War of
the Revolution nearly twenty years ago and it remains one of
my favorite histories of the period.)
P AGE 1 2
P AGE 1 3
An Expatriate Among the Branches
by Steven Leech
Maryland Avenue heads south out of Wilmington
through the old “trolley suburb” of Richardson Park. Early in
the 1950s the old trolley bed was still adjacent to the old two
lane road, but later expansion of Maryland Avenue to four
lanes wiped out its earlier history along with a slew of old
front yards that had swept down to a road less traveled by
automobile traffic. The widening of Maryland Avenue was a
harbinger of the baby boom expansion that began to chew up
old farms and fallow land beyond our aging neighborhood
where I and my family had moved after World War II.
Growing up in Richardson Park in the 1950s, which
was not like the crisp new suburban developments of those
slightly younger than me, was a mix of the older and the
new, of both “war babies” and baby boomers growing up.
Many things were expectedly typical, like television, tail fins
and excessive chrome. This odd mix subtly subverted the
stultifying atmosphere of apathy and conformity that defined burgeoning 1950s cultural life.
Where I lived in Richardson Park, Maryland Avenue divided into the nearly forgotten older developments of
Glenrich and Ashley. I lived on the Glenrich side and my
friend Jonathan Bragdon lived on the Ashley side, where
once the Delaware artist Jefferson David Chalfant had his
studios.
Jonathan’s and my lives had their similarities and
crosscurrents. Both of us were born in Wilmington during
World War II while our fathers served in the war effort. We
both spent our first years with grandparents, myself with
mine near P.S. duPont High School and Jonathan with his
near Cool Springs Park. It was there that Jonathan received
his first artistic inspiration, when as a toddler he saw artists
from either the nearby Pyle or Schoonover galleries working
at their easels in the park.
P AGE 1 4
“What they were doing seemed magical to me,”
Jonathan commented to me when relating the story.
After the war, when our fathers came home, our
families moved to the suburbs south of Wilmington, mine
to Richardson Park and Jonathan’s to Roselle. Later, Jonathan’s family moved to Richardson Park where we met.
In the late 1950s when I was reading Batman
comic books and watching Bandstand on channel 6, Jonathan was spending hours slowly polishing a convex mirror
work, Jonathan was showing me the heavens in all its true
glory.
It was only a short time after that Jonathan turned
his curiosity from the cosmos to the microscopic world, specifically the activity of a single cell life form called the paramecium. Learning that these almond shaped beings on occasion
would eject small threadlike matter called trichocystes, Jonathan explored ways to make them more visible by using dyes
in order to photograph them through his microscope, but more
importantly to
find out
why
paramecium
performed
this phenomena
so that
he could
try to
catch
them in
the act
for his
camera.
as main ingredient for a telescope he was building from
scratch. Comic books and television were not allowed by
his mother who observed strict religious teachings. Instead, Jonathan
was doing other
things which
seemed to
harken back to
older and simpler times, like
raising an orphaned crow
chick, which he
named Johnny
Crow, by feeding it balled up
morsels of raw
hamburger.
One
Sunday night
Jonathan
knocked on my door. I was surprised to see him because
his mother’s religious practices meant strict observance of
the sabbath. While she was away at a church related
event. Jonathan broke that sabbath.
“Jonathan, it’s Sunday,” I said, surprised to see
him.
“Come on over,” he replied. “I’ve something to
show you.”
It was an extraordinary clear night. In his backyard he had set up the telescope he’d just finished building. He aimed it around the skies inviting me to peer
through it. There was Saturn with its rings and that field
of stars called the Pleiades.
I always reflected on that incident and its inherent irony; that while his mother was away doing God’s
“I am tickled to find that they are still listed as of
‘unknown function’,“ Jonathan recently told me regarding the
trichocystes. “In my research, I tried all kinds of ways of trig-
gering reaction of the trichocystes, so that they would shoot
out their threads, from mechanical irritation to presence of
predators, change of temperature, and introduction of chemicals. I proposed an electrochemical mechanism for the
'shooting' or discharge, and tested it by introducing tranquilizer to the medium. I also proposed several functions the discharges might have, from defensive to signaling. By the way,
it really surprises me that no progress has been made on the
trichocyst in the 51 years since I did my study! I wish that I
still had a copy of my report, which included lots of color photographs made through my microscope.”
Jonathan’s project got the notice of his biology
teacher at Conrad High School as well as an invitation to the
National Science Fair in 1960, which was held in Indianapolis. The experience was remarkable.
P AGE 1 5
“To travel to the National Science Fair in Indianapolis,” Jonathan told me, “ I was given a choice between
DC8 jet or Pullman deluxe sleeper, and to the consternation
of the journalist who was to accompany me, my biology
teacher, Mr. Gilligan, and an executive from the main sponsor, I chose the train because I thought I would see more.
The executive and Mr. Gilligan seemed to enjoy themselves
thoroughly on the train, with a pile of newspapers and
books, while the journalist puffed on a fat cheap cigar and
scowled either at me or out the window, when he wasn't
off drinking and trading stories at the bar in the restaurant
car. The night was a waking dream of dozens of levelcrossings with the wail of the horn and bells ringing and
lights flashing, or the bashing passage of trains in the opposite direction, or complicated junctions with jolting and
swaying and clackety-clack over the switches, so when we
arrived in Indianapolis it was as if I'd finally fallen asleep
found out what had happened. It was also then that I found
that he’d been living in Amsterdam, Netherlands, had a
family, and had become a successful artist in Europe.
Over the next 40 years Jonathan’s and my paths
crossed several times, yet neither of us knew. We both lived
in the metropolitan Boston area in the early 1970s, and a
few years later when I had an extended stay with friend in
Memphis, Tennessee Jonathan was living there with his
first wife.
Jonathan had finished his high school graduation
requirements early and had earned his diploma while only
a junior at Conrad High School and was admitted to Johns
Hopkins University. However, he was persuaded by relatives living in Switzerland to spend a year living in the
mountains overlooking the Rhone Valley.
If Jonathan’s first artistic inspiration had been to
see those local artists painting in Wilmington’s Cool
into a realistic dream. The day was spent setting up the exhibits.
“The next night, the first at the hotel which, if I'd
chosen the plane, would have been the second, I couldn't free
myself from the TV in the sitting room of our suite. When
everyone else went to bed, I found myself alone with a
TV for the first time in my life, and I couldn't stop. I
watched until deep in the night and all the broadcasters
signed off. The executive had given me a pill, saying, ‘I bet
you're so excited, you'll have trouble sleeping, so just take
this and I guarantee you'll fall over and sleep like a log.’ The
idea of a sleeping pill scared me, but finally I was so wound
up, hovering about an inch above the mattress, that I took
the pill, and was surprised to find it worked powerfully, like
being pulled down by a strong arm, more like being
drowned, I guess, than anything else, and then it was morning. That was the day of the judging. I awoke feeling dizzy,
with a dull headache, which developed into a splitting headache during the day. By the time the judges reached me, I
could barely follow their questions, and they may have
thought I was doing an impersonation of a robot needing a
recharge.”
In the spring of 1961 Jonathan disappeared. Suddenly he was no longer in class. It was not until after I
googled his name on the internet nearly 50 years later that I
Springs Park, then a visit with an uncle to the Louvre in
Paris was an epiphany. There was no turning back. Art had
become the prime purpose in Jonathan’s life.
For the next few years while living in Europe
Jonathan tutored students in chemistry, attended the École
Superierure des Arts Decoratifs, and studied art under the
European artist Biagio Frisa. For a period between 1963
and 1967 he attended the University of Strasbourg and the
École Payou in Lausanne. In 1967 he had his first solo art
show at the Schuster Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The show was sold out! For a time in 1967 he lived in
New York City where he found encouragement from the
noted choreographer Merce Cunningham and the American
artist Jasper Johns. In December 1967 he moved to London. It was there that he participated in an “happening” at
the Royal Albert Hall called “The Alchemical Wedding”
where he met and interacted with John Lennon and Yoko
Ono.
Just as Jonathan’s career as an artist was hurtling
toward greater success, the times caught up with him. In
1969 he received his draft notice.
While still living in Richardson Park in the late
1950s, Jonathan had registered for the draft as a conscientious objector thanks largely to his mother’s pacifist views,
which were proscribed by her affiliation with the Plymouth
It’s been 50 years since that night Jonathan Bragdon ran across Maryland
Avenue to bid me to look at the heavens through his homemade telescope. Now he
comes to knock on my door via the information superhighway, and an occasional
transatlantic phone call. It’s been a long journey for both of us and my own work has
remained here in Delaware for the past 35 years, but now after 50 years, Jonathan’s
work could finally come home.
children, Jessie and Thomas. He now lives in Amsterdam with his present, and
third, wife, Beate, their son Jessie and their two daughters, Hannah and Clara.
“It is one of the happiest things in my life,” Jonathan told me, “that all four
children have been able to grow up together, and now feel like they're in one family.”
During the ensuing decades he has become a noted artist in Europe, participating in numerous exhibitions, participating with other artists in Europe in a number of collective art projects, and has enjoyed respectable sales of his artworks.
In September through October of 2008 Jonathan had a solo exhibition of his
work at the Aurel Scheibler Gallery in Berlin.
P AGE 1 6
“The show’s opening could not have been better,” Jonathan told me. “An
important American collector bought two large drawings, the Berlin Museum is buying four, and the curator of the Beyeler Foundation in Basel, which has the highest
quality collection of modern art in Europe, has called to say he wants to meet me,
and left his card.”
