Tuesday Evening in the West Village: Red Hen Press presents Brendan Constantine, Jamey Hecht, Amy Lemmon & Lyn Lifshin at the Cornelia Street Café

We went to a great poetry reading tonight at the Cornelia Street Café, our first time there. They have over 700 readings a year, twice an evening, and we're not sure how we ever missed it all these years. We were grateful for the early start at 6 p.m. and didn't mind the $7 admission, which included a free drink (Diet Coke with a twist in our case).

We sat at a back table near Greg Sanders, a great writer whose story collection Motel Girl was published by the evening's sponsor, Red Hen Press, which also brought out our own The Silicon Valley Diet nine years ago. (Greg will be reading with Ernest Hilbert, Elise Paschen, Timothy Green for Red Hen Press at KGB on Friday.)

Stephanie from Red Hen was nearby with the books from the four authors who were reading, but Red Hen Press's Kate Gale, who we've always thought of as the doyenne of the Los Angeles poetry and small press scene, was late. We did get to see Kate, whom we last saw last year when we sat with her and her co-publisher and husband, Mark E. Cull, who has designed some great covers for the press, including ours.
Red Hen Press


In Kate's absence, Angelo Verga, who is the curator of all things literary at Cornelia St. Café, emceed and gave nice introductions to the four poets. He's got a beautiful venue downstairs, with antique-looking mirrors on the walls, dark paneling and warm bare lightbulbs of green, yellow and red. We'll be back after having such a good experience tonight.

First up for the evening was Jamey Hecht, who read from his fascinating poetic take on JFK in Dallas and America in crisis,Limousine, Midnight Blue: Fifty Frames from the Zapruder Film.

In Midnight Blue, Jamey, born sometime in 1968 between the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, uses Abraham Zapruder's most famous home movie as a meditation on American culture. Jamey is a dynamic reader; at some points he was holding the book over his head with one hand as he read from one of the numbered frames of the Zapruder film. Here's Jamey reading "Z-150," one of the poems we heard tonight:

We especially liked the poem for frame Z-192:

Imagine me riding skeletal down Main Street on a bicycle.
I get death, you get the shock of your lives, your daughters
heroin addicts and your sons marines on fire in mud, guilty.
I am pedaling through perfect silence in the capital

of Dixie. Spit on the street when you mention me.
This Site Possesses National Significance
In Commemorating The History Of The United States
of America. 1993. National Park Service. United States

Department of the Interior. You rape my brain,
I haunt you. All my unfinished work impossible,
the very thought of me ridiculous, become an airport,
fried chicken, documentaries. Salute your Nazis.

Operation Paperclip. Go look it up. And while you die,
I and my midnight blue and silver bicycle go by.

The second reader was Amy Lemmon, who read from her just-published book, Saint Nobody. Amy's poems and essays have appeared in Rolling Stone, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Verse, Marginalia, and other magazines, and iIn 2006 she was awarded the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Prize by Red Hen Press. In the fall, look for ABBA: The Poems, a chapbook Amy wrote in collaboration with our friend Denise Duhamel; it will be published by Coconut Books.

Amy, who this week has been guest-blogging at the Best American Poetry blog, is an accomplished and the snaps she got from audience members were well-deserved. Before she read, she spoke interestingly as the mom of Down syndrome child on a campaign we're interested in, to eliminate the use of the derogatory R-word. As the New York Times noted in yesterday's report by our friend Stuart Elliott, "Research found the derogatory expression 'is most extreme among older teenagers in high school and early college,'" so it's important to educate young people.

Amy read some wonderful poems from Saint Nobody that contained echoes of Blake and made us nostalgic. You can listen to Amy's poetry on the Bloomington radio station WFIU here. This is one of our favorite (somewhat older) Amy Lemmon poems, one that she didn't read tonight, "After Di Chirico’s The Uncertainty of the Poet":

First, you notice the torso, archaic but not Apollo’s
by a long shot. It has breasts, and callipygian hips,
but isn’t exactly Venus, either. The head’s fallen off
and the arms, blunt stumps, point mute questions.
The legs halt just below the buttocks. A bunch
of bananas blooms before the crotch, connected
by a dark strip I want to say is shadow, but. . .
Tarantula? Bloodstain? I can’t see the front
lower torso, or privates of any sort, and look
again at the bananas. The black banana-stem? Naw.
Too obvious. I resist waxing Freudian since it’s 1917
and “Yes, We Have No Bananas” is yet to become
every immigrant grocer’s nightmare.

