distance hills and snow

Cold is on my mind right now. The inside temperature here has been hovering around 66 degrees for more than a day.  Maybe it's because the radiators haven't been bled in a decade. Or maybe the furnace isn't what it used to be. I imagine the effect will get worse when temperatures outside grind lower. Gotta check it out.


WOOL-PULLERS: The first year I spent in Maine, I lived in an apartment over and antique store. The landlord said it had "some" insulation. What that really meant was, I spent as much on heat each week as I spent on the monthly rent -  despite keeping the thermostat at 55 and wearing thermal underwear all the time.  Wording can be so tricky. We hear what we hope for, not what is actually said.....

Poetry: Mark McGuire-Schwartz - SURREAL!

Flying over rooftops with an alarm clock

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A post from December of 2009. Poems by Mark McGuire-Schwartz are quirky and a bit surreal, like eating pickles and pistachio ice-cream, then going to sleep and having a strange dream. I like this sort of thing apparently as  I have published seven of his poems in Bent Pin Quarterly.

"If your poems were paintings, based on their style, what painter would you be? Are you more Norman Rockwell or Miro?  Rembrandt or Picasso?" This is my stock question during Wed Night Poetry's Q & A.  It's a question that leaves many poets scratching their heads,  but  Mark gave me a truly fitting answer.

"I would be Chagall" he told me, reminding me that I had asked him this before.  Marc Chagall's  odd visions enchant and disorient at the same time, and often show people flying over quaint rooftops, or barnyard animals with luminous eyes hovering at some impossible angle...

Mark has a quirky reading style as well, featuring his self-effacing charm and an alarm clock or two. You can hear him read his work at the Monday Poetry Series t the Stamford Town Center Barnes and Noble. It's this coming Monday and it starts around 7 p.m.

>>>>>Mark has a new chapbook from his own Oy Vey Press... It's called  "Loss and Laughs, Love and Fauna." Sure the tittle is a little surreal, just like the poems it contains.  I got my copy during his reading last week at  Wed. Poetry (which is now meeting at the Blue Z Coffeehouse in Newtown), and I am enjoying it very much.

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Mark had quite a few poems in Bent Pin during its run. The archive was down for a while but is partially restored:
Here is a list of his poems with links where available in the new Bent Pin Archive:

McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 4/2007 NEW LINK Title: Black Coffee
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 4/2007 NEW LINK Title: In Death
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 7/1/2007 NEW LINK Title: Turkey Club
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 10/13/2007 NEW LINK Title: What I've Been Before
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 1/1/2008 NEW LINKTitle: 25 Short Poems
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 4/1/2008 Title: "Is Them Things Called Stars?"
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 7/1/2008 Title: Coatless 
McGuire-Schwartz, Mark -- 11/10/2009 Title: Heartless  

Visual Metaphor: the Appearance of Seeing Beyond

This mirror hangs over a booth at a Brookfield diner called Rickyl's, and reflects the ceiling far behind the viewer.

At first glance the strange shape of its gilded paper mache frame makes it difficut to read its spacial position, and it's easy to see it as some sureal portal into another room rather than what it is - a simple, flat mirror.

Rickyl's is tucked away at the four corners area, behind Roccos. They offer great granola pancakes

--- Mar Walker

De Kooning's 'Woman I': perception or projection... scary either way

Standing under the brooding, dissatisfied gaze of Willem De Kooning's Woman 1 is a little unnerving. I was afraid of her in 1988 when I first saw her towering over me at  MOMA - New York's Museum of Modern Art. In the intervening decades, I've met a few women with the same expression, so I find her even more disturbing now.
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De Kooning painted Woman I from 1950 to 1952, so this work is nearly as old as I am.  She is larger than life size. When I first met her, those  huge eyes stared across a room which contained only non-objective paintings, so she was the only readable figure present. Yet she didn't seem out of place at all.  Dekooning built her with frenzied brush strokes and scumbling. Although he worked and reworked this painting obsessively for 18 months, the immediacy, the energy,  and the manic quality remain.
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Woman I is an amazing creature -  powerful, imposing, possibly malevolent, lost. Her great glaring eyes are intense and somehow, well, vacant. The top of her head is turban-like and  her long straight teeth are exposed in a lipless grimace. She has huge round shoulders, voluminous bullet breasts, and yet a delicate turn of ankle on parted legs. She's seated solidly with one leg forward and the other stretched sideways and backwards, as if she were trying to decide on a course of action.
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The brush strokes around and through her document passion, anger, vigor -  yet she seems solid and impassive, unresponsive to De Kooning's sustained spasm of creation. According to reports, he abandoned her after 18 months, as if in all that time he couldn't figure out how to please her. Later an associate Meyer Schapiro, convinced him the painting was finished.
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Every part of the painting's surface is full of vigorous bright brush strokes of thickly applied paint.  The idea of Abstrast Expressionist 'gesture painting' was to transfer the raw state of the artist's psyche directly to the canvas without the intervention of any preconceived notions of style or convention - either moral or artistic. Yet over 18 months, previous spontaneous expressions were being edited and superseded by more recent spontaneous decisions by De Kooning.
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A series of photos by Rudolph Burckhardt  shows Woman I at various stages  -- versions "no less compelling" according to Thomas Hess, than its current incarnation. Apparently she started with breasts bare, raised arms, head tilted back in a very spacial room with a clearly drawn window and objects in view beyond it.  Then the woman, the chair she is seated on, the window and a lamp - dance in and out of sight  - until, finally it's only the woman and the turmoil.
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If you are recoiling from this image, today in 2009 - remember when it was first shown in 1953, it caused quite a fuss on two counts. First the general run of folks thought De Kooning's Woman I was shamelessly vulgar, at least compared with June Cleaver and the passive demure wives of television. But it wasn't only Joe Public that hated it. Other Abstract Expressionists thought it was a step backwards -  a betrayal of the avant garde because it was representational and De Kooning's marvelous crazed woman could be clearly seen.
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De Kooning's rebuttal on his Women (and I think he painted four series of works called Woman)  was this: "The Women had to do with the female painted all throught all the ages, all those idols....It did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light -- all this silly talk about line, color and form -- because that (the woman) was the thing I wanted to get hold of...."
Frankly, after all this time, she doesn't look willing.