What’s in the immediate future for Jonathan? His recent exhibition in Berlin has spawned new opportunities.
“My Berlin gallery owner,” Jonathan told me recently, “nominated me for
the central ‘prestige exhibition’ at the Cologne International Art Fair, April 2009,
and my work was selected.”
Brethren church. It had been this draft status that enabled Jonathan’s work at the
nonprofit Concord Community Mental Health Service, and later with the McLean
Mental Hospital, which was affiliated with the Harvard Medical School, to suffice as
alternative service to possibly being sent to the Vietnam War. His service with these
two institutions dovetailed into his matriculation to the University of Massachusetts
where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in the Philosophy of Art in 1975.
After a first marriage ended in 1977, Jonathan lived with a Dutch student of
art history, who had written a review of his first show in Europe at the Free University in Amsterdam.
In 1979, they moved to the Netherlands where they married and had two
P AGE 1 7
Schilderijen van Jan van der Pol zijn van 11 maart t/m 1 april 2010 deel te zien in de tentoonstelling (Let's
March) Into the Labyrinth inGaleria XX1 in Warschau.
Galeria XX1, Al. Jana Pawla II 36 , Warschau
·
 Hinke Schreuders neemt van 25 maart t/m 24 mei 2010 deel aan de tentoonstelling Tegendraads in de
galerie van LUMC in Leiden. De groepstentoonstelling toont kunstenaars die werken met traditionel handwerktechnieken - verdere deelnemers zijn onder anderen Desiree de Baar, Jan koen Lomans en Seet van Hout.

Galerie LUMC, Albinusdreef 2, Leiden. Geopend dagelijks van 8.00 tot 20.00 uur, toegang is vrij. .
 Paul van Dijk neemt van 20 maart t/m 30 mei 2010 deel aan de tentoonstelling Peinture Céramique in
Museum goudA in Gouda, waavoor het museum 17 kunstenaars uitnodigde een vaas te beschilderen met behulp van de historische techniek 'Gouds plateel'. In de tentoonstelling zijn verder vazen te zien van onder anderen Gijs Assman, Arjanne van der Spek en Helen Frik.

Museum goudA, Achter de kerk 14, Gouda. Geopend wo t/m vr 10.00-17.00 uur, za t/m zo 12.00-17.00 uur
 Van 17 april tot 25 juni is werk van Paul van Dijk te zien in de tentoonstelling Proeflokaal in museum SM's in 's-Hertogenbosch. De tentoonstelling omvat werken uit de eigen collectie van het museum, van
onder anderen JCJ vd Heyden, Ger van Elk, Jan Dibbets, Tony Cragg. In het kader van deze tentoonstelling
presenteert Paul van Dijk op 30 mei een door hem gemaakt kunstenaarsboek, dat in een oplage van 1000 verschijnt als uitgave van Peter Foolen Editions.
 SM's, Magistratenlaan 100, 's-Hertogenbosch. Geopend dinsdag t/m zondag 13.00 – 17.00 uur, dinsdagavond
en donderdagavond tot 21.00 uur
 Van 8 mei tot en met 12 juni 2010 zal verder een project van Paul van Dijk in samenwerking met dichteres
Gerry van der Linden, met als thema 'pinksteren', tentoongesteld worden in de Protestantse kerk in SintMichielsgestel. Het project is onderdeel van een serie projecten over hoogtijdagen in de Christelijke kerk,
waaraan verder o.a. Guido Geelen en Reinoud van Vugt in combinatie met dichters deelnamen. Er is een uitgebreide catalogus bij verschenen met afbeeldingen en interviews naast.
P AGE 1 8
One, two, three, one, two, three: music and breath
in Wendy Ingersoll’s Grace Only Follows
a review by Scott Whitaker
on a summer night,/stretch(sic) out against the earth’s back,
Wendy Ingersoll’s book, Grace Only Follows, (March
listen(sic).” Her guilt in her ability to not save her loved ones is
Street Press) is rife with loss; death, her husband’s sudden dethe lynchpin on which much of this collection hinges upon.
parture, her family’s health
Because what’s left for the
problems. Ingersoll not only
speaker after thirty years of marsurvives these challenges
riage is Al-anon meetings, the
but composes poetry out of
painful, forced conversations the
them that is balanced, quiet,
speaker must have with the ex,
and careful, belying the danthe bald fact that her son is an
ger underneath.
alcoholic, that her ex has “scotch
What else does an
for lunch”, that her father is loosartist do with grief?
ing his mind, that her mother is
Ingersoll is a poet
terminally ill. One only tries to
who stares her task down,
breathe, to get a grip, to control.
“an artist’s intent/ is to
Some of the best momake his flowers bloom forments in Grace are when the poet
ever. But first/he hacks off
uses the precise language of gartheir stems,” and if it is her
dening or of music to kick out a
marriage, or her children
rhythm. In “Late Bloom,” the
she is speaking to or about,
names of plants such as pachythe hard cold truth of love is
sandra, and evergreen mix with
laid bare in her poetry, love
trowel and dig, and the music of
can leave us stripped bare,
planting and the rhythm of a garisolated, like a lone power
den help ease the pain of a dying
line knocked down in a
parent. In “Every Afternoon
storm. Sometimes you get
Since” the rhythm of teaching
shocked, sometimes you
piano is key to grief relief that
sizzle till someone shuts the
ultimately results in staid anger.
power down. As if to love
Is she furious with her husband
someone or something is to
leaving, or is she furious with herkill it. This tension is felt
self for “playing the Well Temthroughout the volume,
pered in all the wrong keys?”
sometimes from her relaGrace is a fine collection
tionship with her husband,
that is weaved together by Ingeror mother, or children. At
soll’s eye and ear: the imagery of
the end of the opening poem
the Chesapeake and music motifs,
“Every Afternoon Since,” she
the reoccurring urge to breathe,
isn’t sure who she would
as if after thirty years of marriage
shoot if she had a gun, “her
the poet is finally at peace, or at
target husband, or self.” And
least seeking it in a new life.
where does one direct the
“...It’s okay to loose your place, I
anger, direct the grief? She
tell my students,” and Ingersoll is
isn’t sure herself, for “We
talking beyond the sheet music,
have no radar,” she writes in
beyond the piano where she
“Fly Blind” and we cannot
teaches her lessons, she is talking
see the truth, much less
about a woman’s life, and the de“your true face/nor my own,”
mands placed upon it. And Ingerfor our own deceptions are
soll is too smart to mope, and by
as powerful as those we enthe end of Grace, where the salt
counter day to day.
isbn 1-59661-128-6 March Street Press
marshes are still salt marshes, she’s
This volume could have
<marchstreetpress.com> $9 (paper)
found joy in her granddaughter, pracbeen called “Breath Only Folticing her scales, and much more
lows,” for there is a tight, anximportantly the ability to breathe. For in music, as well as in
ious tension in her verse, coupled with the psychic pain of longpoetry, the rhythm of the breath is essential.
ing for her son “to breathe easy,” someone for whom she has not
—SW
taught “the best way to observe the stars/ is to be eight years old
P AGE 1 9
Readers Respond to Publisher’s Challenges
Poems on Classical Themes by Phillip Calderwood
Invoking Virgil
I sing for the sake of a new order,
for an insecure empire led by simple minds and good intentions.
Our officials lack your complexity of vision, you Homeric Roman,
you practical poet, who never grew too high-minded to forget
the farm of your boyhood, to lose sight of the humming hive,
the cultivation bees bring, or the danger in each swarm and sting.
Show us again the pains your hero, faithful Aeneas, took
to found the eternal city: first forsaking the fallen towers of Troy,
his homeland, whose wise king the Greeks left headless
on a barren shore; then abandoning the safe harbor of Carthage
and the love of its already bereft queen; and in the end unsettling
the tenuous accord that tethered Italians together before his arrival.
Forgive us, you self-effacing sage, you model of the noseless bust.
We must wrest your lessons from fire again. Flesh, I fear,
will have to burn before we feel the human cost of our dream:
a smoke that brings tears, a shadow that feasts on blood.
Pity our advisers, who cannot descry the subtleties you describe:
the winds that disorder the signs we wish to read,
the path to a destination that never arrives,
and the pyre that immolates all we leave behind.
Dante’s Shadow
If I were born and raised in a city graced with churches, statues, and icons,
its wealth fought over by impudent men under the banners of emperors and popes;
if I had seen battle myself and, wanting to promote peace, served the public
until the vengeful took power, and my possessions, and banished me from my home;
and if I had met my city’s fairest citizen when I was nine, and she as well,
and honored her in verse, and scarcely nine years later, she took sick and died—
I would think her too good for all but the eternal city, and pray some day she’d lead
me there,
but first I would have to wander, begging for bread, looking to books for answers.
I would learn to see Lombards, Romans, Sicilians, and Tuscans as one, and write in
their tongue,
as I sat in lonely castles, dreaming of justice in hell, hope in purgatory, and love in
heaven.
P AGE 2 0
Readers Respond to Publisher’s Challenges
Poems on a Classical Theme
Phillip Calderwood
Lenny Lianne
Melanion Considers Atalanta
AS PERSEPHONE GATHERS POSIES
She feels no love for men, and I cannot blame her.
She would have died on a high hilltop,
at her father’s command, if the she-bear had not suckled her.
