I A I

Introducing Nick Paradise

2011-11-05T12:13:00.068-04:00

Although rapper Nick Paradise is Yonkers based his sound and indefinable style can't be pegged to one specific region and his energetic delivery, unique flow, word play, and youthful good looks are rapidly gaining him an impressive following from Yonkers and beyond. Coming off his win as one of the top 10 finalists' spots in the Diesel/55DSL Talent Show in New York City and in preparation for the release of his mixtape No Vacation scheduled to drop in early 2012, Nick Paradise sat down with Immunization Against Invisibility to rap about his future in the rap game, Open Oven Music, and Tumblr fame.

Invisibility Against Immunization: Is Nick Paradise your real name?
Nick Paradise: No.

What is your real name?
My real, whole government name is Timothy Thomas.

How did you come up with Nick Paradise?
Nick Paradise came about when I was on a conference call with my team Double O. They said, "We have a name for you...Nick Paradise," and I said, "Wow, I like that."

Out of the blue they just said Nick Paradise?
Yeah, out of nowhere. They were just throwing out different names and they were like "Nah, I like Nick Paradise." I said, "But that has nothing to do with me; Nick –that's not my name," and they said, "Nah, don't worry about it; that fits you." And that gave me this ego boost like I have a name nobody has and people are going to be like "Oh Nick Paradise; I never heard that before."

I read on your Tumblr that you're African-American, West Indian, European, and Cuban. Has your multicultural upbringing influenced your music? Or is it just who you are?
Honestly, that's just who I am. I haven't been enlightened to the impact that my past has had on me, but somewhere down the line I'm pretty sure it does have an impact.

You're from the Yonkers –born and raised?
No, I'm from The Bronx. I just live in Yonkers. I was born and raised in the Bronx.

What represents a Bronx sound to you?
Honestly, who I am now as far as my name and things I've done so far I don't think people can depict me as having a sound. They might say "Where's this guy from?" When I'm in Yonkers they look at me a certain kind of way because they know I'm not from that area at all. I dress differently. My demeanor is different so they kind of look at me funny. But as far as music you basically get depicted by your style, your swag. If you just look like a wack dude you most likely are, sometimes, but looks can be deceiving.

All rappers aren't logophiles (lover of words), but it seems like you are. I can't think of any rapper that ever used the word "behoove" before like you did in your freestyle over Jay-Z and Kanye's "Otis" track. And your rhymes are heavy with word play. Where did your love of words come from?
I'm going to start by saying this –I graduated, but back in high school it was something about people's diction that annoyed me. I would hate when people said things incorrectly and I would always correct them, so I got depicted as an English major and they were like "You're a young English major," and I was like "Nah, I'm trying to help you out; I'm beneficial to you." My favorite subject is English, so that pretty much helped me as far as rapping. I write poetry as well. I'm diverse. I have story lines and all different types of scenarios.

You're part of a team called Open Oven Music. Who and what is Open Oven Music?
We're more than a team; we're more like a family. I see a team as a group of guys who want the same thing but they don't have any chemistry or fun time, it's just one main objective. However, with Open Oven Music, we're a family. We actually spend time with each other, hang out, go to the studio; we do things as a whole. Even right now I feel that they're with me.

When you put out an album is it going to be like the Wu-Tang Clan?
Nah, we're going to have a few duo albums. There are nine of us. It's me, Dre Charles –that's my little brother, Anthony King, Prince Adam, Shynze, KoNiko, Lyric, Queenie Catora, and Demetrius Martinez. We all are solo artists, however when we want to link up it will be like a Dre Paradise or King Paradise thing. We're all solo artists, but we may do things as a whole as well.

You describe yourself as a rapper, music producer, poet, fashion designer, and a visual artist. Which came first?
Honestly, I believe visual artist came first. I used to draw sneakers. That was almost like a phase, but that is where it really started. I was always musically inclined, so at the age of 12 I got this game, I don't know where I got it from or what happened to it, but it was a game that basically gave me tutorials on how to make a beat and I got inspired from there. Even though the beats were pretty horrible I admit, now that I see my progression. My older brother was rapping before me and he inspired me to start rapping. I always knew I had this something about me. That is what the females say, too, "It's just something about you," and they never really specify what it is

What rapper has influenced you the most – musically or fashion wise?
I'll use current day rappers. I get referred to as a sort of replica of Kanye West because of my swag and word play and Andre 3000 because he's just deep and it goes over a lot of people's heads, but that's all due to society nowadays. That's a whole other story.

Do you have any favorite poets?
My favorite poet is Langston Hughes; I've been very inspired by his work.

Since you have so many talents like rapping, poetry, where do you see yourself in the next five years --doing music? Or just doing everything you possibly can?
Honestly, I just see myself as an entrepreneur because I don't ever really want to stay on one thing. That's what a lot of people do nowadays. That's why I feel a lot of people are disrespecting hip hop. They settle for that and everybody is doing that and that shows other people like "I can do that, too," or "You know what let me do that; I don't have anything else to do." They use it as a hobby when it's more of a lifestyle. And they want to get upset and be mad at the world when they aren't successful because there isn't heart behind it. I've been around music all my life.

What do you hope to bring to the rap game?
Well I have a current song where I say something like "You're trying to see how far the game will take you, the difference is I'm trying to see how far I can take the game." I just want to come into this and bring the game with me. I'll go ahead of the game and do something outrageous and bring the game with me. I don't want to be brought up with the game. That's the biggest impact I want to have. I want to be a legend.

Where can people find you on the Internet?
You can find me on my Facebook fan page and my twitter is @IamNickParadise. I don't really publicize my Tumblr because a lot of people on Tumblr get a lot of "love," but it's all a gimmick. It's almost like a MySpace. You can put up a front, put on two different outfits, take a few couple pictures, and they get reblogged and when they see that they're like "Oh wow people really love me." But it might not be you they love. They could love your camera, the sneakers you got, your background, your house. I don't want that Tumblr fame. The amount of reblogs I get, that will come. I'm not fiending for that. That's not something I desire.

You Might Find Cures Between These Pages

2009-02-27T09:25:00.010-05:00

Elegy for a Scarred Shoulder
Review by Missy McEwen

Karen S. Williams' debut poetry book Elegy for a Scarred Shoulder dedicated to "the late Dr. Clarence Livingood, former chief of dermatology, Henry Ford Hospital Detroit, Michigan," is a poetry collection of "wonderfully made" poems about medicine and midwives, diseases and doctors and death, cures and childbirth, studies and science and surgeons, and hospitals and healing. Thus, Elegy for a Scarred Shoulder is not an easy read. These poems demand the reader's full attention as Karen S. Williams focuses on topics about smallpox, yellow fever, syphilis, keloids, and anorexia:

"The way the epidemic chewed and swallowed.
Onesimus had seen the horror...
The victims clothing
must be torn off, he heard, tossed
into a flame...
To cure it, some thought would be
a leap of faith, a move beyond
Bostonian cure...
But in Africa for displaced Guramantese,
for its lost son, slave Onesimus,
it required using a prickly thorn,
a hard known briar know to rend flesh
or a twig astutely shaped
a sharp, sharp knife." -- from "Onesimus' Twig" Birth of the smallpox inoculation

"Mosquitoes like these from Hispanola,
troll about ships,
flit and foul in Eastern bogs...
They cluster and breed,
still the quick and walking..." -- from "At First Frost" for Black clerics...whom lead black volunteers to serve the sick during the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia.

"Soon, I won't remember the quiet, petite girl:
brunette...with the lazy eye. She

reminded me of my friend except that
she was white...

She spoke to me in whispers
dulled by cheap wine, her

warm, breathy words
making me forget about prophylactics,
vivid canteen posters that spelled
'Syphilis is Death'...
and said that my French woman
may look clean-- but
there is no medicine for regret."-- from "French Letter" For African-American Soldiers with Syphilis during WWI

The poems in Elegy for a Scarred Shoulder are thick and heavy with history, importance and remembrance. Remembrance of doctors such as Dr. Daniel Hale Williams ("…performer of the first open heart surgery in 1893") and Dr. Kenneth Clark:

"Dark and stiff,
in perfect line,
boys and girls enter the room...
One by one they look at the table
I have placed mid-floor,
burdened with brown and white dolls...
I give the children basic instructions,
shake each tiny hand and say:
'Hello. My name is Dr. Clark.
What I would like for you to do
is look at the table filled with dolls.
Show me the doll you think is nice,
then show me the doll you think is bad.
Then after you do that, show me
which doll looks like you.' -- from "The Doll House" For Dr. Kenneth Clark

Karen S. Williams' Elegy for a Scarred Shoulder published by Willow Books, Aquarius Press (2008) cannot be summed up by quotes pulled from the text. It is one of those books that has to be owned and read in full, read thoroughly (you might find cures between these pages). A poetry book packed with so much knowledge and insight should be in every house and on every desk in every schoolroom and can be purchased at http://www.amazon.com/

To learn more about Karen S. Williams go to www.aquariuspressbookseller.net/karenswilliams.html

WELCOME TO MILLEDGEVILLE!

