Remember the Time

There’s not much a poet who’s loved him since she was six can do with this one, the death of Michael Jackson. Maybe because the visuals of him far outweigh any words, positive or negative, that could be or have been written about the most electrifying American dancer ever to glide or moonwalk a stage. The blank journal pages just stare back at me.

The mainstream society that creates both social freaks and idols then destroys them can continue to say whatever it will about the personal trials of the entertainer, but the work he leaves behind is the true measure of an artist’s life. I’m glad that my own artistic talent fails to capture the devastation of losing that little boy who appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show when I was six, the one-gloved wonder who incorporated the sleekest classic dance moves and the sexiest city hip grinds into his unique style, and the guy who made white socks, loafers, and high waters look Bad! Words failing, I turned to youtube to watch him dance, hear his primal yell and jangling boots…and remember the first time I fell in love with a musician.

Now who’s bad?

My First Book

Man, the past six months of celebrating the publication of my first book have been wild. It’s impossible to predict how such an event will affect a writer’s life, for better or for worse. I’m choosing to focus here on the positives and thank the poetry fans who turned out to hear my featured readings and to buy every author’s copy of my book and then some.

Now that I’ve finished my last local reading this year, it’s time to focus on finding a publisher for book number two, making a dent in the novella that will someday finish the autobiographical trilogy I’ve been working on since 1996! and nailing down a steady day job for the Fall. (When I’m not trying to figure out why the blogroll is on here twice,) you can find me over the summer editing the online journals MoJo! and U.M.Ph.! Prose; otherwise, happy summer! See you in September.

Last reading ’til September!

My last featured reading ’til Fall will be in Cambridge Monday. Check under “Readings…” for details (where there’s also info about a Tapestry… reading this Thursday featuring two of the finer women poets from the other side of the River.)

I unexpectedly read in Brighton last night…standing next to Boston’s first poet laureate, Sam Cornish, and Monday I’ll be reading at the series that put Greater Boston on the modern poetry reading map. For a Boston poet, this is totally trippy!

UMPH! PROSE SEEKS SUBMITS

City narratives (prose poetry, flash fiction, etc.) wanted for first issue of new online journal U.M.Ph.! Prose. Get ‘em in soon. I’m ready to roll!

Check guidelines first, then submit to umphsubmits@yahoo.com.

http://umphprose.com

Interview of the first Poet Laureate of Boston!!

http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/newsletter.htm

NaPoMo: Poem Per Day

I took on another 30 poems in 30 days challenge.  Most of the poems are here; some have been or will be removed as I submit them for publication. (Some publishers will not publish poems that have appeared, even as drafts, on blogs, so I can’t post all 30 poems here).

1
Sometimes There’s a Simple Solution.

The one who is not lying there/could have been.
–Patricia Beer, “Middle Age”

Maddening alone has a cure that often is
simply called ‘company’. I’m a woman, and
women like flowers. He brought me flowers.

You love me and want me to dream of you,
you say. He kissed my shoulder while I
read in bed–even though it was not bare,

so he had to do a little work first. Tug, tug,
on purple jersey, like a puppy. Just for a peek
of my flesh, a workspace. He did not mind

work. You talk about it all evening long. “Work.
Work!” you complain. Quite often. You make me
miss things I’ve opted not to miss. So I dream.

2 and 3 Removed for submission.

4

I Believe That Old Lech Has Mellowed.

He said, ‘Come for dinner. We’ll read your poems.’
.–Irene Koronas    

It’s a festival. Happens once per year
in the basement of the BPL*
where some of the poets ain’t gettin’ any younger,
but we”ll spend the day there, what the hell.

We’ll talk about the cads we’ve known,
the chasers and seducers of note,
now propped on canes or attached to wives,
still winking and serving up a quote.

Every time we women get together
there’s plenty of mischief to be had.
But what do you expect from us poets?
-Whoa, look at him. –Hey, not bad!

*Boston Public Library: The annual festival is named Boston Poetry Marathon as the famous finish line is in front of the entrance to the library.

5

Feel Free to Wake Me.

A Death blow is a Life blow to some

Who till they died, did not alive become–
–Emily Dickinson    

When I die, the Irish may wake me.
For I refuse to accept Life
as a foregone conclusion.

As the sawdust settles, I shall rise.
I’ll hear the laughter when I die.

If insipid notes must be offered,
let it be through Chants, and clapping,
and accordion Music, and dancing.

There’s no reason to grieve Mortality.
Save energy to celebrate Eternity.

7

It Loses Something in Translation.

(Removed: Accepted for publication!)

 

 

 

8 Removed for submission.

9

Method Actor Staying Alive

[Prompt: Mangled Lyrics]    

“Well, you can tell by the way I used to walk,
I’m a wounded man–no time to talk.”
Because I used to be Tony Manero,

sexy Italian dancefloor king. Well, before that
I played dumb, sweat-hog stupid, on tv:
“What? Where?” Later, I gained weight

as a bedraggled-drunk fallen angel.
I’ve gotten Shorty, been an army officer
but no gentleman. Well, you can’t tell

by my popularity, but women still want
me to be in sexy scenes in my movies.
And I’m telling you, it really hurts.

