Ben-Oni and Mcilroy Delight the Crowd

Featured Poets Leslie Anne Mcilroy and Rosebud Ben-Oni

Featured Poet Rosebud Ben-Oni

 

Featured Poet Leslie Anne Mcilroy

Featured Poets Rosebud Ben-Oni and Leslie Anne Mcilroy delighted the crowd with an outstanding reading at Ryerss Museum and Library followed by an exceptional open mic. Thanks to Diane Sahms-Guarnieri, Saul Broudy, Rodger Lowenthal, F Omar Telan, Mary Brucker, Ian Wolf, Liz Mayeux, Hila Ratzabi for reading in the open. Photos of the event can be viewed here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/12065560@N04/sets/72157629096910438/

The Poet- Kelly Drive Philadelphia Pa.

Statue of The Poet

“We Shared our Dreams”
Khoren der Harootian, 1955
North Terrace – Ellen Phillips Samuel Memorial.
Kelly Drive, past Boathouse Row

Camel Saloon Marks 3rd Anniversary

Congratulations to our friends over at The Camel Saloon on their 3^rd Anniversary. It’s a great place to stop by for a pick me up. You can visit them here: http://thecamelsaloon.blogspot.com/

 

The Lake Isle of Innisfree at Jacket 2

PoemTalk, a discussion of W.B. Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” with Taije Silverman, Max McKenna and John Timpane.

https://jacket2.org/content/poem-talk

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audio?show=Poem%20Talk

May 19th – Mcilroy and Ben-Oni

@2pm Ryerss Museum and Library , 2nd Floor Gallery -More information: http://foxchasereview.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/may-19th-mcilroy-and-ben-oni-in-fox-chase/

You can visit with Leslie Anne Mcilroy here: http://lamcilroy.com/index.html

And Rosebud Ben-Oni here: http://rosebudbenoni.com/

Reading Series Booked to January 2015

We are pleased to announce that The Fox Chase Reading Series, Featured Poets and Writers Reading is now booked until January 2015. Booking for Poets on the Porch 2014 will commence in January 2014. We thank the great staff at Ryerss Musuem and Library for their continued support of the arts in Fox Chase.

Poetry from and about the Civil Rights Movement

From Books Inq. Blog

Remember and share …

… Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement — Poetry from and about the Civil Rights Movement. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Solecism by Rosebud Ben-Oni

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ISBN13: 9780944048504

ISBN10: 0944048501

Publisher: Virtual Artists Collective

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Review by: g emil reutter

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 Rosebud Ben-Oni has written of the world in her collection Solecism. It may or may not be a world you know but Ben-Oni knows it well and has lived it.  At Ten I Held the Look of Locust brings us to a playground surrounded by corporate greed.

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I held the look of locust, black-sunken eyes and long, thin limbs

             so mothers of melting plastic and plywood

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scrambled for sawdust from the mouths of razor-wild men.

               Bloody nails wrote the mornings after in pencil lead

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I was unborn again, casting the look of locust, leather-rebellious nymph,

             Swarming in constant omission, twitching in sin.

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Twenty years later, the factory is condemned, but the playground stands

                with a sign in English: Warning: Toxic waste, no playing. 

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Ben-Oni notices the cracks in society and those that live in those cracks.  She has the ability to write of the everyday in solid imagery that places the reader in the poem.

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Excerpt from Off the Q

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Did I taste a toadstool

Sitting in a white-walled room

Off Lincoln and Ocean Avenue.

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where the trains no longer keep me awake

passing by below, open and exposed,

the sharp sound of metal and voltage

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like a grace note off a drum roll,

the snare head loose and low.

The blinds have never been gentle

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with the dawn, the harsh glare

stabbing through like an evangelist

jumping up and down to move

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millions. But when I needed hell-fire most,

in the late morning, especially on Shabbat

when I shouldn’t be writing at all,

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The light fades to rubbish gray,

And the Q train shakes my solid desk,

The canopy bed—even the floors creak.

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And an excerpt from After a Funeral in Jerusalem

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I.

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Shiva is three nights at Haoman 17:

you climb the shoulders of an echis

commander, and claw

at the high ceiling. In the morning

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you skid across the cafes of King Solomon.

In the light it is your face the young mourn.

Behind the cracked mirror of an old compact,

You throw your voice to order café hafuch,

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for you stand too close to the edge.

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Ben-Oni captures the images of events that surround her. Subtle yet not as subtle as in this stanza on Middle East violence from The Youth.