2009-02-06T11:56:00.022-05:00

Blood Ties & Brown Liquor

Review by Missy McEwen

Sean Hill's Blood Ties & Brown Liquor is divided into four sections and the pages that are used for the sections' titles resemble the backs of postcards and the cover of the book is like the front of a postcard (cover illustration: Detail of McIntosh Street by Frank Stanley Herring). Even the feel of the book (glossy, smooth to the touch) reminds me of a postcard. It is as if the reader has been sent a postcard, not just from Milledgeville, Georgia, but from another century and the poems are what is scribbled down (in the neatest handwriting) on the back, written by the relative with a knack for writing and storytelling. He sends you postcards about "Red-brown" Benny:

"Benny's handsome, red-brown like rust on a hoe…
The day is empty like a cicada's husk clinging to a tree,
empty like sound after the mule's kick when Benny falls, free
of this place then the hum of a bee and cry of a Jay.
Benny's skin red-brown like rust on a hoe is empty
as a cicada's husk clinging to a tree." -- from "Elegy for an Older Brother 1922"

He sends well-written, poetic postcards about the "..Georgia heat," "Silas & Mulberries 1917" and "Nigger Street 1937":

"McIntosh Street the sign reads
like the apple red but not
red delicious red but red
like redeye gravy on grits
at Gus's or red like stoplights
but they're also green and yellow
like apples in Allen's Market
on the corner…" -- from "Nigger Street 1937"

Postcards of memories, mostly memories:

"In the spring of '43 you went
to the prom. There was a band…
Lucien Walker spun records. You'd sewn your
own dress---white with bright red apples.
Your father didn't allow you to court.
Said you had to invite a girl. Your date was
Lucille Jackson…" -- from "#5: Going to the Prom"

"When I asked, you told me this quiet family lore.
I didn't do no courting worth nothing
cause daddy was so strict. In May of '44
when you were seventeen--an innocent thing--
wouldn't be eighteen for seven months yet,
you eloped. Said: He lived right cross the street
there right cross the street." -- from "#6: Courting"

Blood Ties & Brown Liquor is made up of "records," and "certificates of death and birth" and life -- life as it was in Milledgeville, Georgia, a town with mockingbirds and Flannery O'Connor's grave (there's a poem about it -- "In Memory Hill Cemetery"). In Sean Hill's book, the reader sees, hears, and feels Milledgeville and its people:

"Hear those cicadas building and falling
in rounds? Ain't as soothing as the steady
buzz of bees. Sounds like the whole church
testifying or a car's whine when the belt's
loose..." -- from "Milledgeville Evening Song"

"There was this high yellow man,…
lived up the road/from us when I was a boy…
He raised bees for honey.
[His wife] made candles from the beeswax." -- from "Milledgeville Evening Song"

"All night heavy moonlight dampened
echoes of the curfew bell that rang us in.

Nathaniel stole the little cool
from the late August night that touched my skin

the way the silver I polish and my mistress's
looking glass on first touch took the warmth of my
curious finger…" -- from "Milledgeville Aubade 1831"

Fiction it may be (the back of the book has a blurb about the poems in Blood Ties & Brown Liquor being about "the family of the fictional Silas Wright, a black man born in 1907"), but the feelings are real; the characters are real; the town is real (Sean Hill is from Milledgeville, Georgia). Sean Hill has created a civilization and I forget that Silas Wright is fictional. With an imagination like this, I cannot imagine Sean Hill ever having writer's block. Sean Hill's Blood Ties & Brown Liquor is innovative, creative, and inspiring.

To pick up a copy (and cop-a-feel -- the book's feel is awesome) of Sean Hill's Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, published by The University of Georgia Press (2008), go to http://www.seanhill.org/sh_book.html (There you will find a list of places where Blood Ties & Brown Liquor can be purchased). And to learn more about Sean Hill go to: http://www.seanhill.org/

I A I Discusses Poetry with Jericho Brown

2009-01-18T08:31:00.020-05:00

Jericho Brown, currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego, is the author of Please -- his first book, published by New Issue Poetry & Prose.

IAI: Please is your first book; how long did it take for it to come together?

Jericho Brown: The oldest drafts of some poems in PLEASE were written in 2000, and I wrote them when I first attended the Cave Canem workshop/retreat for African American poets. Some poems' first drafts were written in 2007, the same year New Issues asked to publish the book. But seven years seems a dishonest answer when I think of how I'm prone to reading and thinking more than to writing itself.

In the last eight years of my life, there were times I couldn't stop writing. Over a short period of weeks, I'd have many drafts of very different things and begin to think I may be quite literally possessed. Once, I actually had a car accident trying to get some scribbling done while driving. These periods were thrilling for me, but during them, I felt vulnerable in a way I have a hard time characterizing to some of my closest poet friends.

At other times, for periods as long as two years within the last eight, I didn't write at all. I couldn't even think to revise. This is, of course, painful and scary in a very different way. Today, I think I managed to get through these silences because I was much more interested in figuring how to write poems than I was in how to write a book. I had no goal other than the poem itself and could almost satisfy my yearnings to write by reading and discovering other poets.

IAI: You teach creative writing at the University of San Diego; how do you teach creative writing?

Brown: In addition to fashioning a classroom that investigates and hones craft, I help undergraduate students develop themselves as men and women who think about literature and appreciate art. To that end, students read poetry manifestos written by such canonical writers as Wordsworth, Eliot, Oppen, Hughes, Rich, Glück, Howe, and others. Students then write their own credos and manifestos in order to begin thinking about what they deem aesthetically valuable. In every class, I emphasize the relationship between writing well and reading broadly, the relationship between sharpening critical skills and polishing creative skills. Students participate in what I call "field work," searching out recent issues of journals as different as The Southern Review and Fence, and scouring these magazines for poems they feel must exist and poems they had hoped did not, all the while familiarizing themselves with contemporary poetry. And, in order to highlight the orality of the art, students memorize and recite poems in class throughout the semester.

In the workshop, I guide students in analyzing poems for specific strategies, naming each as a tool that the poet uses to establish emotional depth, to make for musical pleasure, or even to incite humor. Following thorough discussions, students write imitations modeled after giants including Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, Etheridge Knight, Lucille Clifton, Jean Valentine, Rae Armantrout, and David Kirby and more recent contemporary poets, such as Tina Chang, Olena Kalytiak Davis, Ben Doller (nee Doyle), Thomas Sayers Ellis, Beth Ann Fennelly, James Hall, Sean Hill, Jay Hopler, Douglas Kearney, Joseph Legaspi, Richard Siken, Natasha Trethewey, Rachel Zucker, and others. In class and in several conferences throughout the semester, we discuss the ways students deploy these tools in their own work.

IAI: Are the majority of your students poets and writers or are they students taking the class as an elective?

Brown: Even on library bookshelves, poets are never in the majority.

IAI: In schools, teachers tend to teach the same poets over and over again, such as Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, and Langston Hughes. Are you a fan of Plath? Dickinson? Hughes?

Brown: I'm pretty crazy about all three of those poets, but as I mentioned in my earlier answer, I don't think of them as the only poets.

IAI: If you were in charge of choosing the poet laureate for the universe, who would you appoint? Why?

Brown: Maybe I'd get Oprah Winfrey to do it because she'd bring a lot of attention to poetry itself, and since she doesn't seem to know a lot about poetry save for the verse of Angelou and Giovanni, she very well may hire really good poets to advise her on how to handle the job.

On the other hand, I'd probably appoint myself for fear of making the wrong decision by picking Winfrey.

IAI: When did you decide to become a poet?

Brown: I don't remember not wanting to write. While growing up, I always thought I'd have what adults termed some kind of a "real job" and then retire from it in time enough to do what I always wanted to do in earnest. As my relationships with my family became more and more strained in my very late teens, I began to understand that I didn't have to wait to have, do, or be anything I wanted. An example of this was my choosing English as a major while an undergraduate at Dillard University. I convinced my father that the major was best for those planning to attend law school, but I knew I just wanted a major that would allow me to read and think about poetry and fiction.

IAI: I always imagine a poet living like this:

"We walked down the path to breakfast.
The morning swung open like an iron gate…

We trotted back and forth to readings….