She senses how the fields cease to hum
with bees. Wildflowers in bloom
lose their sweet speeches.
When she strode out of the wilderness, not only alive
but lean and lovely, more fit for chasing
down game than any of us, we saw only the woman.
The ground goes somber as if some
hulking cloud overpowers
all sunlight. The meadow convulses
Those hairy half-men, the centaurs, charged,
all lightning hooves and lust, and would have raped her
were she not a sure shot with a bow.
and howls. The earth around her
quakes, afraid of being split open.
Something more savage than nature
Her arrow brought down the boar that ravaged Calydon,
but men fought over her due, the hide,
until poor Meleager and his pig-headed uncles died.
slogs its way closer,
flexing muscle.
She played our games and proved her strength
by pinning Peleus, but when the call went out for heroes,
Jason would not count her among his crew.
We regard her as any woman, and I am not surprised
she runs from our designs. With her feet
so fantastically fleet, no man can hope to overtake her—
unless, like me, he plans to cheat,
rolling god-given gold,
a prize whose purity and warmth she has never known.
A Sonnet by Elisavietta Ritchie
Tradecraft in Iambic Pentameters
For a child who doubts I can keep secrets
So many secrets you will never know
long hid in lines upon my face and page.
Although my random chatter seem to flow,
true tales remain confined within the cage
of my long skull, while most of those who shared
their riddles and their loves with me have died.
I too have lived adventures, and much dared.
Who’d guess? I do know better than confide.
Whispers through the skin are safe—no need
for megaphones: what if the listener spoke?
I may broadcast my sacks of words and seed:
the small birds twitter and the large ones croak.
For I’m the owl, who flies on unheard wings,
foretells when others die, but never sings.
P AGE 2 1
Cape Henlopen Writers’ Retreat
(APPLICATION DEADLINE HAS BEEN EXTENDED)
2010 Poetry and Nonfiction Writers Retreat
October 21-24
Location: The Biden Center, Cape Henlopen State Park, Lewes, Delaware
Retreat leaders:
JoAnn Balingit, Poet Laureate, State of Delaware
Tama Baldwin, poet and nonfiction writer
Frank Giampietro, poet
Applications: due Tuesday, June 1, 2010 by 4:30 PM*
(*extended from previous deadline of Monday, May 17th, 2010)
Apply online at www.artsdel.org
BEGINNERS ENCOURAGED TO APPLY -NO PUBLISHING EXPERIENCE NECESSARY
Fee: $250, includes room and board
P AGE 2 2
Fat Boy
A short story by
Joseph LoGuidice
He was an orangutan the first time I saw him
playing first base. Little league. All belly and arms. It
didn’t start there, his mother said about the belly
part. That fight began the second the free air outside the
womb hit his screaming face. He wanted nothing more
than to be fed – constantly. And he was an Italian kid. So
was I, and food was up there with the Father, the Son, and
the Holy Ghost.
She packed snacks for him whenever they visited
relatives. She had to; the car trip would be unbearable if
she didn’t, and he was always a big kid for his age, capable
of being loud and knocking things over. I’m hungry, I’m
hungry. It never stopped.
I didn’t befriend Eugene until seventh grade. By
this time he was one of the fat kids. But he was also one of
the big kids, tall, so no one made fun of him…. to his
face. And he was a good kid. Big heart, but slow academically. Always in remedial classes. He knew baseball stats
every which way, and would cripple anyone in sitcom
trivia, but ask him to break down a scene from Steinbeck’s
Of Mice And Men, and his brain crystallized like dog piss
in January. Ironic that he was so much like Lennie Small,
and I, a slight kid with a brain, so much like George Milton. But I could never shoot him in the end.
It was Eugene and the fat farms. It was craziness
like the Optifast all liquid diet, and lettuce with tofu. The
fat burned off in layers, the accolades always followed. Pats on the back, and up down looks of disbelief. But inside, nothing had changed. Not in his stomach,
nor deep enough in Eugene’s head. Shakes and lettuce
were to his form of hunger what drilling pinholes in the
earth would be to a monstrous cavern of bubbling magma.
The world says fat is a problem in a million different ways other than, “Hey, fatso, your weight is a problem.” There were the girls Eugene couldn’t have. That
was the worst of everything. It got so that I wouldn’t bring
up a girl I might be seeing in front of his father so as not to
embarrass Eugene. I would let his father ask what the
hell was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I get a girl? God,
you two losers are hopeless, he’d say while rinsing the suds
off his corvette. I told him he could get as many vettes he
wanted; it was all downhill for him. And by the way,
straighten your earring, dummy. Eugene just sat on his
milk crate in the driveway smoking and cracking old-fart
jabs. Age was the one thing he would always have over his
father.
Eugene bounced at a place called Tuxedo Junction
before he was even booze legal. It wasn’t exactly the place
to go if food was a weakness and women quixotic. He was
the big guy at the door who let the tittering girls pass with
a smile and race to the bar. The salty, humid scent from
the hot dog guy on the sidewalk battled with their perfume
for dominance under his nose, and I sometimes thought that
in his quiet places, away from the noise, a huge compensation took place. We all can do that in spots. Some of us get
away with it.
Must have been tough loving movies so
much. Being so close to that screen, seeing the kinds of people one sees, mouth chewing him away from society’s ideal
like a planet losing its orbit. It grows colder the farther you
get from the sun. Because there wasn’t a candy bowl or
sample station Eugene didn’t like, his fat cells, like ancient
mafia, went back many generations. Their numbers were
in need of a desperate purge.
Eugene did manage a girl in his life, but knowing
them together was to replace the word relationship with
maelstrom. She was a medicated bi-polar bulimic live-in
girlfriend turned friend that cinched Eugene’s stomach in
Velcro wraps when he went out on dates. The whole thing
was the best he could do.
I was in his parent’s kitchen the night they brought
up the surgery. Eugene was standing around blocking all
sorts of light. It was one of those moments when scenery
and thought coalesce to form a sudden awareness. Eugene
left the kitchen, and his father, with a dumbfounded look,
gasped. Could he have actually gotten bigger? Yes, he
could have. Five hundred pounds was now a possibility. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape was no longer a thing that
happened to others. We wanted Eugene to be one of those
people that pose holding their old pants, a pair that could fit
a small woman in each leg with room for a poodle in the
crotch.
Cut your goddamn stomach so you can’t eat, so the
world will accept you more, so you don’t die. That was what
the surgeon at Yale planned for him, and it was a last resort. I was there when they wheeled him into his
room. Don’t say anything stupid cause the laughing kills
my stomach, Eugene said. Bastard. I had planned jokes
around the fact that a handful of desperate peas would now
fill him up and maybe cause him to puke. Eugene and his
damn stomach; it was always getting in the way of things.
P AGE 2 3
Poetry by Lyn Lifshin
RAGE
a flower that
explodes, something
you once thought
you wanted to
curl near,
stroke, becomes
a porcupine
in your throat,
nail bomb
breaking apart in
your throat
so even your last
words bleed
THANK GOODNESS I DIDN’T
BUY THE SKULL COAT
drugged as I was
by his eyes. It was
not my fault I felt
intoxicated. Few
made my being
a poet seem an
aphrodisiac. I
thought I’d been
inoculated
against charmers
but his ecstasy
about my words,
a dangerous tango.
What felt like
foreplay, a
player’s play
SHE SAID FOR YOU THE WOMEN
WORE LOW GAUZY DRESSES
it’s true, women beam
in your arms. Old
widows and taut 20
year olds with licorice
hair and tight asses.
They glow, a bride
for an hour. When he
walks you to the
dance floor he could
be carrying you
across a threshold.
When you’re in his
arms and his dark
mahogany eyes lock
on you, you are the
only woman who
exists until time for
the next lovelorn.
What more could you
want? You don’t have
to do his laundry,
never hear him
snore. Who wouldn’t
want the most pricey
perfume, want to
buy clothes you don’t
need dying for him
to notice?
HE SAID THE NIGHTMARE POEMS BLEED
he said they were
too real to be
dreams. He said
they scared him,
a parallel world,
deeper than DNA.
Terrifying he
said, the words
were armed, were
bleeding all
over the page
P AGE 2 4
ADORABLE
maybe the first time
I was called that:
bitch, sexy, honey,
babe, but not
adorable. Kittens
are adorable,
babies. Frustrated,
I can’t get the
step. Each try in his
arms, I screw it
up. “This is
fun,” he says, “we
never get to
dance this much.”
He holds me
closer, lifts me up.
“Adorable.” I’m
not a cat, a
puppy. My face
burns. I think of a
man ages ago I
didn’t want
to go to bed with
who took me
to the Adelphi.
My skin was rose.
“Oh,” he said,
“I can see
you want me.”
No, it was just
an wild allergy
to Macrodantin
WHEN, AT THE BALLET BARRE,
THE MAD GIRL REALIZES
the only relief,
that she could
end it all, this
going thru the
motions. She is
sick of fantasy
being more real
than her life.
On the metro,
only gray. In
ballet, the gray
leaks in thru
her skin, braids
with a litany
of dreads. She
can’t remember
when she stopped
looking ahead
but only backward
AFTER THE E MAIL
the gulp of his black
eyes won’t obliterate
her venom. I play
loud music to
drown her words.
It isn’t that there
isn’t something of
his darkness,
his knife in her
verbs. Lady Killers
are never alter
boys. Or are they?
He was, no matter.