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and then stooped off into the street.

No one called after him, after

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                              pieces of him

                              out-of-camera shot

                              found their way into a stretcher,

                              Mourner’s Kaddish, some say.

                              opening his lips.

                              But for who?

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No one thought to ask

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Ben-Oni has a strong sense of place and of the places she has been.

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From Over the River from Sal Si Puedes

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girls grow slowly here

in graying eyelet dresses

under molted mocking birds

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outside in rocking chairs

we mark time in losing it

even the eagle, a widow

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shed from distant high winds,

has forgotten continuous flight

inseparable from the horizon

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a promise has been broken

under junipers camphor lingers

the only pioneers, strangers

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In Solecism, Rosebud Ben-Oni has marked time and place without losing it. She brings us to fractured places, but we depart with wholeness as Ben-Oni pastes them together.

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You can buy the book at this link: http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780944048504?&PID=30560

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. -g emil reutter lives and writes in the Fox Chase neighborhood of Philadlephia

Lumia by Nick Admussen

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18 Pages

Winged City Press

2013

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Review by: Diane Sahms-Guarnieri

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“Lumia” according to Thomas Wilfred is a general term for “the art of light.” Nick Admussen’s, Watching Lumia, an 18 page ekphrastic poem, was inspired by Wilfred’s “Untitled,” Opus 161, 1965/66 and “Luccata,” Opus 162, 1967/68, which Admussen credits in the “Introduction.”  Apparently, Amussen did his best to see as much as he could of Opus 161 in its 22 month presentation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art by sitting in front of its waving and changing patterns of light –

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Watching Lumia, this rising/ at a constant speed which should look mechanical / but seems instead like a soul ascending.

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To Admussen “a soul ascending” is just one of the many clever and creative images/metaphors dancing their myriad colors through changing movements of light “of one squinting transfixed into light.”

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His poetic use of color: Vanilla and coal, blueberry…orange sorbet and stolen ivory, / urine and bloody fog, a sun-colored lemon…

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  …the color of gas-station / power and sweet: sour twist, oil-dark, cherry.

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 And now the first green / in a long time / glides in like a second hand…

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Throughout this poem, there are many different images gliding into and out of focus – like a camera lens, focusing and unfocusing, capturing the art of light as changing images within light:

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…The axe handle, / the bird, the message to God, / the hook, the heart’s procession, 

the lesson about drifting, and the universe from afar / all warm themselves in light.

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Another dreamy segment, a young crocus flute up around its starry axis, and another as he drowses and wakes  …the flowers rioting open every year / like they’re the first on earth. / A small man with a cup in his hands/ in aquamarine holds the cup out/ and rotates in a semicircle, offering it / to all assembled.

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Admussen’s perception of images: seeing of, into, around, and through the ever changing images and movement of colors sometimes brings apprehension and even fear during his “680 day” quest.    Imagine how arduous a task, how disciplined his observations of watching light change in front of him, as he – himself- is being changed by ever passing time that flows into, around, and through him.

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…perhaps I have been / inside too long, I may have forgotten, art that moves through time exhausts/and frightens, are these / spines or waves…

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…that the Lumia turns frightening. / A blood cow looks down at me and lows, / the woman reaches out of a dark river. 

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…Lumia shows / a hooked dagger endlessly drawn /from a wound, which pursues it.  / I know that this is just one light – /which means there is no body / and no knife in it, just a body /with a knife in it, no art and / me watching, but an art with / me watching, an art of me watching.  Light on light: / other light.

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There are humor and query, yes, the “Question of the Door?”

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There is a machine behind the glass; / a gray door with an obviously flimsy lock / leads to the machine. I see the light / and not the Lumia, I mean the mechanism…

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Can you meet me here, no. / Actually yes….you can come sit in front of Lumia where I sit. Wear jeans and a solid color T-shirt.  Repeatedly replace your $15.00 sneakers / because your feet hurt because / you’re getting old.

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It sounds like a refrigerator, a good one.

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The machine of Lumia is a satellite / ringed with mirrors and crownedin a swirl / of iron tendrils: behind it, a lamp / and a color wheel, a three-fingered arm / that raises and lowers to uncertain purpose. 