Someone was always hungover,
scheming with rhymes…"

At the bonfire, we flamed with words…" -- from "Green Night" by Edward Hirsch

How are you living?

Brown: I'm grateful that I've been traveling a lot in order to fill requests that I give readings. Most of my recent life is centered around meeting really interesting people from all over the nation who love good poetry. Also, I try to make sure I have enough reading to do on planes since I spend so much time on them.

Other than that, I go to the gym a lot. I eat a lot. I talk with friends over the phone a lot. I teach a lot and read a lot in preparation for teaching. I usually go clubbing when I get the chance because I like flirting and dancing.

IAI: From the same poem, the line: "It was a green night to be a poet in those days/we didn't care if the country didn't care about us." Do you care?

Brown: Yes, but I have low expectations when it comes to this country caring about its poets. Maybe that will change now…who knows?

IAI: Finally, on a different note, I love the library; it is still a magical place for me. Is it for you?

Brown: Of course. Free books are more than magical.

Jericho Brown's book was recently reviewed on Immunization Against Invisibility.

You can learn more about Jericho Brown at http://www.jerichobrown.com/

Jericho Brown's Please, published by New Issues Poetry & Prose (2008), can be purchased at www.Jerichobrown.com and http://www.amazon.com/.

The Armadillo

2009-01-05T10:53:00.013-05:00

For the Love of an Armadillo
Review by Missy McEwen

In the pages of For the Love of an Armadillo by Didi Menendez (illustrated by Jeremy Baum), a delicate love affair (between The Armadillo and the narrator) takes shape. It is a love affair that is complicated and simple at the same time -- simple because they enjoy each other's company and are there for each other; there is no arguing, just dancing and watching television together, eating together, and sometimes kissing, but complicated because, for the narrator, there is conflict. The narrator is afraid she might be falling in love with The Armadillo. In the first poem of For the Love of an Armadillo "Armadillo," the poet writes:

"I am not sure how
the armadillo found
his way into my life…

I tell myself
not to feel
for the armadillo.

No respectable
woman my age
should feel for
an armadillo."

The illustration that comes before "Armadillo" is of a woman with an armadillo in her chest, next to her heart. The book carries on in this fashion -- the artwork (illustrated by Jeremy Baum) that precedes the poem complements the poem, so the reader gets a visual picture, as well as a poetic picture, of the developing relationship between the narrator and The Armadillo. In some of the illustrations featuring The Armadillo, the reader sees his 'stache, his stare, the smoke coming from his cigarette. It is not hard to believe why the narrator may be feeling for and falling for The Armadillo. She even gave him the nickname "Armadillo." But even though she knows him well enough to give him a pet name, she does not know him well enough to know his real name. In the poem "Armadillo and Andalucia," the poet writes:

"His real name may be Harry or Richard or Tom.
I don't know because he never offered to tell me.
I never asked.

I never ask Armadillo anything.
He never asks me anything either
except for the occasional what's for dinner?"

She does not know his real name, still she cooks him dinner as though she wants to be something more to him. She does for him as a mother would. In "Armadillo's Shoes," she tells him to shine his shoes. She gives him the polish and she spits on the shoes for him. She even wants to "knit him a sweater," but by the end of the poem, she wants to be more than a mother figure, she wants to be a lover; she wants The Armadillo to kiss her. The poem ends with these words:

"…kiss me Armadillo.
I want you to kiss me…hard."

And the poem that follows begins with the words "Armadillo only kisses me/when there is a full moon/or when it rains." This poem "Armadillo's Kisses" comes after the illustration titled "Conquest," and because of this sequence, I get the impression that the narrator has made her move, has given up trying to fight her feelings for The Armadillo, and The Armadillo has somewhat surrendered. But still she is taking it slow, maybe, not wanting to scare off The Armadillo by rushing things. She knows "never to serve/him snails al ajillo because snails/remind him of his first love." She takes what is given and does not ask for more. He kisses her, but only when it rains, only when there is a full moon. There is a limit to his love. Maybe during these times (of rain and full moons) he becomes sentimental and kissing is the only thing that will do.

In Didi Menendez' For the Love of an Armadillo, there are moments of tenderness, moments of longing, moments of passion, and moments of friendship. For the Love of an Armadillo is a classic story of a love affair told through poetry and pictures. It is a great read.

For the Love of an Armadillo, published by Goss 183::CASA Menendez (2008-2009), can be purchased from www.lulu.com/content/5543766, and soon from Amazon and other online bookstores.

Jemeni Interviewed

2008-10-30T18:18:00.011-04:00

Born in Grenada, raised in St. Catharines, Ontario, but now lives in Toronto, Joanne Gairy, better known as Jemeni, is a woman of many talents. She is an actress, poet, radio host, and writer. She is also married to "words" and "words" must be infatuated because Jemeni has a way with words:

"I already know you're having an affair with words, but, boo, i'm married to it. My vocabulary leaves most men wary. I need to know: can you get into it?

Would you let me lick you with alliteration and tie you up with
similes? Give you pain and pleasure with soliloquies until you beg me for release. I think we can have the ebonic plague solution. Lace me with your lexiconic seed and in nine months we can start to raise the revolution." -- Jemeni's verse from Esthero's "Fast Lane"

WITHOUT FURTHER ADO -- THE ONE AND ONLY JEMENI:

IAI: Is Langston Hughes still your favorite writer in the entire world?

Jemeni: Yes Langston Hughes is still my favourite writer always and forever. His work to me was so poignant and beautifully, unapologetically, heroically black. I love his exploration and celebration of his people, sores and all. Or as he put it:

The younger Negro artists who create now intend to express
our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame.
If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not,
it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly, too.
The tom-tom cries, and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people
are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure
doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow,
strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain
free within ourselves.

I LOVE THIS MAN!!! I mean what's f*#%ing with thaaaat???

I also love his story, who he was, what he came through and what he stood for. His swagger was impenetrable, which is not to say that there aren't a great many writers that I also love and admire (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Nikki Giovanni, Zora Neale Hurston are some of my favourites). It is just that there is always that one person who stops you in your tracks and makes you silent. For me, that's always been Langston Hughes.

IAI: What poet, dead or alive, is overrated? Underrated?

Jemeni: Honestly, there are poets I don't dig, or don't get but I respect that it's about perception and time and perspective so I can't say they are overrated just because it doesn't speak to me. I guess that to the masses that rate them it means something. Besides who does it hurt to overrate a poet? I'm not mad at that.

Underrated? Tough too...I guess I can speak on poets who I think are dope, but maybe the world isn't on yet. Right now my low pro poet fantastic is my home girl Mansa Trotman; her stuff is fluid and soft... right before it kills you.

IAI: I'm sure everyone has heard, by now, your piece "No More Dating DJs." Would you date a poet?

Jemeni: lol! In my mind, sure, I date poets every day. Dope poems make for great pretend boyfriends. All lyrical and witty and no toilet seat left up. I'd never say no; talent is attractive and words turn me on, but it can be tough dating someone who does what you do. It makes it too easy to see through their bullshit cuz it's the same colour as yours.

IAI: Do you write poems for the stage or the page?

Jemeni: This is weird, but I write them for the page -- by performing them into existence like I would for stage. They write themselves with rhythm, but their true calling is for pages.

IAI: I read somewhere that you said: "I don't ... see myself as a poet as much as I do a storyteller." What's the difference?

Jemeni: That came from trying to figure out exactly what it is that I do -- radio host, actor, writer, poet, performer, and I sometimes pop up in songs. To me storyteller encompasses it all. Even in radio, I was telling the city's story every morning. I wasn't raised on poetry, but culturally storytelling was a big part of my upbringing. We didn't do bedtime stories, but Saturday mornings I remember running into my parents' room to hear ananci stories and tales about jumbies and soucouyants and the dreaded la Diablesse. Poetry is a fascinating form, but I'm not always interested in poems. Stories are different; I've always loved a good story. I love telling them in whatever form is available (acting, recording, poetry). And I love experiencing them in any form (movie, TV, great book, in person).

IAI: What emcee today could have been an accomplished poet in his/her past life?

Jemeni: Mmmmm...emcee…Papoose and Kanye and it'd have to be my girl Esthero -- that's a bad bitch right there; a redhead word gangster.

IAI: Anything else you want to add?

Jemeni: Just thanks for having such an interest in words and reaching out. And to whoever takes the time to read this or check out my work -- I want them to know it means a lot and I'm thankful.

You can read Jemeni's work in Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry Jam, edited by Tony Medina, which can be purchased at http://www.amazon.com/

You can hear her work on Esthero's latest CD Wikked Lil Grrrls.