Wasn’t it Satan Eve
found irresistible?
And isn’t that feeling
worth everything?
P AGE 2 5
WHEN I SEE HER PHOTOGRAPH
IN HER NEW BOOK
glum and gloomy,
not the startling beauty
she was. Haggard,
something close to a
witch or bitch. My
poems are as dark as
hers. I’m sure I am too
but would never pick
such a grave, sour image.
Where is that black
eyed kohl eyed beauty,
her hair pulled back,
arrogant, maybe spoiled?
But at least one of my
boyfriends fell wild
for her: that pout, that
taunt, that dare. “It
was a mistake,” a famous
poet said to put two
beautiful young women
together.” Invited
to a dinner before my
reading, she refused,
introduced me then
walked haughtily out.
It was my worse reading.
Sleet in April on the
coast, the feeling I’d
never do another reading
and never one of only
new poems. Worse
that I like much of her
poetry so much, still do.
At least, now, I look better
THE DATING SERVICE DELICIOUSLY LUSTFUL
DREAM
Suddenly, I’m as unattached as milk
weed dust. It’s not so bad floating
free though I would have liked to
have the body I had when I was 20
though maybe not exactly. I still
thought I was fat but I want that
taut skin, arms I loved to wear sun
dresses in. Well, what is is and it’s
not so bad. Not a babe in this dream
I’ve got men flocking I didn’t at 16,
groveling to jerks who refused me,
invited to Women’s Club hayrides and
balls, goodbye to waiting on the side
lines, a wall flower, my face bright
rose. In the dream at least I’m
gorgeous, well if not gorgeous,
sexy and especially the one with long
strong legs wants me to care. We
are in a house, not familiar, pillows
spread. I half expect hookah pipes.
There’s oriental carpets. I’m in a tie
dyed filmy sarong . Though I’ve
hated my arms, I feel mysteriously
attractive. I feel on fire, want either of
these men to want to get in my pants.
I don’t care if anyone knows it.
It’s rare I have time or even care.
Maybe it’s the scent of jasmine, the
feel of silk and lace with nothing
between it and my skin. Or the voice
of the tallest one with the thighs,
I couldn’t help be drawn to it,
more sexy than any body part,
seduction and lullaby braided into
what I want to lasso me to his kiss
P AGE 2 6
MAYBE, HONEY, I’M GRINDING
MY TEETH TO DUST
to throw on your grave.
It isn’t easy to bury you.
Running to the metro in
the handicapped spot I see
license plates with “COMBAT
WOUNDED” on it. You
never would have gone
for that, once said, when you
saw your leg on the other
side of the road, it was
something, as a marine, you
were ready to take but
then when you couldn’t feel
the other and they were
shouting up to the copter,
casings exploding, enough
is enough, you screamed, both,
are fucking too many
I THINK OF YOU PAST ANY WEATHER OR TIME
and then, of the film about
the woman who only loved
the dead, prepared their bodies
and then, sure there was a
last spark of energy inside,
saved for one more spurt of
bliss, she climbed on top
of them and took what still
pulsed like a last breath
into her. She felt fulfilled,
that she’d held and comforted
them on their last trip as
she once wrapped dead frogs
and kittens in soft velvet,
caressed them, kissed their
coolness before planting
them under the Ginkgo tree
I THINK MAYBE MY JAW HAS FROZEN
as if to keep pace
with everything turning
to stone in you much as,
when my mother was
so ill, becoming thinner
and thinner, something
in me, as if trying to
keep up, withered away.
I hear a clicking, a
reminder, as if what’s
coming past my teeth
might jolt and jar,
be harsh and metallic,
words that could scar,
tear lips and tongue,
words so tortured and
boiling nothing they
passed thru could be the
same
I COULD HAVE BEEN A WIDOW
I think of that
standing with the
light going rose
over the pond.
This small deck
could be a widow’s walk
I think of women
staring out into
gray water, into
some blue black sea
looking for signs,
imagining the boat reeling
My hair would frizz
in peach plum and salt air
my jaw frozen in the shape of a moan
P AGE 2 7
AFTER THIS LAST MAROON
OR PURPLE NOTEBOOK
WHEN I HEARDHE LEFT RADIO
to work as a counselor
for troubled kids, I knew it
couldn’t last long, being
a troubled kid himself and
with worse things coming
it wouldn’t be enough to
get him through. “I don’t
know what I’m going to do
when I grow up,” he’d
grin toward midnight.
Women of all ages wanted
to try to help him , hold him,
behold him emerging
between their legs or from
a table spread just for
him. With one hundred
stitches and my face egg
plant purple, I who never
cook, made a chicken sandwich
he celebrated on the air.
What he did best was on air,
made of air. What turned
stillness into some
thing I wanted to hold,
of course, being
air, couldn’t
I’ll leave you alone which
is what you said you wanted,
want on your grave. But I
don’t think that’s true. Why,
after quitting several times
would you want to go back
on radio the last years you
were sick, the fast way to
touch so many, touched
them to then have them
die to touch you, be in
touch. For you, still, it was
that scoring, those touch
downs and you always had
the touch. What you wanted
was to be wanted, and you
watched from the side lines
like an angel, or devil, aloof,
above, knowing with one
touch you could have
whoever was at your feet
as if worshipping or praying,
taking your time with no
special time now you
have all the time,
only time
RESISTANCE – DO IT
his hand flat against
mine. No, I didn’t
think flu or worse.
Resist, more he
purrs as if I wasn’t
already, not wanting
him to matter,
when I push you
resist. Can he imagine
what I’m thinking.
It’s all technique
he says. I’m
sure it is
P AGE 2 8
I’M HAVING TROUBLE WRITING A LOVE POEM
what was, the darkest
blood petals. Scorched
roses, not the fresh
ones surrounding
Cleopatra’s bed so
with Anthony braided
around her it must
have looked like they
were on a bed or maybe
a raft, surrounded by
roses. When I think
of roses, they’re the
color of blood and rust,
the ash, something
in a church for the dead.
Or the rose of his
cigarette burning holes
in everything as he
staggered thru
my arms leaving no
thing he moved
thru as it was
obsessed with death
as the woman in Kiss,
sure I could make you
breathe, have you as
my Sleeping Beauty,
Snow White, my frog
prince awakened by
my lips. It wouldn’t
have mattered that you
didn’t have a pulse,
your heart dead ages
before. I could have
dressed in black, been
pale from crying, as
spooky and angelic
and aroused by death.
That wouldn’t surprise:
look how long I stayed
talking to you when it
was like whispering
to someone in a
casket
obsessed with death
as the woman in Kiss,
sure I could make you
breathe, have you as
my Sleeping Beauty,
Snow White, my frog
prince awakened by
my lips. It wouldn’t
have mattered that you
didn’t have a pulse,
your heart dead ages
before. I could have
dressed in black, been
pale from crying, as
spooky and angelic
and aroused by death.
That wouldn’t surprise:
look how long I stayed
talking to him when it
was like whispering
to someone in a
casket. I was always
sure your soul lingered
in your body waiting
for one last fling
in your room that filled
with other worldly
light probably from
the sheets tacked over
every glass so you
could, like any ghost,
sleep days, the light of
near death experience
that turns bodies,
hunky stiffs in
to shining stars
P AGE 2 9
THURSDAY
In high school,
always the day I was
sure bad things
happened. Bobby
Senecal said no
about the Junior
Women’s Club hay
ride. Mark already
taken. What shame,
asking a boy to a
dance or a party
and having him say
let me think about
it and then have
him say no. Always
on Thursday. A
doomed day. My
thumb would break
on Valentine’s Day
Thursday so I had
to wear a clunky
cast to the Valentine
party. Chubby, with
glasses, why bother
with clothes. Sure,
I’ve made up for that
with daily arrivals
from Bebe, Free
People, Saks and
Betsey Johnson.
But when I look
in my over stuffed
closet, I still feel
I have nothing
THE LAST, WAS IT LOVE OR HATE POEM,
I WROTE ABOUT YOU
I want to apologize, there
was no passion for you,
just emptiness I wanted
to fill. Someone said
women shop to soothe,
release stress, for excitement. To have you on the
sheet of paper was some
thing like that. Of course
it was expensive. Except
for one thing, I’ll be
discreet enough to leave
out the poems that could
have been about anyone
and maybe some real
lovers will be sure they
are. It’s a relief tho sad
to not feel that electricity.
Some things fade like
the sepia of remembered
faces common in old
photographs of parents
you can’t quite remember
young leaning against
an old model T, glowing
in the light of dreams
I can never know
TODAY A CAR BURST INTO FLAME
IN THE STREET
wild tongues, a blur
of everything else
out there: that was
the news of your
death. Paint in my
blood bubbled,
pale roses went crisp
as if a magnifying
glass sucked the
sun down thru it
P AGE 3 0
A Random Soldier is the story of Chad Clifton told in his own words and through is own
writings, edited, and with accompanying narrative by his mother, Terri Clifton. This moving story can be order by contacting
Telephone: 302-684-4747
Email: Rccliftonstudios@aol.com
Adress: 9397 Cods Road Milford De. 19963
The book may also be special ordered through any full-service bookstore using the number below
ISBN-13: 9780978530006
BAY OAK
PUBLISHERS, Ltd.,
a Delaware-based
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Magical History Tours
www.bayoakpublishers.com
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WEBSITE: WWW.FEDERALSTREETGALLERY.COM
P AGE 3 1
P AGE 3 2
Under the Wedgehorn
The REP/PTTP:
Can the Crown Jewel of UD’s “Path to
Prominence” Be a People’s Theatre?