-- Mar Walker

We are getting old, but do we have think about it in advance?

The Blindness of Spring

We grow like the scent
of  gardens in soft rain,
in sweet perpetual increase.
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We revel in sunlight
refuse to contemplate the dark,
view winter premonition
with aloof disdain.

This is a poem layout from my old Metaphoratorium website and it lived on several versions of my websites dating from around 1998 or so.....  --Mistryel (Mar) Walker

the delicate warm poems of Claire Zoghb

Last Thursday at New Haven's Institute Library, I heard Claire Zoghb read her poetry.

Hers is not a poetry that slaps or shocks. It is as unpretentious and human as an embrace, as welcoming as a smile, yet it's not a sappy sentimental sort either.  For this reading, Ms. Zoghb read from her first full-length collection, Small House Breathing, which took the 2008 Quercus Review annual book competition. These poems sit on the threshold - where one culture knocks on the door of another in a friendly way, and is welcomed.

Her gentle, quiet-but-knowing style of delivery complemented the words - the poems and the person being of one whole cloth, the one the essential expression of the other.

She has a new chapbook, Dispatches from Everest, to be released by Pudding House Press on a schedule to be determined. Her work has appeared often: Yankee, Connecticut Review, Connecticut River Review, Caduceus, and CALYX, and in  Through A Child’s Eyes: Poems and Stories About War and Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems, (the last two are anthologies).

She's won a lot of awards:  she won the 2008 Dogwood annual poetry competition, was awarded two Artist Fellowships from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism, and there were two Pushcart nominations.

If you have a chance to get to one of her readings, drive a bit, walk, ride the bus. Arrive, sit back, enjoy.

Ms. Zoghb lives in New Haven where The Institute Library can be found at 847 Chapel Street, New Haven, CT.  There is a poetry reading there each third Thursday. The Institute Library is a membership library and it is seeking members. For $25 a year you can borrow whatever you like and keep it as long as you need to. You can even mail it back.   Though membership involves a fee - the monthly poetry reading is free.

-- Mar Walker

Poet, Playwright Allan Garry - difficult truths, well-crafted poems

Allan Garry brought the realities of his past life to the Wednesday Night Poetry Series this past Wednesday night. He read well, spoke well, brought a balance of darkness and light to bear on the difficult subjects of war and death.  (He writes about other things as well.)

Garry is a Vietnam veteran who recently returned to writing after a long hiatus. He served in a morgue in Vietnam, searching bodies for ID, trying to honor the lives of men he didn't know, trying to make sense of random slaughter, preparing the bodies for their return home. He began writing in college after his discharge, but stopped, only starting up again in the last few years.

 He is, he says, experiencing the benefits of 18 years of therapy to recover from his experiences with war and with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Much of what he had to say is so very current, with the endless treadmill of duty tours in our present wars.

His new play Gathering Shells, co-written with Crystal Brian, (who also attended the reading) has  been produced at the Long Wharf Theater and the Little Theater in New Haven, CT,  and will be produced at the  Abingdon Theater in New York on Dec. 3, 4 & 5.  Admission is free; seating is limited. For more information and tickets, call 203-582-3500.

Garry's poetry has been published in The Red Fox Review; the Pennypaper, Curbstone Press and Helix. He has read his work at Wesleyan University, Yale University, Trinity College, Connecticut College and a number of other venues as a winner of the Wesleyan University Honors College Connecticut Poetry Circuit. New poems will be appearing in the forthcoming issues of The Connecticut River Review, Connecticut Review and Avocet Review.

He doesn't have a chapbook yet, but his well-crafted poetry will surely find a home. If you get a chance to hear his work, don't miss it...

-- Mar Walker