A Please That Sounds Like Music*

2008-10-29T21:20:00.025-04:00

Please
Review by Missy McEwen

Please by Jericho Brown is set up like an album cover -- liner notes, track listing and all. Moreover, the book itself is like the stereo (Please is split into sections: Repeat, Pause, Power, and Stop). And just like the stereo and how it is the medium for music/musicians, the book is the medium for poems/poets.

In Please, music and poetry collide (some poems share titles with songs: "Lush Life," "Summertime," and "Song for You") in a compelling way. Similar to the singer that sings about love, all kinds of love, Brown writes about love and its many forms, such as violent love:

"My mother loves her husband
and his hands
even if laid heavy against her." -- from "Again"

Jealous love:

"Keep looking at my man
and I'll cut you a new eyelid" -- from "Autobiography"

"You see
your man approached by a girl whose hair is longer
than her skirt…
my mother/calm, but close to violence, she-wolf set
to claw and devour." -- from "Betty Jo Jackson"

Man and man love:

"In a fast-food line
one man pulls a penny
from another man's
hand,

grins too wide a grin,
and pays the extra change.
The boy standing behind

the register takes my jealous
stare for one of disapproval
and shakes his head at me

to say, I hate faggots
too." -- from "Lunch"

familial love:

"He kissed my forehead
before covering me
on the couch that was my bed…" -- from "Again"

"My father's embrace is tighter
now that he knows
he is not the only man in my life…" -- from "Like Father"

and sexual love:

"And you can hear them
in the next room
planning names for the youngest of us
then making love loud…" -- from "Again"

In Please, love is oh baby I love you and/or bruises. Fists inflict pain, words inflict pain, and so does music. "Nothing hurts/like old R&B" Jericho Brown writes and I believe him because music, just like lovers, can bring you down one minute and soothe you the next. Music is mighty. When "the sirens are on the way" and everybody's hollering, the people in Shreveport, "learn to listen to music" over the noise. Music saves if no one else does:

"The singer seeks an exit from the scarred body
and opens his mouth trying
to get out" -- from "Pause"

"I belt out…this tune…
I should be thankful
I…[can] moan…
so nobody notices I'm such an ugly girl.
I'm such an ugly girl." -- from "Track 5: Summertime as performed by Janis Joplin"

Love, music, hurt are the themes in Please. But music seems to be the inspiration behind most of the poems. Jericho Brown writes, "There is no such thing as background music" and this is true. When music is on, we listen -- whether it be the instruments that move us or the voice. Poetry and music go hand and hand; music can move the poet to write and poetry can move the musician to create songs with lyrics fit for a poet. But whereas music can be felt right away, can hit you instantaneously, poems hit you slower. Some poems have to be read and then reread. But not these poems. The poems in Jericho Brown's Please hit you right away and make you say, "Wow," make you pause, make you close the book to take a break to recuperate from the blow. Please is a strong book of poems -- strong like a man's fist, strong like love, strong like music. Press play and give Please a listen, er, a read.

Jericho Brown's Please, published by New Issues Poetry & Prose (2008), can be purchased at
www.Jerichobrown.com and www.Amazon.com

*From Jericho Brown's poem "Track 5: Summertime"

Silk Fist Songs

2008-10-24T15:48:00.010-04:00

Silk Fist Songs
Review by Missy McEwen

Some poets have been doing for ages what scientists, mad and sane, have been trying to construct forever: time machines (sturdy and effective) and Marilyn E. Johnston's first book, Silk Fist Songs, is a sturdy and effective time machine; it takes us back into her past, her youth, without stalling. All the poems in Silk Fist Songs are well-written; there are no filler poems, no weak put-putting poems. From the very beginning of the book, the machine is well-oiled and revs. The reader is invited to take a ride with Marilyn E. Johnston in her time machine (most of the poems in Silk Fist Songs are about her brother and father; they passed away within years of each other). In her poems, we see them "young again." We meet her brother:

"'Dreamer' you had already dubbed me
with my books and determined study habits.
'Realist' I guess that made you, with your
sleek leather jacket and mirror-chrome
cycle revved and straddled, roaring out of
Belden Street when the sun went down." -- from "Game's End"

"'When you do get a strike' -- her brother's wrist
sweeps up magic like a wand -- 'let the line
unreel loosely -- out -- out -- as far as it will go'…
She only wants to be free with him, here
backing her up the way he does, his arm
raised high above their heads, snapping
high widening spirals over the river." -- from "Fishing Salmon River"

We meet her father:

"He drops forty years, gives
a free and easy rogue's smile, bantering
until he forgets where he is in time,
reverts to a spirited Waukegan
Army Air Corps man on extended leave
from Bradley Field, charming
a local girl…" -- from "The Payback"

"The dark bar/booths you emigrated from…" -- from "Speaking in Code"

"Thick workman's fingers
shuffle, cut, and deal one-handed
sleight-of-hand mystery" -- from "Poker Face"

"With smoke-squint eye and work-roughened
fingers, he bows over me
in pure attention, tending,
carefully tying the short white thread
around the wart sprouted
on the base of my elbow…" -- from "Home Cure"

We meet the younger Marilyn:

"So there were boys in the room ----
what had that to do with wanting
to lie, flat on your own rec room floor
in black tights and pleated kilt
kicking up into shoulder-stands
when you're ten going-on-eleven…" -- from "Power"

"You are not supposed to run with boys
but here you are, dancing foot to foot
in impromptu 'tag,' your side of a boundary hedge..."
-- from "Playground After Chase"

"Second-grade friends fortifying a separate
alliance, turned brusquely away, leaving me
crushed, breathless, confused. I had
to resort to sharing my trouble
with Mother at the sink, saying nothing." -- from "Warmth"

"…up comes that June morning of my life's one wild ambush.
Seizing a last day of summer leave, your parents gone,
I let myself in, tiptoed upstairs and slid into this bed
where you curled, English Leather fragrant, still half-asleep,
my clothed body fast-fused to your half-nakedness
while from its dark depths my ring radiated
rainbow filaments across a dawn-lit wall…" -- from "Taking Down A Bed"

Silk Fist Songs is an impressive first book -- open it, step in and forget where you are in time. Go back in time with Marilyn E. Johnston and let her show you around. It will be a place you will want to visit again and again.

Marilyn E. Johnston's Silk Fist Songs, published by Antrim House (2008), can be purchased at www.antrimhousebooks.com/johnston.html

The Truth

2008-10-20T12:40:00.037-04:00

A Day of Presence
Review by Missy McEwen

Some of the poems in Truth Thomas' A Day of Presence are about difficult subjects such as AIDS, racism, parents fighting in front of children, and the homeless, but the poems themselves are not difficult to understand. There is no flowery language to beautify the tough subject matter, yet the writing is not straight, ordinary talk either.

Thomas writes about serious issues, yes, but he also writes about mundane things like the weather, but not in a mundane voice. In "Zero Degrees In Dupont Circle," he shows us his take on the cold weather:

"It's the kind of evening when the temperature
sign on the Sun Trust Bank Building just says
'Damn it's Cold,' the kind of evening where... /water mains spit up

glaciers; the kind of DC evening where the march of
penguins is the march of pedestrians;
where squirrels wear scarves and P street is
an ice road..."

A Day of Presence features, in between the solemn poems, odes dedicated to a mosquito and to caffeine. Things other people might take for granted, Truth Thomas notices and writes about them. Some poems made me laugh out loud as if I were watching a comedian on stage (see the poem above). Some poems made me think. For example, the poem "BET" (BET stands for Black Entertainment Television) deals with the degrading images being fed to the viewers:

"Watermelon glazed fried chicken
fills our screens.
pimps on parade
tattoo 'Bitches'
on sisters.
DJ Overseer & MC Whipping Post
play
– Buckwheat
Hip Hop, zip-a-dee-doo-dah
night & day.
Bishop
Money's undies – anointed
and for purchase.
Bootie Entertainment Television
of thee I sing.
Bootie Entertainment Network
no ideas
but in bling"

Truth Thomas tells the truth. He does not hide his thoughts behind euphemisms. He says what he feels. He is not afraid to take the Pledge of Allegiance, the Miranda Rights, John's Lennon's "Imagine" and use it in his own way:

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America
and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation Under God,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all…

Oh, hell no, I do not.

I pledge allegiance to the fingers, reading goosebumps
on your breasts like Braille….

One black man, under Goddess
with multiple orgasms
for all." – from "A Different Kind of Pledge"

"Miranda Rights for Black Men," is Truth Thomas' version of the Miranda Rights:

"You have the right to remain silent, the right to bleed
out, the right to be a cripple after they beat you.

Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court
of law (where they will be acquitted) after they beat you.

Whether in New York or Philly, you have the right to speak
to an attorney, if you can still speak after they beat you."

"Imagine" by John Lennon is remade and remixed into this:

"Imagine unemployment
it isn't hard to do
a shanty town of trailers
the families with no food
Imagine all the people
sinking in their screams…" - from "Imagine"

Also, Washington DC is an important presence in A Day of Presence. Although Thomas was born in Tennessee, he grew up in Washington DC. When we read, we see what he sees: New York Avenue, P Street, the Green Line Metro, U Street, Georgetown. DC natives will smile in recognition and out-of-towners will learn a little about what the Chocolate City is about – the good (like watching a girl sing while waiting for the bus):

In "Dreamgirl":

"A zaftig sister with iPod ears and a dandelion
dress sings while waiting for the 90 bus
to Congressional Heights as Duke Ellington
hums along from the front porch

of his mural here above the Green Line
Metro…

At 100 degrees Fahrenheit, humidity
is thicker than grease on chitlins – still
this sister blows – sings like

every stranger passing by is an American
Idol judge – sings as if this urine baked
sidewalk, freckled with…flattened
wads of gum, and crumpled up

McDonald's bags is the polished
stage of the Apollo – sings as if
Carnegie Hall is calling her
name…"

And the bad (DC has the highest rate of AIDS in the United States):

In "Visiting Hours are Over":

"There are no gay, straight, down low, get high, protected, unprotected
sex questions for you now. Now, a morphine drip drains its indifferent
bladder in your arm. Now a monitor's beeps get sleepy in the shadow
of your coughs."

Events happening in the world such as the war, Katrina, AIDS, racism can shape poets, can make them want to use poetry as a medium to get these issues heard and Truth Thomas' A Day of Presence features poems that deal with heavy topics such as these. However, this is not a book that lectures or preaches; instead this is a book that tells it like it is.

Truth Thomas A Day of Presence, published by Flipped Eye Publishing (2008), can be purchased at www.flippedeye.net/store and Amazon.com.

I A I & John Korn: The Interview

2008-10-13T08:21:00.004-04:00

John Korn began writing poetry around 2002. He grew up and still lives in Pittsburgh PA. He worked in a second hand store for three years and is currently a social worker. John draws and paints on occasion, is interested in digital film making, and would like to attempt different forms of story telling, audio, visual and written word.

IAI: You grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The "P" in Pittsburgh must stand for poet because when I was going to college there, there were poets all over the place. What is it about Pittsburgh that makes one want to be a poet? Why did you become a poet?

John Korn: I guess there are many poets here. I see fliers for poetry readings and workshops and have been invited. But honestly most people I know are not poets. So I would not know why there are many here. I kind of stumbled into poetry. When I was younger I would draw and paint. I liked making things with my hands. Later I got interested in story telling. When I was a teenager I remember writing some poetry, but this quickly developed into writing stories. However, they were not very good, but it did help me sharpen some skills with imagery and symbolism. I tried narrative for awhile, and took a creative writing class in college. Even though the focus in this class was fiction the professor asked us to write some poems which I did. I eventually showed these poems to a friend, and he recommended that I submit them to an online magazine called The Hold. I was published there. After that I began reading a few small press poets. There were a few that really got my attention and I began writing poetry frequently for some time.

IAI: Pittsburgh poets seem loyal to the 'Burgh and write about its streets and bridges and the dialect—Pittsburghese. Is Pittsburgh your muse?

Korn: I can't speak for other poets from this area. Pittsburgh certainly makes an impression I suppose. Yes, there are many bridges and streets crowded with old style homes. Lots of which are set on top of large hills. Streets winding around mountains. Some streets seem to be in urban areas and one turn could send you up some narrow road into a heavily wooded area. The slopes in southside are pretty surreal and scary to drive on. Lots of areas look very surreal -- to me at least. Rich areas and poor areas are often side by side. Also there is a lot of local history. I tend to focus on small stories --things like urban legends and just strange little anecdotes and stories I heard via word of mouth, stories by regular people. It's a small city. Some parts of it feel like a small town. There is certainly a Pittsburgh accent. I don't know if that inspires me, but it is a strange accent. Mostly even the people from here mock it in a cartoonish way. I love Pittsburgh. I wouldn't say Pittsburgh is my muse; I don't think I have a muse, but you can't live in a place for so long and not be inspired by it.

IAI: If you could hang a poster of a poet on your wall—like how teenagers hang up posters of rock stars and actors—what poet would that be? Why?

Korn: Oh man. I don't know. Probably Albert Huffstickler. When I think of Albert Huffstickler I kind of laugh to myself because he has a good sense of humor in his poems even when dealing with brooding content.

IAI: Do you remember the first poem you wrote?

Korn: Not really. I remember a few I wrote in grade school, but it was only because I had to. I remember the first one I wrote for college; it was about a guy taking a walk during the fall season and finding a dead man under some leaves. He took the dead man home and made him soup and fed it to him. The man came back to life. That's all I remember. The dead man's name was Jim and that was the title of the poem -- Jim.

IAI: What do you hope to accomplish as a poet?

Korn: I honestly feel like moving into other mediums often. But before I do I would like to write a series of poems that tell a loose non linear narrative maybe following a group of people in a small city such as Pittsburgh. So I guess your questions about Pittsburgh have come full circle in this interview. It does influence my writing, yes.

John Korn's new book of poetry, Television Farm, is available at amazon.com.

I A I Discusses Poetry With Michelle Sewell

2008-10-08T13:46:00.002-04:00

Michelle Sewell is an award-winning screenwriter, poet, and founder of GirlChild Press. Throughout her work as a poet and a social worker, she has maintained that there must be a place for women and girls to develop and express their truest selves. With that in mind she has created open mics, workshops, and writing circles to foster that "sacred space" environment for women. The Jamaican-born artist/activist work has appeared on NPR, in Sinister Wisdom, Other Countries: Voices Rising, Campaign to End AIDS Anthology, Port of Harlem Magazine, and seeingblack.com. With the tremendous success of GirlChild's most recent book, Growing Up Girl: An Anthology of Voices from Marginalized Spaces, the press is attracting more projects and writers. Just Like A Girl: A Manifesta! is also doing well. A parenting handbook, centered on girls, is also in the works and will be released in September 2009. * To book Michelle for lectures, workshops, keynote addresses at your college, university, high school or conference please email girlchildpress@aol.com

IAI: In the Fall-Winter Issue of The Birmingham Review, writer Andrew Glaze is interviewed and he states that "Our best poets today aren't nearly as interesting … as cummings [or] Marianne Moore." Them's fighting words?

Michelle Sewell: I think it depends on how you like your poetry: hard and impenetrable or accessible to the public at large. I think it has been difficult for some “traditionalist” to embrace the fact that poetry has evolved, like all forms of art. Every time a new artist comes on the scene and shares with us their interpretations, their thoughts, we owe it to them to hear them out and consider the merits of what she is brings. Recently, I heard someone say that there is a caste system in the poetry world: academic poets, slam poets, lay poets. I don’t think it serves any of us to have these distinctions. I think the doors on the halls of poetry should be swung wide open, invite everyone in.

IAI: Who would you say is "our best poet(s) today"?

Sewell: For me it depends on the day of the week. What mood I am in. Sometimes I am totally moved by a 14 year old poet from Thurgood Marshall Charter School, another day I can’t stop worshipping at the altar of Staceyann Chin or Sonya Renee Taylor. I recently heard a poem from Billy Collins (former Poet Laureate) and I was left breathless. I appreciate innovation, but also poets that do their homework. Poets that understand that when it is done well it really impacts hearts and minds.

IAI: You do a lot to keep poetry relevant today. Why do you do it? How did you get started?

Sewell: I try to do my part. I do it through GirlChild Press because I believe that girls and women need a place to have their say. The more I learn about the publishing world, the clearer it is to me that there is a gender gap that needs to be filled in the publishing world -- what the publishing industry is willing to publish and how they promote women writers in general. I can’t say that my initial foray into publishing was intentional. During 2004, I took a year off to explore my writing life. During that time I started teaching writing workshops to women and girls in marginalized spaces (detention centers, alternative schools, domestic violence shelters, and recovery programs) and was really surprised by the level of talent and the need to write among the girls and women, not only write their stories, but write in general. In 2005, I received a small artist grant and decided to start the press as an attempt to continue to validate these writings by publishing little known women writers, and introducing them to a larger audience. Ultimately, the press strives to be a champion of women’s literature. GirlChild Press is in its third year and currently promoting the most recent anthology Just Like A Girl: A Manifesta!