By Phillip Bannowsky
Tonight my wife Joanie and I are going to the theater:
The Resistible Rise of Arturo UI, by Bertrolt Brecht, the revolutionary, as directed by Heinz-Uwe Haus. I am wondering if
the experience will be as revolutionary as the play: raising
consciousness and solidarity, transcending the insular and
obfuscated environment of the Great Recession, or, indeed, of
the University of Delaware, whose Resident Ensemble Players
(REP)—the crown jewel in UD’s “Path to Prominence”— will
be performing.
We have been attending plays by the University of
Delaware’s Professional Theater Training Program (PTTP)
since about 1991. Shaw! Shakespeare! Wilde! Chekov!
Moliere! Williams! Ibsen! Brecht! Giants of the stage, great
words on the page: the patrimony of humankind. Founded by
Sandy Robbins with Jewel Walker as an initial faculty at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1976, PTTP migrated
to the University of Delaware in 1988. In 1992, Jewel Walker,
now faculty emeritus, kindly observed a herky-jerky performance of my Autoplant: a Poetic Monologue and gave me some
gentle advice about drama consisting of moments.
PTTP students stay together for three years working
on their MFAs, learning the craft of acting piece by piece, and
performing classical works in kick-out-the-jams sets either at
the venerable Hartshorn Theater (once a women’s gym) or at
the new neo-Georgian semi-opulence of the Thompson Theatre
at the Roselle Center for the Arts. The REP, a recently added
ensemble of journeymen actors, produces its own plays while
mentoring PTTP apprentices and gradually incorporates them
into the REP.
And they are good. Many of the students were already
professionals before they came to re-program themselves into
artists of a higher order. Most graduates join regional theaters
and repertory companies. Some have hit the bigs on Broadway
and TV, earning nominations for Tony, Emmy, and Obie
awards. Sometimes, on the stage right here in Newark, Delaware, they hit those registers of theater that open your heart
and fill you with a sensation of encompassing something
greater than yourself, of transcending your own individuality
and knowing the collective soul—at least in my experience.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, for example. With Steven Pilinski as Big Daddy, Mic Matarrese as the brooding and
drunken son, and Elizabeth Helfin as a very hot Maggie the
Cat, Tennessee Williams’s play is not merely words, actions,
and sets; those are just the dressing of the play. When cut and
combined with precision, they reveal the shape of the body
and the light of the soul: not just a randy and ailing Southern
patriarch, a conflicted son, and his frustrated wife, but the
self-consuming struggle for life to generate life.
A playwright gathers the forgotten dreams and incomprehensible experiences of humanity—our patrimony—
and gives them back in a form that revives memory and
makes sense of life’s struggles, not merely to interpret the
world if I had my way, however, but to change it (See epitaph,
K. Marx).
So, how does the PTTP/REP break out of the insularity of UD and bring the dramatic patrimony of the people back
to the people, especially the revolutionary patrimony?
Certainly some of its alumni have gone off to present
plays that strip the veils from the bullshit. For example, 2007
PTTP graduate Sarah Dandridge performed My Name is Rachel Corrie, about the American activist who gave her life resisting Israeli bulldozers sent to demolish Palestinian homes.
My friend Sevîn Ákbar (Summerhill Seven) has created his
own art form, poemedy, a kind of “neo-beat-hip-hop
verse” (Phil Hubbard) in which the artist performs the different voices of the African American community as aspects of
his own soul. His upcoming Squircular: An Actor’s Tale! takes
poemedy to new frontiers of form. See http://
www.poemedy.com/.
Having now experienced The Resistable Rise of Arturo
UI, I believe the REP/PTTP can be as revolutionary as its
alumni. A farce set in a gangster-era Chicago, Arturo UI
represents the rise of Hitler if Hitler was Capone. It opens
with a phalanx of trench coat-clad thugs drumming a cacophony with tonfa clubs until, stomping and glaring down the
audience, they beat a menacing tatoo. Soon Ui appears, a grotesque like that other murderer Richard III, played with perverse mastery by Carine Montbertrand. At first, the way she
sits or holds her hands projects the half-formed banality who
is UI. Like Hitler, Ui learns the arts of gesture and movement
(silly walks?) to project power. At first comic, by the end of the
play Montbertrand’s Ui physically revolts me.
Steadily, in other ways, the play erodes the distances
between audience and player and between real and esthetic
experience. As a parallel to the scandals and disasters propelling Chicago into the arms of Ui’s protection racket or Germany into Hitler’s, the cast read headlines from that very
day’s Wilmington, Delaware News Journal. Another time they
play the game of gossip onstage, each version of the story rising to greater heights of paranoia until the final participant
shouts, “Obama is Osama and we’re all gonna die!” Ui takes
advantage of these uncertainties as he allies with depressionbeset capitalist to intimidate petit bourgeois grocers and suppress the working class deliverymen.
In the last scene—and I won’t spoil it with exactly
how—the audience is swept up in Ui’s triumph, compelled
to sing some ludicrous hymn. Never one for Large Group
Awareness Training, I sing “The International.” Director
Haus characterizes the play as “interventionist realism” in
the playbill. Was my response his intention?
Forcing the audience to make a choice, to resist,
to rewrite the play, is about as close as it gets to where art
actually has a transformational impact.
So, how do we connect people who have a material
interest in transformation to the art? How do we go beyond a university audience who may be merely concerned
with the esthetic and interpretive aspects of the work?
In a between-act chat, REP Artistic Director
Sandy Robbins told me he is always looking for ways to
expand his audience. When Chrysler closed down, the
REP/PTTP offered free tickets to laid-off workers and
some came. Myself a Chrysler retiree (as well as a parttime professor for UD), I immediately went off on the University for ending the hopes of workers when they bought
the plant for a song. They scared off any investors who
might want to reopen the plant for blue-collar jobs (as
Fisker is doing with the former GM plant at Boxwood
Road) by threatening to grab the plant right out from under them using eminent domain, so don’t get me started.
Anyway, Robbins said surveys had shown an increase in
blue-collar workers in their audience. And REP/PTTP
keeps the prices down. General public admission ranges
from $15 to $22. REP faculty present four or five public
lectures yearly downstate. But there is not much budget
for conducting off-campus workshops or taking plays to the
community.
Robbins added that he pushes the boundaries of
what the University of Delaware’s decision-makers might
tolerate by producing shows like Arturo Ui and I Am My
Own Wife. In that one-man show, the amazing Michael
Gotch portrayed more than 30 characters to recreate the
life of a morally ambiguous transvestite who survived in
Berlin under both the Nazis and the German Democratic
Republic.
Well, my suggestion would be to partner with
unions, charities, non-profits, community organizations,
civil and human rights groups, and other participants in
civil society. Expand your power base beyond the University’s purse strings to a community that would permit the
REP to push the boundaries even further. That’s where
the taxpayers are who help fund the University’s programs. That’s where the workers are whose incarnate
sweat and sinew built what the University now pulls
down. That’s where the people are from whose dreams and
experiences comes the raw material of art.
In the meantime, REP/PTTP can provide a transcendent and empowering experience for anyone who attends. The season ends Sunday, May 16. Next year’s offerings are unannounced, but Sandy told me they are planning a world premiere of a play by Theresa Rebeck. Rebeck has written several plays for the New York stage as
well as scripts for LA Law, Law and Order, and NYPD
Blue. She has won numerous awards including a Peabody
and a National Theatre Conference Award. Insha’Allah,
I’ll be there.
For info and tickets, see http://
www.pttp.udel.edu/.
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Required Summer Reading List
http://www.shakespeareco.org/index.htm
http://washingtonart.com/beltway
If you don’t get it, you don’t GET it!
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Poetry by Shelley Grabel
What can I tell you about
the day we buried Morgan?
It was cold
It was raining
It was raining money
It was windy and wild
It was too early
It was too late
It was full of people you know
It was full of people you don’t
It was morning
It was rush hour but no one was rushing
It was hard
It was funny as hell
It was a day Morgan would have loved
It was chaotic
It was orderly
It was full of excellent food
It was full of the blackest earth
It was a day that flew into night too fast
It was full of noise and
It was absolutely silent
It was a day I will always remember
It was a night I want to forget
It was scary
It was funny
It was empty
It was without her
It was without her
It was without her
It was a day full of love
It was a day devoid of love
It was the first day
It was the last day
What can I tell you?
For My Lover In Answer To A Question
“I love the scars we reform daily”
You are not my first
You will be my last
This is not a curse
Your eyes search for answers
I will not easily give
This is the secret I hold fast
I am a pebble stuck in your shoe
You ask me none
of the hundred questions
Stuck in your throat and yet
Your eyes spill always with question marks
I hide in the curl of your commas
We are 10 years older
And 10 years later
grown into each other’s hair
My toes curl toward you at night
You now know that my sleeping back
does not reject you and yet
that one open question hangs
above the bed like a ceiling fan
The low noise of it
Is the soundtrack of our days
Roses, perfume, red flock gift boxes
Not your style – either to give or receive
We have instead
One year piled on the next
Like Frost’s Mending Wall
But in this story
We are on the same side
The stony unevenness our strength
A wall built of our fits and stops
A wall built of our unfit starts
Our hands meet on rugged surfaces
Our fingers bleed on jagged points
Blood believes in you and you in me
We grow together like mending skin
In this bed with small dogs curled between us
The cat braids my hair into yours
Fur bridges my thigh to yours
The morning does not unmake this cloth
The sun does not unshake me from you
The tether of your voice
Holds me to you
a balloon in a violent wind
a kite reeled in each night by my own hand
We reweave, reattach until
we cannot distinguish fur from hair from robe from slipper
The question I will answer now is this
Will I choose you?