Stage right, a green coliseum arches. In the distance,
a train rushes past, all a-steam. Factory smokestack.
Ship’s mast. Not a single gun. Not even a fire. It’s 1917
and war ravages Europe, blotted to a green sludge.
Sun? Moon? No light-source to be seen. Nothing but bananas,
bananas, we certainly have bananas, and this torso—
twisted relic—truncated and the brightest thing around.

If you're not familiar with Amy's poetry, you must change your life.

After Amy, the next poet was Brendan Constantine, who lives in L.A. and has been reading about town in a visit this week.

Although Brendan said that "bringing poetry to New York is like bringing cocaine to South America," we were enthralled by his visionary poems in the form of letters to guns throughout different points in history from various inanimate objects like a Civil War army boot or a fifteenth-century broadsword. They're from his new Red Hen Press book titled, well, Letters to Guns.

We also enjoyed his non-gun poems, like a love poem in the form of a Miranda warning. Here's another poem by Brendan, "Litany":

Why do we say Good Morning like a command
when we know it won't sit still? Why Good Night
when it won't be flattered?

Why do we whisper in the presence of trees or remove
our shoes to step on the skirt of the sea?

And why do we think of the lake as lonely
when the call of the duck does not echo?
Not even in the chambers of the heart.

Why do we treat infinity as old, as something
we may look into, when we know it is a teenaged boy
who looks no one in the eye?

See what fire does to the hands, water
to the brain, blood to the color of anything;
why do we pretend God isn't an animal,
a big black beetle, antlered for the hoisting of stars?

Infinity keeps her in a box of sand, feeds her silence.
She in turn creates worlds that do not endure
so he'll feel older, grown up.

While we're at it, the sun and the moon have never
risen to greet anyone. The forest does not hear
gossip. The ocean prefers to dance alone.

And none are more abandoned than we who wait
in a wilderness for the children we have been
to lead us out.

You can see Brendan reading on this video, one of many good ones from Valley Contemporary Poets:

Finally, the queen of the literary magazines, the great Lyn Lifshin, who's published five skillion poems (she kindly remembered us as someone who published alongside her in lots of literary magazine issues).

Lyn, author of more than 125 books, read some wonderful work, some of it autobiographical, from her Red Hen book Persephone and others. What a treat to see her.

Did we tell you that we've been in love with Lyn's work since we first discovered her magical poems in every other literary magazine we saw in the early 1970s? We're proud to have published alongside Lyn in such litmags as Hanging Loose #37 in 1980, Star-Web Paper #7 in 1979, and Bachy #8 back in 1976.

Lyn didn't disappoint. She never does in print, and in person she's even better. After all, Lyn has given over 700 readings across the U.S. Here she is at Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs:

Lyn is also an amazing prose writer. Her brilliant memoir, about growing up and beyond, appeared in the same volume of Contemporary Authors, #210, in 2002, along with a much less interesting autobiographical essay.

Here's a Lyn Lifshin poem we love:

IN MY MOTHER'S LAST HOURS

I write titles for
poems I'll never
write while she's
living in a note
book, shaking as
her eyes roll back
and I feel guilty
I sat on the out
side stoop this noon
while the nurse's aide
changed her. Mama
my mother calls out
only a few weeks since
we took the ambulance
down here thru black
eyed susans and she
wanted muffins,
coffee, wanted to
smell the air on
the lake. Her skin
the nurse says is
already mottled. Lyn,
she gasps, take
me home

And one of our favorites from tonight:

BEING JEWISH IN A SMALL TOWN

Someone writes kike on
the blackboard and the
"k's" pull thru the
chalk, stick in my

plump pale thighs.
Even after the high
school burns down the
word is written in

the ashes. My under
pants' elastic snaps
on Main St because
I can't go to

Pilgrim Fellowship.
I'm the one Jewish girl
in town but the 4
Cohen brothers

want blond hair
blowing from their
car. They don't know
my black braids

smell of almond.
I wear my clothes
loose so no one
dreams who I am,

will never know
Hebrew, keep a
Christmas tree in
my drawer. In

the dark, my fingers
could be the menorah
that pulls you toward
honey in the snow

The whole early evening at the Cornelia Street Cafe was wonderful, and we're grateful for the rare chance to get out during this hectic semester for us. (One of the people who hired us as a teacher of evening classes was Amy Lemmon, who's deputy chair of the FIT English and Speech Department.) It was a pleasure to hear the varied voices of the Red Hen Press poets, and it was a delight to see old friends like Susan O'Doherty ("Dr. Sue") and others there.

As Angelo kept reminding us, book make great presents for Easter, Passover and Mother's Day. Check out these exciting poets and their works.

And there's a Red Hen Press and Rattle 15th anniversary party (not a reading, a party) on Saturday from 6:00-9:00 p.m. at Telephone Bar that everyone is invited to. Come if you can!

Saturday Evening in DUMBO: Susan O'Doherty' & "Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity"

This report by Richard Grayson first appeared on Jeff Bryant's blog Syntax of Things (go there for the original links) on Monday, July 23, 2007:

A week or so ago I attended an event at Brooklyn's P.S. Bookshop, an elegant addition to Dumbo's Front Street that opened last fall. Susan O'Doherty, known to many as "Dr. Sue" for her Friday "The Doctor Is In" advice columns from M.J. Rose's blog Buzz, Balls & Hype, was celebrating the publication of her new book, Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman's Guide to Unblocking Creativity. Although I know Sue first and foremost as an excellent fiction writer -- our first stories were published in the same rather obscure little magazines back in the mid-1970s -- she's also a psychologist whose Brooklyn Heights private practice has specialized in the treatment of working with clients -- writers, artists, composers and others -- struggling with creative blocks.

As her book explains and this recent Brooklyn Daily Eagle article notes, Sue is an expert on the external and internal factors that prohibit artists — especially women — from pursuing the work that they love -- and not just from her professional life but personally as well. Getting Unstuck's introduction, "Why I Wrote This Book," and its first chapter, "What We Learned at Home," chronicle Sue's own longterm fight to overcome the subtle and not-so-subtle messages conveyed by her parents and grandparents -- and the experiences of her case histories (fictional composites of clients from varied social and ethnic backgrounds) with their own families' messages that girls' artistic, literary and musical efforts may be "nice frills" but they are not what a young woman should aim for in life.

Now, it's no surprise to hear that an 84-year-old novelist like Elizabeth, who has never taken her own books seriously, feeling they were more frivolous and silly than the literary works she really desired to write, got this message:

Elizabeth had learned from her blue-collar, no-nonsense family that life consists of hard, grinding work, and that, in her words, "a woman's place was in the home, serving her husband and raising the children. Any striving for beauty or accomplishment was squelched as 'silly' or, worse, 'putting on airs.'"

But I'm disappointed that these same messages are given to girls like Janna when she submitted an angry poem (dealing with feelings about her mother after Janna's years-long sexual abuse by a stepfather) to her high school literary magazine in 1996:

The poem was rejected by the journal, and Janna was encouraged to submit one of her "nice" poems. She refused. With her mother's support, she started submitting this poem, and others like it, to small literary journals, and within a year, two of her poems were published.

Janna moves to New York and becomes a painter, but she finds that her work's violent and often disturbing images find resistance as well as much support. When a parents' group tries to remove one of her paintings from an exhibit, Janna triumphs but the experience shakes her:

"It was like high school all over again. There were people calling me names and saying my work isn't art . . . I should be used to this by now, to being hated for expressing what I see as the truth. It was a nightmare, though, and I realized there was a lot I hadn't dealt with."

At that point Janna consults the author. Despite being a fairly successful artist -- like Elizabeth, whose novels "have a small but loyal and literate following -- Janna has never been able to take her work completely seriously.