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A blown stage-lamp rest inert. Below, another shines constantly, deep in the cabinet. Everywhere the wires and lines / of ancient electricity …

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Nick Admussen’s ekphrastic poem is beautifully written and wonderfully entertaining, the way Wilfred’s Opuses were in the early to mid-1900s, and thanks to Eugene Epstein’s restorations of the remaining apparatus/instruments viewers may have an opportunity to visit a museum in their area for a closer look, or one can get a quick minute feel on YouTube of “Untitled” Opus 161 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqb88gdCM4Q.  (Note: If you really like what you’re are seeing and want to view Wilfred’s“Untitled” Opus 161 in a slide show go to: http://www.clavilux.org/op161/slideshow.swf .  “The animation, featured here, is a Flash based ‘movie’ made up of 30 still images taken from Wilfred’s Opus 161., and produced for us by the Pompidou Centre, Paris.”)

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You can buy the book here: http://www.wingedcitypress.com/2013/01/paypal-safer-easier-way-to-pay-online.html

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- Diane Sahms-Guarnieri is the Poetry Editor of The Fox Chase Review 

Winter News by John Haines

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Review by: Stephen Page

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Haines Duality

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White men are invading the last of the American wilderness.  They pan for gold, fish, trap, hunt, and cut down timbre to build homes.  During the 1940’s, while Haines is living in Alaska, he sees this happening, and feels it is morally wrong.   In “Winter News,” Haines, with all his good intentions and moral judgment, has a duality about him that maybe even he did not realize.

‘The House of the Injured’ reveals a part of Haines attitude:

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I found a house in the forest,

small, windowless, and dark.

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From the doorway came the close,

suffocating odor of blood

and fur mixed with dung.

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I looked inside and saw an injured

bird that filled the room,

fluttering against the walls.

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With a stifled croaking

it  lunged toward the door

as if held back

by an invisible chain:

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the beak was half eaten away,

and its heart beat wildly

under rumpled feathers.

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I sank to my knees—

A man shown the face of God.

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Here Haines shows his reverence for nature and his personal philosophy.  A bird is a part of the larger scheme of things, a religious symbol, a thing that represents God.  The animal has been trapped inside a house.  This house is obviously built by a white person, for since it has windows and doors, it is not typical of the homes built by the then indigenous people of Alaska. The house is a symbolic cage, a deathtrap.  Thus white man is killing a representation of God.

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In ‘Horns’ we get deeper into the psych of Haines:

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I went to the edge of the wood

in the color of evening,

and rubbed with a piece of horn

against a tree,

believing the great, dark moose

would come, his eyes

on fire with the moon.

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I fell asleep in an old white tent.

The October moon rose,

and down a wide, frozen stream

the moose came roaring,

hoarse with rage and desire.

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I awoke and stood in the cold

as  he slowly circled the camp.

His horns exploded in the brush

with dry trees cracking

and falling; his nostrils flared

as, swollen-necked, smelling

of challenge, he stalked by me.

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I called him back, and he came

and stood in the shadow

not far away, and gently rubbed

his horns against the icy willows.

I heard him breathing softly.

Then with a faint sigh of warning

Soundlessly he walked away.

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I stood there in the moonlight,

and the darkness and silence

surged back, flowing around me,

full of wild enchantment,

as though a god had spoken.

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The narrator of the poem sees a moose and is awed by it.  He believes the sigh of the animal is the voice of a deity.

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Throughout the collection, there are scenes of white men panning for gold, fishing the seas, hunting, trapping and building houses of timber in a land that was once occupied my animals and indigenous people who lived in sync with the rest of nature.  The indigenous people are almost wiped out, the majority of them lying in graveyards, and their way of life is thus becoming extinct.  Haines believes nature represents God and that humans need to live in sync with it to understand God.  He hates what white men are doing to one of the last places on earth unexploited by greed.  The irony of the whole book is that Haines, or better worded, his narrator, is a white man in the Alaskan wilderness who is surviving by hunting, trapping, and living in a house built from cut timber.

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All this taken into consideration, it does not detract from the quality of the poetry in “Winter News.”  These are vivid poems from the Alaskan frontier that put the reader in a metaphysical state with nature.  I sense a deep imagist influence, and find a few romantic and formalist phrasings, yet the poems are unique, the product of a well-read poet working on his own finding his own voice.  Some of the images and phrasings are by now clichéd, but that is because so many other poets have been influenced by Haines.

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You can buy Winter News here:  http://www.amazon.com/Winter-News-Poems-John-Haines/dp/B00159Z7EO

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Stephen wrote this while living over a rickety abandoned supply store amongst the Rocky Mountains of Montana with only a smoke-leaking wood stove for heat and dried beef jerky for sustenance. He brewed coffee and drank water from snowmelt.