I do choose you, go on choosing you
breath by minute by mile
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Poetry by Shelley Grabel
Marriage
Marriage is not a joy ride in mid-December down an icy slope
Or maybe that’s all it is
It’s not a comedy about a love story – it is a love story about a comedy
It’s not taffeta, organza, and silk in the honeymoon suite
It is denim and a holey t-shirt in the bedroom of a Motel 8
It’s not the moment you say I do – it’s the moments you say I still do
It’s not the best of times and not the worst – it is all of the times
It’s not the hand in hand on a sunny day
It’s the hand held at the bedside when death comes to call
Marriage is not a dream catcher – it’s the caught dreams held steady to the light of day.
Marriage is a November full of regret – not yet winter and definitely not fall
Marriage is falling and finding finally you
I left you because
I left you because you wouldn’t let me breathe
I left you because I was 29 and didn’t want to wait until I was 30
I left you because she was leaving me
I left you because I needed you too much
I left you because you were the first thing I reached for every morning
I left you because you were the last thing I did every night
I left you because you were costing me too much – too much time, money health
I left you because you yellowed my fingertips
I left you because the matches would no long light on cue
I left you because my chest hurt
I left you because had my father’s cough
I left you not because of the surgeon general’s weak warnings
I left you because once and for all
I wanted to do something completely fully and finally
I left you in the end because, at last I could
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Poetry by
Shelley Grabel
Poetry by
Lisa Ellis
Christopher Street 1993
Vacationing
Night time on Christopher Street
Black leather collars
turned up to hide red splotches on necks and cheeks
Sharp angled street lights
slice guilty faces
Fear of discovery as if
a disease determines good or bad
Disease as judgment
Black leather collars
turn into the night
Fewer and fewer footsteps
echo down these damp streets
Soon the time will come
when night is utterly still
and leather jackets swing empty
on creaking wire hangars
in silent apartments
or hospital closets
All that remains
on Christopher street:
balled up bandanas
tossed into gutters
soaked now with rain and sludge.
Poetry At The Beach
Schedule Set
May 27
South Coastal Library (Bethany Beach)
Sherry Chappelle, H.A. Maxson,
Scott Whitaker
June 22
Lewes Public Library
Beth Joselow, Sherry Chappelle,
Denise Clemons
July 27
Rehoboth Beach Public Library
Scott Whitaker, Denise Clemons,
Sherry Chappelle
Aug. 26
South Coastal Llibrary (Bethany Beach)
Michael Blaine, Denise Clemons,
Beth Joselow
Sept. 28 Lewes Public Library
H.A. Maxson, Michael Blaine,
Scott Whitaker
Sometime I leave this place.
I close my eyes and breathe, breathe,
And I no longer sit next to you.
That person there is a stranger.
Doesn’t know my favorite things.
She goes through life
Doing things like me
Then checking them off the list I left.
She will wake up three minutes after the alarm,
And talk just a little bit too fast
And walk just a little bit too slow.
Then I will come back
And you will ask me things
That I will not know.
Poetry by
Wendy Ingersoll
Between Me and the Far Trees
a drainage ditch draws a straight line
down the middle of the field and into
the next, collecting sticks, bugs, clots of earth,
spilling them onward the way Bach
floats a phrase into the next measure,
the way forgiveness
must be ferried into tomorrow.
So I paddle forward that moment
my husband said he was leaving. At dark
this ditch is where my father would scout,
snap on his torch to shine in the eyes
of a big bullfrog hunkered in the mud,
retinas reflecting the light until
he shot between them with his 22. He mostly stalked
ducks— in the house there hangs from the ceiling
a clean-shot mallard, wound
patched, wings spread, dead head
glossy-green as new spring leaves.
It was traveling a line south or north,
wanting, like us, warmth or propagation,
when it spied our field, circled.
Now it floats below our ceiling,
looking as if it longs to land.
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Roast Chicken and Chips
A short story by
Maryanne Khan
Riccardo stood at the pool table talking to a tall
young man.
A Punjabi, Tanvir thought as he paid for his beer at
the bar.
‘Ehi! Tan,’ Riccardo shouted. ‘One of your mob!’ he
called, shaking the young Pakistani by the shoulder. Tanvir
estimated the newcomer was barely twenty years old and embarrassed. In fact, the guy squirmed out of Riccardo’s grasp
and sat down abruptly.
He offered his hand to the young stranger, who
leaped once more to his feet.
‘Adab arz, janab,’ Tanvir said.
The young man smiled at being addressed as ‘sir.’
‘Adab. Kya hal he Tanvir Sahib?’ he said.
Tanvir replied that he was well.
‘Mera nam Nadeem he.’
‘Hi Nadeem.’
‘What’s with this mumbo jumbo?’ Riccardo interrupted. ‘Speak English, you Paki bastards. Me and Nadeem,
here, we play you. We’re on small. You want to break, Tan?’
The game ended with Tanvir sinking an extremely
difficult shot.
‘Where did you learn to play like that?’ Ricardo protested. ‘It’s criminal.’ He retrieved the ball from the pocket,
holding it in front of his face to scrutinise it. ‘There’s something wrong with this ball. There has to be if a Paki can beat
Il Maestro.’ He rolled the ball across the table, saying cheerfully, ‘My shout.’ and went to the bar.
Tanvir and Nadeem sat at one of the green plastic
tables that the owners of the place considered a waste of time
to wipe down given the clientele the establishment attracted.
In fact, a group of bikies across the room were becoming increasingly raucous. Nadeem stared at them.
‘If you leave them alone, they leave you alone,’ Tanvir
said. ‘So what are you doing over here?’
‘I’m doing a PhD in Optical Physics,’ Nadeem replied.
When Tanvir did not comment, he added, ‘I’m from Lahore.
And you?’
‘Peshawar.’
‘You don’t look like a Pashtun.’
‘I’m not. My people come from Mansehra District.’
Riccardo returned with three glasses in his enormous
calloused hands.
‘So how was the first day at work, Tan?’ he inquired.
‘It was today, no?’
‘Yes. It was all right.’
‘Treat you okay?’
‘There was only the manager there today, the two
partners weren’t in.’
‘At least that’ll keep you off the streets,’ Riccardo said
with a wink at Nadeem. ‘And who are these partners?’ He took
a long swig of his beer, wiping his mouth on the back of a hand
that bristled with a mat of dark, wiry hair.
‘One guy is a Lebanese businessman and the other’s a
retired surgeon. My neighbour knows the surgeon, the Indian
guy. He’s married to a woman from Pakistan.’
Nadeem shot Tanvir a look as though to say, ‘That
will be an interesting set up.’
‘The manager says it’s like the United Nations over
there,’ Tanvir continued. ‘The janitors are Philippinos. They go
around speaking their own language, and that really annoys
the English guy who runs the place. He thinks they’re plotting
something.’
Riccardo consulted his watch.
‘Time for me to get back home, I’m a working man,’
he added, grinning broadly. ‘Not like you Signori who haven’t
done a real day’s work in your lives.’
Tanvir also rose to leave.
‘I’ll see you again?’ Nadeem said as they shook hands.
‘Sure.’
He walked through the glass doors into the night that
was reverberating with the sound of twelve powerful Harley
Davidson engines roaring into life.
in.’
‘You’ll never sink that,’ Nadeem said.
‘Get your hand out of the way,’ Tanvir said. ‘I’ll get it
‘After the meeting the other night, we were talking
about Muhammad Khan Junejo getting sworn in as Prime
Minister,’ Nadeem said.
‘If I were you, I’d stay clear of those Socialists,’ Tanvir
said. ‘It’s not such a good idea to let everyone know what you
think. This isn’t Lahore. This place is like a village.’
‘Some of the brothers think that just because he’s
promised to end Martial Law, Ul Haq is going to let him go
ahead and do it,’ Nadeem added. ‘No chance of that one happening. Anyway, if I have a social conscience, that’s just how it
is.’
‘Have it your way,’ Tanvir said, sighting along his cue.
He struck the ball so that it rolled with the bias in an elegant
curve to come to a stop in the mouth of the pocket.
‘You missed!’ Nadeem crowed.
He then took stock of the state of play. Tanvir had
managed to position his balls so that they blocked all but one
of the pockets.
‘I suppose you think that’s funny,’ Nadeem said.
‘Doesn’t leave me much choice for my shot.’ He leaned against
the table, stretching forward.
‘Thank you. That’s a point for me,’ Tanvir said, having trapped Nadeem into sinking one of the balls he had set
up.
‘Why don’t you just sink them yourself in the first
place?’ Nadeem asked, a little put out.
‘More fun seeing how close I can get without it going
in.’
You should come to one of the meetings some time,’
Nadeem said. ‘Some of us Pakistanis talk about what’s going
on at home these days.’