IAI: What would the world be like without poets, poetry?

Sewell: I think poetry is a way to record what is going on in the larger world. Poetry in many ways can be seen as a time capsule to inform those who come after what was important during that time period. I think the absence of poetry, like all art, leaves us lacking, wanting.

IAI: GirlChild Press just recently published Just Like A Girl: A Manifesta! And also published Growing Up Girl: An Anthology of Voices from Marginalized Spaces. What makes a woman poet special?

Sewell: I don’t know if a woman writer/poet is any more special, but I do think they see the world from a different perspective and that perspective should be fully explored and considered.

IAI: On your blog GirlChildPress.com, in the entry "Bailouts and Book Buying," you write: "… Uncle Sam will not be coming by GirlChild Press anytime soon, and writing me a bailout check to keep it afloat…" Do you think poetry publications have staying power in times like these?

Sewell: Books are definitely a leisure items for many, so in this chaotic financial time I think we will see a decrease in sales as people focus on their Maslow Hierarchy of Needs (food, shelter, and clothing). I think all businesses will have to become innovative to stay alive and prosper.

Just Like a Girl: A Manifesta! and Growing Up Girl: An Anthology of Voices from Marginalized Spaces can be purchased at Amazon.com and www.girlchildpress.com/

The Definition of Place

2008-10-07T14:17:00.000-04:00

The Definition of Place
Review by Missy McEwen

Some poems are bigger than the page and need to be brought to the stage. If I had to pick a poetry book that could be turned into a film (or a play), it would be Randall Horton's The Definition of Place. The soundtrack: the blues.

The Definition of Place is divided into six sections: The Backstory, Elvie & Rosetta, Sydney Merrill, First Street: Attalla, Alabama, Colored Water: 1963 and Scrapbook. The poems in this book are meant to be read from beginning to end, like a short story, but each poem can stand on its own. However, you'll want to read it like a story because In The Definition of Place, with each poem, a family tree grows and lives unfold. We meet the Fennels (they killed a white man), Elvie and Rosetta, Sydney and Emma (Rosetta's folks), and others relatives. The Fennels (Percy and Wiley -- related to Rosetta and them) are something like heroes in this book. They killed a white man and got away with it and their story is told in the section titled Backstory:

"Sunday's Defiance
(Guntersville, Alabama, 1912)

I. According to Marshall County Clerk of Court

On June 9, twenty-five peg holes were dispensed into the
body of Major King and he dropped to the ground deader
than a cigarette ash. King was reputed to be a wildcat
distiller from Hobbs Island who believed coloreds to be
no better than coons staring owl-eyed down the tip
of a shotgun. Buckshots were the handshake given when
King, inebriated from honeycomb moonshine, disrupted
a peaceful buggy ride, thought he could square dance
right up to old colored Wiley Fennel and his brother
Percy's wagon and invade family space with whiteness.
For the record: Sunday is when Negroes tote Jesus in the
front pocket and Remington in the back. It is not clear
who shot King as neither of the Fennel's discarded lead
matched the body holes. In the meantime there is unrest
in the Negro Settlement."

The killing of the white man by the Fennels is mentioned in several poems throughout the book. It gives Percy and Wiley's kinfolk a sense of pride and they brag about it every chance they get. Even Elvie, related to Percy and Wiley by marriage, mentions it. In "Elvie Horton Stumbles into Rosetta Merrill, Age 26, 1929":

"It was common gossip how
her kinfolk had shot a white man and escaped death.
Right then I knew I had a thorn of a woman. She come
from that proud stock, straight-backed, never lay down."

In "Dialogue with the Tennessee River," Rosetta's brother Sydney recalls with pride the bravery of his relatives:

"I think back to the day when my kinfolk
told he how they made buckshots softly float
in the air like pillow feathers until
they covered a white man's chest full of holes.

Said, we Merrills come from a special breed
of colored that is too proud to bow down."

And just like family, place can mean so much, too. It can shape you. It makes you who you are. The other main character in The Definition of Place is a place: First Street in Attalla, Alabama. A section of the book is dedicated to it, so you know this street is major. On this street, "gossip is dispensed freely./Everybody is aware of somebody's dirty blues." First Street is where everyone goes after a hard day at work or a hard day at home, or when life in general is just plain hard.

In "The Sanctuary of the Boogie Shack":

"On Friday evenings workers pour
out Republic Steel Mill, make a beeline
down First Street to the Boogie Shack
where malt syrup tastes of home-brew
waits for those who have grinded against
the stone all week…Music
is metal slide of blues on stringed guitar;
the way blown wind streams through a
muted trumpet or curls around a tenor
saxophone…"

Thank God for First Street and the sanctuary of the Boogie Shack and Blues music because In Attalla, Alabama, a "soda pop town" where the "front porches…hold history," life is hard; it is where "men…been working since they stopped sucking milk from their mama's tit" and everybody "cries the blues," and everybody "got nothing but the blues," so they go to the Boogie Shack and listen to the blues. What is it about blues music that makes you listen even when you got the blues yourself? I am reminded of a poem by Cornelius Eady "I'm a Fool to Love You." He puts it this way: "This is the way the blues works/its sorry wonders,/makes trouble look like/a feather bed…"

Randall Horton's poem "Town Crier" even sounds like a blues song:

"On pay day, Mr. Fred is dead drunk, pockets
thick like a wash pot full of clothes….
Come Monday morning he can't afford a shoe shine.
Big Friday got his wife and he got nothing but the blues."

And the poems in The Definition of Place are what blues songs are made of. When I read "Rosetta on Her Brother Sydney," ("…my brother Sydney has been/known to tip-toe out the rear door/as husbands walk in the front…"), I thought of the blues song "One Way Out," that goes: "Ain't but one way out baby, Lord I just can't go out the door 'cause there's a man down there, might be your man I don't know." And when reading "Rosetta on Elvie" (he…want to be discovering things don't need finding;/but he always double back--scratch on my door/like a saddle-cat, come in easy-footed…"), Big Mama Thorton's "Hound Dog" came on in my head: "You ain't nothing but a hound dog, been snooping 'round my door." The blues are all over this book.

If you can read and listen to music at the same time, I suggest you turn on Miles Davis' "Tout de Suite," sit in your favorite chair, and enter the world of Elvie & Rosetta. I guarantee by the time you close this book, you will feel as if you've just come back from somewhere else.

Randall Horton's The Definition of Place, published by Main Street Rag, can be purchased at http://www.mainstreetrag.com/store/books.php. A signed copy can be purchased at http://www.randallhorton.com/.

The Weird Sideshow At The Fair

2008-10-04T23:25:00.002-04:00

OCHO #19 - Published by Didi Menendez
Review by Missy McEwen

OCHO #19, published Spring 2008, is a fantastic read for Halloween. On the cover, a girl with worms in her hair is screaming. The cover is a forewarning of what's to come: dark and grotesque images in poems so bizarre, they are like something from a bad dream. Didi Menendez' disclaimer mentions that this "issue was taking on a lovely macabre…feel."

The poems in this issue fit together perfectly. Most poems feature gruesome, nightmarish imagery. Even Billy Howell-Sinnard's poem The Butcher, about the day in the life of a butcher, when placed in this collection of poems, becomes scary:

"I split rib cages, sever heads--eyes still open.
Trunks and limbs hang on hooks. Between me

and my customers, ice-breathed freezer chests
stacked with tongues, ribs, rumps, legs,
shoulders,

thighs, breasts, and brains. A femur. A Pelvis.
Sawdust. All the same to me. The rosy flesh…"

Becoming Bull by Kemel Zaldivar, however, is downright strange and leaves me feeling spooked:

"I stabbed a pregnant cow…,
cut her open and tore out her calf."

Another poem by Kemel Zaldivar Meeting People is Easy, is even stranger:

"All that remains of Mercy is her head,
in the freezer, with the
fish…

Elena was nice; her Guatemalan eyes
float in a jar on the
dresser…

Nancy fell asleep under water.
She surfaced with no
limbs and swam
to the pier…

Eating people is easy. They get
cozy in the stomach."

My!

And that's not all. There is more where that came from. Miguel Murphy's Ramona & The Devil Rooster Lover:

"The girl loved her black rooster with the sun under its chin.
When she carried it under her arm…,
it went mad & slashed her
face…

The girl touched her cuts & dreamt knives
flew through the air where she willed them. She was the Carnival Knife-
Thrower-Woman, impaling red apples on weak men's heads."