10

Sudden Deaths

[Prompt: < 20 lines, using: stain/caramel/cloud/iris/vacant]    

Here and there people lose their minds–
not gradually, first staring at the clouds,
irises vacant, next misunderstanding
simple concepts, suspicious of every

word, everyone. Rather, they go suddenly,
stars exploding, to become caramel stains
against the clouds, stains that will cause
other troubled minds to go nova too.

11

Desperately Seeking

[Prompt: Write to a specific audience.]    

I’d like to say that I have never done
This before, but we both know

That that is not entirely truthful. No,
I’ve never said a word aloud, nor written

Down my heartfelt prayers. Yet it was
Always there–the longing, questioning

Whether I had done something to deserve
So much agony, solitude, in so little time.

But what I really want to focus on now
Is the positive, the future, the devotion

I have always held, attempted to quiet,
Unvoiced because it could not possibly

Be worthy of one such as Yourself.
But all the misery of others came too.

No one is spared, so now I ask You aloud
To distribute that which we all have given,

Enough for everyone, for as the song says,
Lord, “What the world needs now is love.”

12-14 Removed for submission.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

15 Turn of Phrase

 My inner voice has one foul tongue,
and lately she’s been lashing me hard.
There isn’t enough cocoa butter balm
for the welts on my back, salve
for these scars on my knees, yet
she is repeatedly beating me down.

I know all about my imperfections,
been hearing about ‘em my whole life
–but most of that time the voice
was a honey-tongued best friend.
Whatever your complaints, please wait
till she’s done maligning my name.

16 Removed for submission.

18 In Other Words
 

She doesn’t fear change, merely dislikes it,
same for commitment. If she cared for it,
she’d have moved elsewhere long ago.
Rude of change, she thought, to move in
next door as if it owned the neighborhood,
taking down curtains not yet bleached out.

“Change” was just another word for waste. 

19 Spring Cold

 A sneeze and a wheeze are swizzled
by a pink flamingo. Then a faerie
drizzles buttercup dew to seal your
eyelids. Garlic around window frames
won’t help. It only works on vampires.

Silver bullets won’t blast it out,
no matter how a werewolf might
yelp. Drink some gin. Take a nap.
Nothing beats it, so why not dream
of technicolor wings while you can?

20 From An Athlete Lying Low

The Sox are winning 9 to 1
while two Americans lose their run.
A Kenyan woman wins again,
as Ethiopia gains new fame.

I, however, barely budge,
eating corn chips, craving fudge.
Boston sports earn worldwide fame.
Don’t glare at me. I’m not to blame.

 

22 Saved Earth

The dirt transforms itself, transposes,
pot chips, transports clay pipes once

transmogrified by fire, sealed from water
yet carried by it into history. Meaning

is translated to other cultures that lap
life up on cool tongues, transmit it over fire

to each other and beyond; so we transcend
mere fact to become artifact.

[Very rough draft. Happy Earth Day!!]

23  A classic Shakespearean sonnet, but I’m submitting it for publication.

Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday!

[I'm still trying to learn how to write prose poems. How's this?]

25 Considering Spring

Taking in the sights that I will miss
When outer eyes cease to do their work,
I remember forehead’s touched and eyelids kissed,
And continue to admire God’s best work.

Watching men digging up the street
Or playing tennis when they should be working,
I pause to note each movement of their feet,
While check-listing that every muscle’s working.

So when my joints are weak, my spine is bent,
I’ll close my eyes to dream how Springs were spent.

26 I Woulda

[For Daniel]

This isn’t one of my better love poems.
It’s just one I coulda written years ago.
But how were you to know I’d never,

ever, love anyone better? I sat there
on your stoop for three hours after,
not sure where to be next. My home,

it seemed, had vanished. I would have
followed you, woulda sold that damned
13-inch TV to buy a ticket, flung all my

books into the trash. And I did write
a poem about it then, “Amtrakking
for Love” –something like that, yet

it was worse than this.  But the point
is, you said I love her. Then you left.
Damn, you really shoulda said too.

27 “And the lights….”*

Lived here my whole life 
without ever seeing the lights out 
on the train platform. For a sec, 
I’m Charlton Heston in that movie 
about being the last human left 

as zombie-like blueish creatures 
go right on with what they’re doing, 
plodding toward the lemming-raiser, 
aka, escalator. That time Kenmore flooded 
I went to see the water which was 

all the way up to the second stair 
of the station. A stranger emerged 
from the faceless pedestrians to say, 
“Don’t worry. They’ll fix it,” because I was 
bawling like it was the end of civilization. 

* from the Bee Gees lyrics:  …and the lights all went down in Massachusetts….”  (Don’t bother looking for it on YouTube.  I’m a huge fan, and I have to say it’s their very worst song–and depressing as heck!)