Tanvir chalked the tip of his cue. ‘No thanks,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘When I was seven,’ he said, ‘I had to listen to my
Dad’s friends discussing the Kashmir War without knowing
what it was all about. I used to curl up in bed, scared stiff,
listening for the Indian air force to come swooping down from
Kashmir. Once it ended, the villagers sank back into their
usual boredom. I’ll leave the political agitation to people like
you,’ he said adding, ‘By the way, I had a friend in the village
who was also called Nadeem. Always trying to get me to go the
mosque. Now there’s you trying to get me to join the Socialist
Party. Too many Nadeems trying to boss me around.’
Nadeem laughed. ‘Did you go to that thing at the
High Commission the other night?’
‘Yes. And I’m not going anywhere near the place
again.’
Nadeem leaned on his cue and waited for an explanation.
‘They don’t realise what it means to be people like you
and me,’ Tanvir said. ‘They talk about a Pakistani Community, but there’s no such thing. It’s like a private club. If you
don’t belong, you don’t belong.
As he drove home, he thought over the evening he had
spent as guest of the Pakistan High Commissioner along with
other expatriate Pakistanis. These men were successful businessmen who had received a great deal of support from other
Pakistani entrepreneurs. He had been scrutinised and it was
clear that they had formed the firm opinion that he was inferior. In their eyes, he was a person obliged to work for others,
and therefore an embarrassment. He refused to mention that
his contractor’s certificate was not valid in Australia, nor that
having owned and managed a motel in Peshawar somehow did
not qualify him to work in what was called the ‘hospitality’
industry. He was left to sit staring into the glass of tea a
young houseboy served him. The servant had an expression in
his eyes that hinted that he had detected a certain fraternity
between them. Excusing himself, he had taken his leave, vowing never to return.
He turned into his space in the carport.
Bruce had been drinking all day as usual, and called,
‘Hey, black bastard!’ from the threadbare couch that occupied
one wall of his carport and where he entertained other drunks.
He was swigging from a long neck.
‘Wanna beer?’ he called, waving the bottle at Tanvir,
all smiles. ‘That’s an invite, ya bastard.’
‘I’m right Bruce, thanks.’
‘Yer a funny bugger,’ Bruce replied. ‘Gunnight then,’
he slurred.
‘Good night Bruce. See you tomorrow.’
As he entered the hall of the flat, he heard a tiny
click, a sound that he could not quite place. There it was
again. In the kitchen. He snapped on the light and noticed
that the little red warning light on the iron was glowing. He
switched it off and unplugged it.
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It was rather amusing to see that he had accumulated
quite a collection of small appliances after leaving Sarah—a
white plastic electric kettle, the wretched iron he always forgot to turn off, on, a toaster, a deep-fryer, the stove responsible
for the burns on his forearms every time he used the oven, a
drawer full of utensils, gadgets he needed to make it comfortable for James.
That’s the thing about life, he thought, you dump all
the baggage from your past only to have to go out and collect
another lot.
‘What would you like for dinner?’ he asked James
every night he stayed with him.
The answer was always the same.
‘Roast chicken and chips! Chips with vinegar.’
He took a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and
walked into in the dark living room. He switched on the television behind his armchair and sat watching the reflected screen
swim blue and flickering in the large window like a mystical
lunar event. His mind wandered as the reflections floated in a
dimension suspended between the dark shape of the large tree
outside the window and the interior of the room.
He stared at the window dancing with phantom images, thinking, these days, I have nothing to say for myself. I
tell people I work in a car park, and that’s it. I’ve gone back to
revealing nothing about myself. I can’t go round telling people
who my father was and expect them to give me some kind of
credit for it. There’s no such thing as a Sahib over here. No
one here understands what it means to hold a position of privilege and responsibility for as long as the men in my family
have. Nothing else I did in Pakistan counts over here anyway.
He thought of James, a consideration that steadied
him. I have my son, and I’ll always have him, no matter what.
For the rest of it, I got myself into this bucket of shit, and I
have to get out of it.
He gazed across the dark room to the large collage of
photographs he and James had assembled on the far wall.
Images of them walking on the beach; flying a kite; the first
tricycle; James holding the cat around the neck with its body
dangling from his arms. His mind wandered back to exactly
what he might represent to anyone other than his son.
Over here, it’s all about how much money you have,
and even then, it’s mostly about having more. People have so
many good things in their life, but they want something else.
I’m not going to be like that.
His wristwatch showed two in the morning.
I can either sit here thinking this nonsense or bother
going to bed. Either way, he thought, it doesn’t matter.
The telephone rang early next morning. He started
awake, finding that he had decided to sleep on the bed after
all. He struggled up, feeling his way to the living room, the
shrilling phone urging him hurry! hurry!
He answered.
It was Sarah.
‘I’m going to be out of town for a few weeks,’ she said.
‘You’ll have to take James for a while.’
Right, he thought.
‘And don’t forget his doctor’s appointments.’
Through the fog of sleep he remembered the intensive
treatment James’ kidney condition demanded.
‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
‘Anna and I booked a trip to Mexico,’ she said evenly.
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As always, he was amazed that Sarah seemed to consider her role as parent a secondary alternative to other interests.
She interpreted his present silence as curiosity. ‘Anna
wants to explore the Yucatan Peninsula. Absolutely wonderful
Mayan temples.’
He dropped his head into his free hand. Something
nasty in his mind whispered; make sure you don’t come back
with some poor Mexican you’ve decided to marry.
Instead, he said, ‘When are you leaving?’
‘Tomorrow,’ she said brightly. ‘Can’t wait. Anyway, I’ll
have James’ stuff packed and ready for you to pick up.’
Apparently, that was a farewell, as she abruptly hung
up.
He stared at the phone, wondering, what kind of
mother constantly decides to go off and leave her child like
that? Doesn’t happen where I come from. But that’s there, he
thought. Different here. If Sarah wants to go somewhere, she
goes, no questions asked. Seminars in Sydney? No problem.
Trips overseas? No problem. Each time it’s, ‘You’ll have to
take James,’ and she’s gone.
The following day, the boss was not pleased that he
needed to take time off to collect James from day care, saying,
‘It’s hardly sufficient notice.’
‘Listen John. I only found out yesterday,’ Tanvir said.
‘Oh well, if you’re prepared to dance around like a
puppet on a string,’ John began.
Tanvir slammed both hands on the desk so that the
cup of pencils rattled.
‘I’m not ‘dancing’ as you call it. This is my son. What
am I supposed to do? Leave him there? He’s five, for god’s
sake!’ He strode to the door. ‘I don’t understand what’s wrong
with you people. You treat your children like parcels. Shove
them here, shove them there . . .What about the poor kids?’
John, sitting shocked in his chair, pen suspended in
mid air, said, ‘You can’t drag your family issues to your place
of business and expect everyone to shuffle about to suit you! I
might very well remind you that you work here, young man.’
‘I work here yes,’ Tanvir said raising his voice, ‘that’s
my choice, but it’s not my entire life. You can take your car
park . . .’ he said, deciding at the last minute to bite off further
words he might regret.
‘Now look here!’ John thundered.
Tanvir took himself up to the open parking lot on the
roof. The sight of the distant Brindabella Mountains always
struck a calming chord in him, memories of his village and the
Karakoram Range beyond it.
‘What if I have to go back to Mummy’s tomorrow?’
James said, clutching his red backpack to his chest, resisting
having its contents removed and laid neatly in the small chest
of drawers. ‘You’ll just have to put it all back in again.’
‘You’re staying with me for a little while,’ Tanvir said
sitting on the bed. ‘Is that okay with you?’
James grinned, nodded vigorously, shoved the backpack at his father and ran off to find the cat.
‘Can we have roast chicken and chips?’ he called from
the sofa.