Ocho #19 is the weird sideshow at the fair, where, when there, you might run into the petrified man from Eudora Welty's story "Petrified Man":

"…But they got this man, this petrified man, that ever'thing ever since he was nine years old, when it goes through his digestion, see, … it goes to his joints and has been turning to stone."

Published by Menendez Publishing (2008). For more information on where to purchase this book, stop by http://www.mipoesias.com/.

I A I interviews Anna-Lynne Williams

2008-10-04T14:52:00.005-04:00

Anna-Lynne Williams is a poet, a songwriter, and a singer. She sings in: Trespassers William, Lotte Kestner, Anomie Belle, Tunnel-Tunnel.

I A I: On your blog http://www.parrotwood.blogspot.com/, entry: Great Modern Works, you listed 25 of your favorite novels. That is hard work. Naming 25 favorite poetry books might be harder. I won't ask you to list 25, but do you have favorite poetry books or a poem or poet?

Anna-Lynne Williams: Yeah I'm not sure that I've even read 25 books of poetry. For me it's always been something I've preferred to make than to consume, which sounds kind of selfish. When I first started writing poetry as a very young teenager, Edgar Allan Poe's poetry was really appealing to me and I sort of ripped it off as I tried to develop my own style. Then, around the time I started writing songs on the guitar (age 16) I got really into e.e. cummings. Most of the poems I've read are his. I have read his complete collected works several times, it's marked with about 50 paper bookmarkers on each of my favorite pages. I think one thing I adopted from him is that sometimes one really powerful sentence or beautiful surprise in a song or poem can carry the whole piece, and the rest of the lines can just be these pretty fragments that set the mood. Or at least that the majority of the work can be obtuse and mysterious so long as you reveal yourself at last in the final couplet ("I thank heaven somebody's crazy enough to give me a daisy...")

My next discovery, around age 17, was Leonard Cohens' "Stranger Music". It's predominantly poetry, but there are also excerpts from his novels and many song lyrics in there as well. That's definitely my favorite collection of writing. He knows how to write from the perspectives of utterly heartbroken and utterly insensitive, equally well. There is a simplicity to the way he puts things, but the subjects he tackles are often heavy. I love how romantic it is. Even as a teenager I could sense that Leonard Cohen had grasped the important themes of being a human being, and had expressed them exactly how I wanted someone to.

Recently, the only poetry book that I've been introduced to that I've really loved is David Berman's "Actual Air." Those poems are infectious. Once again, it's a musician-turned-poet so maybe I'm cheating a bit...Rainer Maria Rilke I have always liked as well.
I think that pretty much sums up all the poetry that's really struck me.

I A I : Some poems can be turned into songs and some song lyrics can be read as poetry. If you could do a "cover" of a poem and set it to music, what poem would it be?

Williams: That's hard for me to imagine... I have difficulty using other people's words, I've not really had success with that. My voice sounds different if I didn't write the song. But Peppermill Records is putting together a compilation of Shel Silverstein poems translated into songs by different artists, and I've chosen "Hug-o-war" to record. That one seemed like a good pick because it's innately sweet and emotional.

I A I: And what singer/songwriters' lyrics do you think could be made into publishable poems? For example, to me, Sade's song "Clean Heart," could be a poem:

"He loved his brother and his sister
Luke and Tony called him Mister
They made him feel much more
Like a man

He loved his daddy though he
never told him And how he loved his mama
He loved
He loved her
like an Italian

Little Janet said you look so fine...
Something in his smile
Made them feel like strangers
And then he straightened his belt
With a lover's touch
And he said I'm gonna bring home
The things that are out of your clutch

Seemed like the hottest night in summer
A heat that makes you feel like dying."

Williams: Lisa Germano's lyrics read really well. I think she's amazing. She somehow makes so much beauty out of these really awful feelings. And there's always some scathing line hiding in there somewhere that would make for a memorable poem.

And I think the lyrics that Jeff Tweedy writes for Wilco are out of this world. The album "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" in particular. ("All my lies are always wishes. I know I would die if I could come back new.")Which is strange because he published a book of poetry and I wasn't that moved by it, but I'm really blown away by his song lyrics. It might be that poetry comes off as more pretentious to me, in general, which is why a lot of my favorite "poets" are actually musicians. It's like songwriters don't TRY in the same way, which happens to be more to my liking. And musicians also have to put things more simply because you're supposed to comprehend it without getting to read it on a page.

IAI: When you write poetry, do you submit it to literary magazines or journals or do you keep them for yourself? Do you turn them into songs?

Williams: Most of what I've written has been made available in some way. I released a book called "Split Infinitive" about 6 years ago that had a good percentage of what I'd written up to that point. I had planned to do the same thing a few years later with what I wrote after that publication, but it's a pretty expensive process to set up a book. Instead, I've posted several of my poems on my MySpace music page, and a couple of them on my personal blog. I did have one short story published on a literary website (Humdinger) and an excerpt from my journal on another site (Identity Theory), but not any of my poems. I'd like to have more of my pieces pop up in different places, but it seems people respond to my music a lot more than the strictly written works. And lately, I've been getting into more journalistic writing.

I have never turned a poem into a song, though sometimes I'll borrow a line from one of my poems. There's a line in the song "What Could I Say" that says "Now I'm so afraid to push you from my mind, like the fear of forgetting what light is like when you close your eyes." That was stolen from an older poem, though I changed it a little to make it fit with the meter of the song.

I A I: What would the world be like without poets?

Williams: My instinctive response is to say that the world would be just the same, I'm not sure that it really needs poetry. But I think that POETS really need poetry as an outlet. Maybe I only think that because it feels like a disappearing medium, but at the same time every teenager who ever felt anything big or beautiful has tried to write a poem. I can't imagine what I would've done without it all through high school and college, but the world would've been just fine with or without what I wrote... I wonder if I'm the only person that thinks that, that poetry is far more for the person writing it than the person reading it.

You can find Anna-Lynne Williams' poems and song lyrics at www.lieinthesound.fr/lyrics.php

To find out more about Anna-Lynne Williams go to: www.myspace.com/annalynnew or www.myspace.com/trespasserswilliam.

"Sparkling Dirty Magic in the Winter Light"

2008-09-28T20:43:00.001-04:00

Love Songs & Laments - Poems by Matt Reeck
Review by Missy McEwen

Love Songs & Laments by Matt Reeck is a chapbook. One of my favorite poems in this collection is Fantasy of the Day; it starts off tender and dreamlike, "I'd like to be with you where the river meets the/river..." and then turns real: "...when the winter sunlight/meets the river down from the sewage plant, where the sewage meets the river, pumped into the river..." This poem seems to be a love song and a lament. The river is filled with sewage, but it's "...sparkling dirty magic in the winter light." Matt Reeck makes dirty sound delightful.

Another favorite of mine is Some People and Jane. This poem is witty and catchy. If it were an actual love song, you would hear it on the radio station that plays Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan records:

"Some people have IQs of 180 and are featured in newspaper[s], but I don't read
them because I am kissing Jane..."

His poems have love song like titles -- Conversations Beneath The Moon-Filled Sky, for example. Before I read the poem I thought it was going to be about conversations with a lover beneath the moon. Wrong. This poem is made up of conversations. I don't know if one conversation is going on or many, but I wonder where Reeck was to hear talk like this:

"The queen was robbed by her soldiers"

"I swallowed the poison to
learn its secrets"

Matt Reeck's sixteen poems are well written. I enjoyed reading them and while reading the table of contents, I am reminded of another small book -- Howl by Allen Ginsberg. Even though the style of writing is different, the titles sound like something a songwriter would use: Ginsberg's In The Baggage Room at Greyhound and A Supermarket in California and Reeck's A Conversation on the Street Corner and Portrait of a Navigator could be part of Bob Dylan's catalog.

Published by GOSS183::CASA MENENDEZ (2008). For more information on where to purchase this book, stop by http://www.mipoesias.com/.

Ocho #6 Should Have A Cult Following

2008-09-28T20:00:00.000-04:00

Ocho #6 - Published by Didi Menendez

Review by Missy McEwen

Don't let the size (ten pages long) fool you, this issue is filled with poems by heavy hitters like Lorna Dee Cervantes (her poem Shelling the Pecans won a Pushcart Prize), Diego Quiros, Lyn Lifshin, Grace Cavalieri, and John Korn.

Ocho #6 is like an underground 'zine you would come across in a small bookstore. You would buy it because of the cover (the cover is hot!) and you would keep it because of the poems and because of the way the pages are numbered in Spanish: pagina 1, pagina 2, and so on. You'd feel special and privileged to have stumbled across it. Like a phenomenon discovered, you'd want to show it off and share it with friends. So I am sharing.