Each of the chapters in Getting Unstuck concludes with an exercise for the reader designed to help apply the chapter's main ideas to your own life and goals. At the P.S. Bookshop event, after reading excerpts from the book and talking about her own experiences, Sue had us all -- female and male, young and old -- engage in a similar exercise, a creative visualization imagining our ideal day. It was an enlightening experience for many of the participants -- although some of the exercises in the book may raise more discomfort for readers as they are forced (okay, not forced, as the author says to skip any exercise that makes one too uncomfortable) to confront their inner critics and "shadow selves."

Having been prevented by sacroiliac joint dysfunction in the past day and a half from attending literary events much further than my own backyard, I spent several happy (if not quite pain-free) hours there the past two afternoons reading Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued, and I have to agree with my old friend Michelle Herman, who said, "This is the best -- the smartest and most lucid -- book about creative blocks I have ever read."

And I'm a guy. Yeah, I think that as a boy and a man, I didn't have to deal with the kind of "young-ladies-should-be-nice" or "this-isn't-for-girls" message that the women artists profiled in Sue's book have dealt with. Despite growing up in a family and neighborhood that contained few role models for writers or artists -- I was the first person in my family to graduate from college -- I never really doubted that I could be a writer if I wanted to. That's very unlike the experience of some women profiled here, whether they are growing up in an affluent African-American suburb of professional strivers or a rural Appalachian village where most girls aspire to no more than an early pregnancy and a job at the Family Dollar store.

Yet even after umteen years of therapy with seven different psychotherapists (none of them Susan O'Doherty), I still find it hard to express some of my less-than-"nice" thoughts and feelings -- the ones often necessary for truly important artistic works. Because I've never really made much money from my books and other writings, I have often discussed my literary work not so much as a career as a hobby -- unlike my paid work as a law school administrator, college professor, attorney, computer education consultant and newspaper columnist.

I'm not all that different from Sue in that respect, and like her, for years at a time, despite previous publications and successes, I've just stopped writing. Like her, I've always gone back to it.

For those writers, male or female, published or unpublished, and for any other kind of creative artists who are searching for a way to become unblocked, I can't recommend Susan O'Doherty's Getting Unstuck Without Becoming Unglued highly enough.

And check out Sue's fiction and creative nonfiction too. Her memoir in the anthology About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope was for me the highlight of a series of wonderful essays by other terrific women writers at a reading for that book, edited by Jessica Berger Gross, at McNally Robinson last month.

Sue's website has links to recent stories, proving that she's one doctor who takes her own advice -- and has profited from it. So have her readers.

Tuesday Evening in Soho: "About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope" at McNally Robinson

This was posted to Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on Tuesday, June 12, 2007:

Tonight I went to a great reading at the McNally Robinson bookstore in Soho. Several of my friends are contributors to this anthology, About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope, and they were among the six writers who read excerpts from their memoirs of miscarriage.

Editor Jessica Berger Gross read from the introduction and how she looked high and low for a book to help her after her own miscarriage -- there really wasn't one about women's experiences from their point of view, so she created one here.

Caroline Leavitt's excerpt dealt with her insensitive coworkers who said the most thoughtless things and her friend who came up with the perfect antidote; Andrea (Andi to me) Buchanan's, about the loss of her son's twin brother, and about the feeling of having a dead fetus as well as a living one inside her; Rachel Zucker (whom I know as poet-in-residence at Fordham, where I teach), her 12-day-old son wrapped around her, read about her miscarriage; my Readerville friend and fellow Rockawayite comic novelist Rochelle Jewell Shapiro read about the events leading up to hers, namely her courtship and marriage proposal by her husband Bernie (sitting next to me); and finally, Susan O'Doherty (to me, the one and only "Dear Dr. Sue") read about the aftermath of a twenty-year siege of miscarriages, the nearly unbelievable birth of her son Ben, now 12, who was eating a pumpkin scone with his father at the table beside mine.

We also had an interesting and productive discussion after the readings. Anyway, if you know anyone who's had a miscarriage or want to understand what women go through when they do have one (and why the absolute stupidest thing you can say is, "Some things weren't meant to be"), get About What Was Lost. And even if you're not that interested in the topic now, the writing is so good you will be once you get started.