Look for Maryanne Khan’s collection of short stories,
Domain of the Lower Air
this summer! Pre-order now! ISBN 9780982603048
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Literary Birthdays
May
May 3, 1912
May 5, 1867
May 6, 1861
May 7, 1812
May 7, 1857
May 7, 1776
May 8, 1698
May 9, 1860
May 12, 1907
May 12, 1812
May 15, 1890
May 17, 1873
May 20, 1799
May 22, 1688
May 26, 1799
May 27, 1867
May 30, 1835
May Sarton
Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochran)
Rabindranath Tagore
Robert Browning
Jose Valentim Fialho de Almeida
Daniel Berzsenyi
Henry Baker
Sir James Matthew Barrie
Daphne Du Maurier
Edward Lear
Katherine Anne Porter
Henri Barbusse
Honore de Balzac
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pushkin
Arnold Bennett
Alfred Austin
June
Jun 2. 1816
Jun 3, 1867
Jun 6, 1799
Jun. 8, 1874
Jun. 10, 1832
Jun. 12, 1827
Jun. 13, 1752
Jun. 13, 1574
Jun. 14, 1811
Jun. 18, 1896
Jun. 20, 1905
Jun. 20, 1743
Jun. 21, 1912
Jun. 21, 1813
Jun. 23, 1910
Jun. 23, 1889
Jun. 24, 1842
Jun. 25, 1875
Jun. 29, 1809
Jun. 29, 1900
Jun. 30, 1803
Grace Aguilar
Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont
Alexander Pushkin
Jose Martinex Ruiz (Azorin)
Sir Edwin Arnold
Johanna Spyri
Fanny Burney
Richard Barnfield
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Philip Barry
Lillian Hellman
Anna Laetitia Barbauld
Mary McCarthy
William Edmondstoune Aytoun
Jean Anouilh
Anna Akhmatova
Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce
Sir Ernest John Pickstone
Petrus Borel
Antoine St. Exupery
Thomas Lovell Beddoes
July
Jul. 3, 1883
Jul. 3, 1860
Jul. 9, 1843
Jul. 12, 1602
Jul. 19, 1863
Jul 21, 1899
Jul. 22, 1898
Jul. 24, 1900
Jul. 26, 1856
Jul. 27, 1870
Jul. 29, 1869
Jul. 30, 1818
Jul. 30, 1888
Franz Kafka
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Bertha Felicie Sophie
Edward Benlowes
Hermann Bahr
Ernest Hemingway
Stephen Vincent Benet
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald
George Bernard Shaw
Hillaire Belloc
Booth Tarkington
Emily Bronte
Jean Jacques Bernard
3819 North 13th Street
Arlington, VA 22201
gargoyle@gargoylemagazine.com
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More Essential Books
Chosen by TBR Editors and Readers
Here are more essential books as selected by our Editors and Readers. Do you agree or disagree with their selections? Let us
know and why, and, while you’re at it, send us your selections for essential books which everyone should read.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
The Levanter
The Proving Flight
Monsieur Pamplemousse
After Sorrow
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
O'Pioneers/My Antonia
On the Black Hill
The Collected Stories
Democracy In America
(works)
A Yellow Raft on Blue Water
The Alexandria Quartet (esp. Justine)
(works)
Under The Red Sea Sun
(works)
The Art of Eating
The Machine Stops
(works)
Don't Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight
The Man Who Planted Trees
(works)
Our Man In Havana
(works)
Stranger In A Strange Land
Revolt in 2010
Pentimento
The Old Man And The Sea
Islands In The Stream
A Book of Bees
(works)
(works)
Being There
(works)
The River of Doubt
The Kapillan of Malta
HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour
(works)
When the Emperor Was Divine
Sharks And Little Fish
The Last Time I Saw Paris
Giants in the Earth
Passing Through Customs
Rootabaga Stories
The Raj Quartet (four books)
(works)
Round The Bend
A Town Like Alice
Angle of Repose
(works)
The Run for the Elbertas
Living Well is the Best Revenge
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
Webster's Dictionary
What Saves Us
James Agee and Walker Evans
Eric Ambler
David Beatt
Michael Bond
Lady Borton (nonfiction)
Willa Cather (fiction)
Bruce Chatwin (fiction)
Anton Chekhov
Alexis De Tocqueville
Charles Dickins
Michael Dorris (fiction)
Laurence Durrell (fiction)
T.S. Eliot
Commander Edward Ellsberg
William Faulkner
M.F.K. Fisher (essays)
E.M. Forster
Robert Frost
Alexandria Fuller (memoir)
Jean Giono
Louise Gluck
Graham Greene
Thomas Hardy
Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein
Lillian Hellman
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Sue Hubbell
James Joyce
Franz Kafka
Jerzy Kosinski
D.H. Lawrence n
Candice Millard
Nicholas Monsarrat
Nicholas Monsarrat
Mary Oliver
Julie Otsuka
Wolfgang Ott
Eliot Paul
O.E. Rolvaag
Gibbons Ruark
Carl Sandburg
Paul Scott
Shakespeare
Nevil Shute
Nevil Shute
Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stevens
James Still
Calvin Tomkins
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
Bruce Weigl
P AGE 4 6
A JOURNAL OF LITERATURE
and its contents are © John Milton & Co., 2007
Address correspondence to:
c/o John Milton and Company Books
104 Federal Street,
Milton, DE 19968
Phone: 302-684-3514 e-mail: the_broadkill_review@earthlink.net
V OLU ME 1 , NUMB ER 2
John Milton & Company Quality Used Books
“Pre-owned books read just as well.”
Bringing you the best in used books since the last
millennium — Now proud to bring you
The Broadkill Review, featuring the best in
contemporary writing.
CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE:
Phillip Bannowsky is a retired autoworker, an educator, and the
author of Autoplant: A Poetic Monologue and The Mother Earth Inn:
A Novel, both published by Broken Turtle Books LLC. See http://
brokenturtlebooks.com/
Linda Blaskey Originally from the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, she now resides in Sussex County, Delaware. Her work has
appeared in Terrains, Literary Mama and a broadside entitled The
Poet Laureate Presents and is included in the moving exhibition
Poetry in Public Places, supported by the Delaware Division of the
Arts. She is a founding member of the Rehoboth Art League writers
group and was selected to participate in the 2002 Delaware Division of the Arts poetry retreat held at Cape Henlopen. She is the
winner of the 2008 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize.
Jamie Brown is Publisher & Editor of The Broadkill Review.
Phillip Calderwood’s poems have appeared in The Chabot Review, The Berkeley Text, A Magazine of Paragraphs, and The Innisfree Poetry Journal. I am originally from Northern California,
where I received undergraduate degrees in English and history
from UC Berkeley. I moved to Maryland in 2004, completed a master’s program in history at American University, and now work as
an editor and content manager in the District of Columbia.
Lisa Ellis is a student at Orange County High School of the Arts in
Santa Ana California, and is currently studying Creative Writing.
She is on the editorial staff of Inkblot, the school’s the literary
magazine. One of her short screenplays was chosen to be produced
by OCHSA’s Film and Television class. This is her first publication..
Shelly Grabel has been writing poetry for over 35 years. In 1975
Persephone Press published "The Fourteenth Witch" a book of Shelley's poems with photographs by Deborah Snow. Her poetry has
appeared in a number of publications including “Off Our Backs”
and ”The Journal of Radical Therapy” . She performed her poetry in
the Village at local cafes, Folk City and on WBAI Radio. Shelley
graduated from Brooklyn College with a degree in TV/Radio in
1987. After a successful career in computer systems at various
corporations in the Northeast,
Shelley relocated to Milton, Delaware. . Shelley now writes articles
for local publications as well as continuing to develop her poetic
style. She has participated in workshops with Fleda Brown as well
and is an active member of the Rehoboth Writers Guild. She currently teaches Business Leadership courses at Delaware Technical
& Community College.
Joshua D. Isard is a writer from Philadelphia who has published
his writing in both American and British fiction magazines and
anthologies. He has completed one novel, for which he's still seeking a publisher, and is working on a second. Joshua earned a master's degree in creative writing from The University of Edinburgh,
and is currently enrolled in University College London's master's
program literature. He has taught literature and writing at Temple
University and the Art Institute of Philadelphia.
Maryanne Khan has lived in Europe, the United States and now
Canberra, Australia. She has had works of short fiction and poetry
published in American and Australian literary journals, in two
anthologies, and her book I Never Lie to You was published in Australia. Her "Family Guide" to the Hirschhorn Museum has been
repeatedly re-published since 1997, and received an Honourable
Mention in the American Museums Design Awards. She is currently writing memoirs based on her recent trip to Pakistan, and
her life in Italy, the US and Australia.
Steven Leech has been an editor of the Delaware literary periodical Dreamstreets since 1980. He is also the producer of the radio
series Dreamstreets 26, which is podcasted from WVUD.org. His
latest novel UNTIME was published in 2007 by Broken Turtle
Books.
Lenny Lianne is the author of A WILDERNESS OF RICHES:
VOICES OF THE VIRGINIA COLONY (ScriptWorks Press, 2008)
and two other forthcoming books of poetry. She co-hosts a monthly
reading series in Escondido, California. Lenny won Third Place in
2009 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest for her parody of Ginsberg’s “Howl”.
Lyn Lifshin is the author of The Licorice Daughter: My Year with
the Ruffian, Texas Review Press. Also Another Woman Who Looks
Like Me from Black Sparrow at Godine.. She has over 120 books &
edited 4 anthologies. In Mirrors, An Unfinished Story, The
Daughter I Don’t Have, She Was Found Treading Water. Coming
soon: Tsunami Poems and All the Poets (Mostly) Who Have
Touched Me, Living and Dead, All True, Especially the Lies.
Joseph LoGuidice was born in rural New York, but spent much
of his childhood in the urban environment of the Bronx. These
counter settings have prevailed upon his creative mind, and his
writing, always taking root from childhood impressions, explores
the surface and the depth of human relationships. He has been
published in several magazines for both fiction and non-fiction,
and is currently seeking representation for his first novel, Little
Gods. He now lives with his wife, Corín, in Cortlandt Manor, New
York.
Elisavietta Ritchiebooks include: Awaiting Permission to Land,
The Spirit of the Walrus; The Arc of the Storm; Elegy for the Other
Woman; Tightening The Circle Over Eel Country; Raking The
Snow; chapbooks: Timbot; Wild Garlic: The Journal of Maria X..
Fiction collections: In Haste I Write You This Note; Flying Time:
Edited The Dolphin's Arc: Endangered Creatures of the Sea and
others.
Scott Whitaker grew up on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. He
attended Emerson College and was a creative writing fellow at
Boston University, where he worked at Agni Magazine. His poetry
has appeared in PIF Magazine, The Coe Review, The MacGuffin,
and others. In 2002 he was a NEA recipient of grant for his rock
and roll adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. In 2003 A Third World
Christmas, a comedy co-written with his wife was a finalist in the
Richmond Playwriting Competition. Finishing Line Press published his first chapbook, The Barleyhouse Letters. He currently
teaches literature, drama, and psychology at Pocomoke High
School, and lives in Onley, VA with his wife Michele, and his two
sons. He was the winner of the 2006 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize.

TBR Vol 4 No 3 - The Broadkill River Press

Transcription

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