The poets in Ocho #6 each have their own style and voice, yet this issue is not choppy. Some of the poems can be grouped because of similarities, but still no poem sounds the same. For instance, a few of the poems evoke the magical, sensual feeling that only summer nights can bring. The two poems by Lyn Lifshin are good examples:

From Champlain, Branbury, The Lakes at Night:

"always women in the

dark on porches talking

as if in blackness their secrets

would be safe....

Night flowers full of things with wings,

something you almost

feel like the fingers of a boy moving...

under sheer nylon...

in the dark movie house..."

From Middlebury Poem:

"Milky summer nights,

the men stay waiting...

as they have all June evenings of their lives....

Miss Damon...

hurries to unlock the library, still

hoping for a sudden man to spring tall from the

locked dark mysterious card catalogues..."

In Groovy Mortimer y Su Lepista Nuda written by Lorna Dee Cervantes, "It was a black beans summer night/...and you could smell the tamale pie in the avenues/coming from the curtained backs of the bodegas..."

While other poems in Ocho #6 explore darker topics. For example, Michael Parker's A Difference Between Us:

"You sip war like a glass of red syrah…

Consider I told you: I lost my soldier-son from

a bullet to the head, execution style

in front of a mosque."

Even in Lyn Lifshin's Champlain, Branbury, The Lakes at Night, there is a sense of something brewing:

"something miscarried

that maybe never was.

The mothers whispered

about a knife, blood…"

In Reyes Cardenas' Running Away, Running Away:

"somebody please pull this rearview mirror

out of my head and the reflection

of the city I am leaving behind.

No, not that homeless beggar,

let him fend for himself.

No, not that dead prostitute,

it's too late for her."

I like Reyes Cardenas' style. In fact all the poets in Ocho #6 have an enviable style, so it is hard to pick a favorite. All these poets, these notable poets, in one issue makes Ocho #6 something like a collector's item.

Published by GOSS183::CASA MENENDEZ (2006). For more information on where to purchase this book, stop by http://www.mipoesias.com/.

An Anthology of Lovemaking and More

2008-09-28T17:31:00.000-04:00

Alchetry - Poems by Diego Quiros
Review by Missy McEwen

"For five years I filled a light green

three ring binder with poems about you...

Poems describing stares, kisses

and the taste of sweat. An anthology

of lovemaking" -- From Black Rings

And that is what Alchetry is -- an anthology of lovemaking, even though Diego Quiros has a poem titled I Will Not Write About Love. That poem is even about love. And love is a good thing. This book is full of thighs, kisses, touches and love: beautiful love. Everything about love is beautiful in Alchetry. "Heartache is beautiful," Quiros writes in Déjà Vu and it is his language that makes it so. I would love to hear these poems read aloud by the author, although I can hear the music in lines like these even when reading them to myself:

"It is always the tropics
in my heart regardless of season
when I speak your name." - From Mantra

"...round little vowels
that ooze from your lips
like sweet ripened fruit…

My ears can see your face by the roundness of your ohs." -- From Ohs

"...you blew a kiss...
out the car window
towards where I stood.

It went in my mouth and rolled down my throat like moonshine." - From Keepsake

The language in this book is sweet -- not sappy, not sentimental -- but sweet and pleasing to the ear.

Sometimes, though, a line, a verse, would take me by surprise:

"Ass not flat...." -- From Rubbing Sticks

"It was you that bounced
on my hips in the darkness
but someone else's name that I called out." -- From Equestrian
Women

"Hips imitate the hammering of molten metal
heads titled back, mouths shaped like howling." -- From Rubbing Sticks

"She asked me to make love to her and
reach...spiritual ecstasy.
We did, and it was ecstatic, but I dismissed it
as good sex because good sex is ecstatic." -- From An Overdue
Apology

After reading those lines, I smiled to myself, because after all, underneath it all, Diego Quiros is still a man.

Not all of Quiros poems are about women, however. In Mango Tree, for example, a "child [holds his] grandfather's hand [while] standing by a mango tree in a small Caribbean town."

"[Grandfather] points to the fruit and asks:
'Would you like one?'
I answer: 'maybe tomorrow or the day after.'
How was I supposed to know there would be neither one."

In Young Man on the Bus Bench, Quiros paints a picture of the man for us:

"His face is smooth and thin
paralyzed with a tenor's expression.
His skin the shade of autumn skies."

Diego Quiros is a painter as well as a poet and I wonder if he has ever painted the picture equivalents of his poems because I can see Mango Tree and Young Man on the Bus Bench as paintings. Diego Quiros' work, whether it be poems or art, are vibrant with color and beauty.

Published by GOSS183::CASA MENENDEZ (2008) and may be purchased from Amazon or stop by http://www.mipoesias.com/.

These Poems are Fantasy, but seem oh so Real

2008-09-27T23:38:00.000-04:00

Anna Nicole -- Poems by Grace Cavalieri
Review by Missy McEwen

At the beginning of the book, these words: "These poems are fantasy." I had to keep reminding myself of that when reading Grace Cavalieri's Anna Nicole because I found myself believing every word and forgetting that this is all imagination -- that is how real these poems are. It is as if I am reading a memoir written in poem form.

In Anna Nicole, Anna is not two-dimensional. She is alive and breathing again. Cavalieri gets into Anna Nicole's head like how an actor prepares for a role and she pulls it off. I can hear Anna Nicole's voice while I am reading these poems. I can see her in the scenes and situations in which Cavalieri has placed her. And I keep reminding myself over and over again -- these poems are fantasy. But it seems as if Grace Cavalieri followed Anna Nicole around and studied her.

"Once she heard on TV that if a man rapes you,
he steals your soul…
That's why she always gave in to men,
so she wouldn't have to be raped,
so she could save her soul."
-- from Negative Capability

I had to ask myself, did Anna Nicole mention this in a magazine or television interview? Or is this all in Cavalieri's imagination? And If so, what an imagination she has. Even though this is fantasy, Cavalieri gives the reader authentic Anna Nicole. She shows the reader an Anna Nicole confused about her role in life (in real life Anna Nicole often seemed confused). In Cavalier's Anna Nicole, Anna Nicole seems to be confused by this: should she be the religious-do-right-by-God woman or be the Hollywood sex symbol? She tries to convince herself that Hollywood is the way to go and others try to convince her that Hollywood is the way to go:

"Trusting a stranger because he said
The Good Lord can't see what happens in
Hollywood." -- from Anna's Estate

"The counselor said…
creation is a divine collaboration with God." -- from Negative Capability

However, Anima, Anna Nicole's Alter Ego, tries to talk her into doing "God's works," but "Anna knew only God could do God's works,/and said so." (House of Strings).

In Narcissism Spring, Anna Nicole asks: "What religion overcomes suffering?" It is as if she is doubting religion or looking for a new religion altogether. In Anna Nicole's eyes, Hollywood is a religion. So Anna Nicole turns to Hollywood and fame and success, but even "Success cannot/kill grief, just the body." (Betrayal All Around Her). However, death does not scare Anna Nicole. She welcomes it:

"Death would be so nice,
something all her own
like a baby or the
Academy Award." -- from Tinseltown

"Hollywood is where you
go to die." -- from House of String

"Elvis…
dying on the
toilet, oh,
so beautiful to die like that, expressing yourself." -- from Didn't She Almost Have It All

"She wasn't afraid to die.
She'd get some delicious morphine at the end." -- from No More
Lapdancing With The Stars

I believe Anna Nicole would think like this. Once again I have to remind myself that this is fantasy, but it seems so real. Even the other characters in the poems, Rescinda (Anna Nicole's maid) for example, seem as if they really exist. "Anna knew full well…Rescinda would spit/in her coffee" if she touched her man. Luis, another character in this book, is Rescinda's man. We get a glimpse into their lives as well and I find it hard to believe that these people do not exist.

The poems in Anna Nicole remind me of the poem My Date With Elvis: Cybil Shepherd, 1973 by Sandra Yvonne. In the poem, Sandra Yvonne writes in first person as though she is Cybil Shepherd and describes her date with Elvis at the movie theater. Poems like these give poets freedom and let them use their imagination. While reading Anna Nicole I am also reminded of the book M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A by A. Van Jordan about the first African-American girl to make it to the final round of the National Spelling Bee. A. Van Jordan gives her a back story and gives her a voice, gives her life again just like how Grace Cavalieri's Anna Nicole gives Anna Nicole a voice and life again.

Published by GOSS183::CASA MENENDEZ (2008) and may be purchased from Amazon or stop by http://www.mipoesias.com/.