Thursday, May 29, 2008

Evening Commute

In the silk stocking district where I work,
a man has hoisted onto his shoulders
two large plastic sacks.
They are crammed with cans worth five cents each.
His hair flops over his eyes. We make no eye contact.
He mutters as he walks past a woman
carrying a plastic baggy turned inside out
for the droppings of the poodle trotting
ahead of her. All the streets have trees
up here. Planted around the trees are pansies,
and around the pansies a short fence.
Doormen wash down sidewalks every morning.
They pause when I walk past, but now
it is night and I am heading to
the bus then the subway to
Chinatown where an old woman has slung
eight square plastic jugs on a pole.
She has braced the rod across her back
and balanced it on her shoulders.

Men facing east kneel on prayer rugs
on the sidewalk in front of the old bank
now a Payless Shoe store.
There are shops with bootleg perfumes by Chanel,
Calvin Klein, Guerlain. There are plastics stores,
there are men selling sound systems,
and women selling handbags.
The four men who had been praying to Mecca
roll up their rugs and push their wares in suitcases
on wheels. I wonder what is inside.

The old woman rattles a coffee cup's loose change
She looks down as I pass her.

I am almost home now.




















photo of Canal Street
By Sergio Calleja

Monday, May 26, 2008

Olive Kittredge














Haunting stories stay with me today after having finished the collection last night. The collection of short prose pieces centers on a large boned woman whose husband is her counterpoint--soft hearted, generous, gentle. Olive is brusque and does not suffer fools. The stories that are not about Olive are also character driven, with one of the most heart-rending about a teen with an eating disorder. Even when Olive is not the only one holding our undivided attention, she is often in the periphery or remarked on by Olive's neighbors who become the focus of the ancillary stories.

The setting is a character in its own right, the small town in Maine where the Yankee disposition of keeping a stiff upper lip and holding your secrets to yourself is beginning to be chipped away by the openness of celebrity culture and psycho-therapeutic solutions of the early 21st century. We witness Olive in her middle age, and as she advances in years, only to suffer a rift with her only child.

Imagine combining the sensibility of Ray Carver (without the drinking) and Alice Munro. You might begin to feel the strengths of this marvelous writer.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Jee Leong Koh


Payday Loans, poems by Jee Leong Koh

(Poets Wear Prada) Hoboken NJ 2007



I encourage you to buy this book, but please go to the poet's blog to buy it, and to find the many stimulating things he has to say there.

In a series of sonnets, Koh writes of his struggle to find a job.
Every poem is about waiting: waiting to get a job, waiting to move in with his boyfriend, waiting to write the great poem. Koh is an expert sonnet maker. The sequence was written after Hurricane Katrina and I like the self mockery of this poem.

April 27, Wednesday
I can’t decide which organic bread to buy,
the pumpernickel or the multi-grain.
The tents of death still fly on flooded plains
and campers pray for drops of food supply.
I can’t decide which organic bread to buy.
The fucked-up prisoners-of-war complain.
The pumpernickel or the multi-grain,
I ask the empty counter. No reply
but the new pope speaks out against the tie
of gay marriage legalized in Spain.
The prisoners protest for checkout lanes
and campers pray to satellites that fly
over their heads while I decide to buy
the pumpernickel, or the multi-grain.




Laurel Blossom













I raced through Blossom’s
Degrees of Latitude because the structure—traveling through latitudes—and the form --in free verse— had the suspense and tension of a page turning novel.
The plot does not unfold so much as surprise the way a good lyric poem does. And there is expert use of dialogue. The mother - daughter relationship develops in a few pages, from birth of daughter to death of mother with quick brushstrokes.

The book's melding of forms breaks new ground. I hope that it gets the wide audience it
deserves. Several of the characters are alcoholics and Blossom's writing in these passages is more appealing to me than anything O'Neill has written.

Here is an excerpt:

____________________________________________________________________

My husband said he thought the spinach wasn't quite done.

When I looked I saw I'd served it to him straight from the freezer, a hard green brick.

That was the night I knew.

So I tried white wine.

So I tried divorce.

*

Two bottles of Wild Turkey, a bottle of Teachers, a bottle of Canadian Club one shot down, a bottle of Stolichnaya, a bottle of Gordon's Gin, half a bottle of Beefeater's for Peter, an unopened bottle of Ron Rico because nobody seems to drink rum any more, a bottle of Grand Marnier, a bottle of Metaxa, a bottle of vin santa in honor of Aunt Phoebe, a bottle of saki Gloria gave me who loves sushi, two decanters, one full of Scotch, the other full of brandy, one a wedding present from Freddie's uncle, the other my mother's doughtnut-shaped beauty, the last bottle of white wine, three bottles of red, a bottle of Harvey's Bristol Cream.

The sink smelled wonderful.

from Degrees of Latitude a poem by Laurel Blossom

May 10, 2008

Saturday, May 10, 2008

PEN America World Voices Festival

The theme of the World Voices Festival this year was public lives, private lives. Salman Rushdie introduced eight writers from Hungary, South Africa, UK, Israel, Germany, Mexico, and U.S., who read in their native languages. It took all my concentration to watch the words scroll on a large black screen behind the reader especially when the scrolling didn't keep time with the words, but how wonderful it was to hear the languages and to see the writers come from many places.
Annie Proulx modestly read a short story by Irish Aidin Higgins who was not able to come because of fragile health. Here is a link. She read it beautifully.
Annie Proulx from Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down

Most amusing was Peter Esterhazy's Celestial Harmonies, about his Austro-Hungarian family. Book one of the larger work is entitled ""Numbered Sentences from the Lives of the Esterhazy Family." Here is the first of many sentences.

1. It is deucedly difficult to tell a lie when you don't know the truth.


Monday, May 5, 2008


Richard and I went to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden and ran into the Cherry Blossom Festival. So many pink petals. So many children running across the lawn.

As we walked down the main alleyway toward the loud canned pop music stand blocking the steps to the cherry tree esplanade, we passed a young boy and girl. The boy who was a little older than his sister was poking her, then dodging out of her way so that she couldn't get back at him. After this happened three times, the grandfather stood between them, took the girl's hand and walked away.

Among the lilacs, Richard found the paler blossoms more fragrant. I thought I smelled the lilacs of my childhood there in Brooklyn. I love the shape of the blooms, carrying so many individual small florets to make up a curved cone that hangs heavy on the bough.

As we were leaving, we ran into a threesome, but the girl in the foreground stands out.