28  Must I?

I’ve loved entirely too much 
entirely too infrequently– 
thought craving a lover’s touch 
not love, but mere indecency. 

There he is, The One, 
that man I thought a myth. 
Why must I smother hope again, 
to live without his kiss? 

29  At the Main Street Cafe

At the Main Street Cafe the windows 
are valanced in bright, white lace, 
and the hunter wallpaper has diamonds. 
I’m ostensibly here for the competition, 

but the wooden booths, friendly server, 
white tin ceiling make me want to 
relocate. Besides, the American cheese 
omelet and I are bonding, even though 

my eyes are riveted to the door in case 
the biker poet is coughed up by the wind. 
The words are relayed, slammed like nails 
into the wooden booths, but really this eve 

is about Michelle, dark-rimmed eyes, a voice 
making it clear that her past is darker. Who 
would expect a ride through Canton to reveal 
where one of the best gems is hiding out? 

30  Sentenced to 30 Days

It was a month of what Sundays 
should always be: relax and do your time, 
peek outdoors and complain about confinement 

even while escaping in your mind for a bit. 
Make a little small talk with the other inmates 
who’ll tell you to give yourself a break. 

On the outside, you’re a deadbeat, blight, 
responsible for the downfall of civilisation, 
but in here, you are a legend in your own time. 

Yee haw!!!!  Made it through another 30-in-30 with my poetic dignity intact.  Thank you to friends who read and commented!

 

Interviewed

Photo: Jack Scully

*****************************************************

Interviewed by: Doug Holder

*****************************************************

Mignon Ariel King is a dyed-in-the wool Boston poet. In her introduction to her new collection of poetry “The Woods Have Words,” she invites the reader to:”…stroll along the Charles River… walk through the streets of Boston,…or zip under and over the state of Massachusetts on the country’s oldest subway.” King was born some 40 odd years ago in the bosom of Boston City Hospital. She grew up in Roxbury,later earned a couple of advanced degrees, and was an adjunct professor of English at several local colleges.

—-

She describes herself as a woman who is happily single, bookish, urban, multicultural, nocturnal; a complex woman of refined sensibilities, but she can just as easily down a few beers, and yelp for the home team.  King said she was introduced to poetry as a young kid when she was given a “fat” anthology of children’s poetry edited by Helen Ferris. She read it cover to cover, and soon started to write her own poetry. And finally, after all these years, she has penned her own poetry collection.  King said that poetry is her favorite medium because she said: “ I can’t write fiction.” King lists some of her favorite poets and writers as: Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros, to name a few.

“The Woods Have Words” is of course set in Boston—a place that King will always consider home. She can’t imagine a city without a river, and Boston has the Charles, and as the song goes: “She loves that muddy water.”  Interestingly enough King said she views Boston as a character in her book. She explores the different sections of Boston, many of them which she has lived in and worked in. “They all become part of you,” she reflected.

And this denizen of the asphalt, this walker in the city, considers herself a nature poet as well! She laughed: “ Skyscrapers are as natural as trees to me.”  King is no wallflower at the party, a weeping willow in the woods. She said her poetry is the poetry of a strong woman – a message that is clearly evident in her work. King doesn’t want to be know[n] as an “African-American” poet. She won’t be typecaste by biology, she insisted. She simply wants to be known as a writer with a capital W. She identifies with no school of poetry. She says simply and firmly that her work is multicultural. 

King said she finds a lot of women writers write about their kids and gardening—a subject matter she see[s] too much among her peers. She lists Sharon Olds and Deborah Garrison as poets who break the mold. Local poets Carolyn Gregory and Jessica Harman are poets she greatly admires.  She is currently working on a new collection “[A] View of the Charles,” that will be a straightforward, Bukowski-style collection. It will be a lyrical journey through Boston, the home of the Bean, the Cod, and the King.

***********************************************************

Chestnuts

.

Sox-capped men with silvered white pushcarts peddle
honey-roasted peanuts on the Boston Common.
Whatever happened to roasted chestnuts, clutched
in tiny brown paper bags, crooked in fedora-topped
daddies’ grey-tweeded arms, the evening edition
of the Globe absorbing the extra heat? My officemate
offers a dissertation on today’s male after I am foolish
enough to ask her opinion on the vanishing breeds.
It seems wrong not to love trees and men
and the fruit of them while shuffling the pulp of
a thousand murdered trees in an attempt to make
a living without missing another life.

–from The Woods Have Words, p.7

To order “The Woods Have Words” go to:  http://www.lulu.com/ibbetsonpress 

Doug Holder’s website  http://authorsden.com/douglasholder

THE WOODS HAVE WORDS

Cover painting: Charmed Silent by Hannibal King

THE WOODS HAVE WORDS: poems of tribute, my first collection of poetry, is now available from Ibbetson Street Press. Thank you for supporting small-press poetry.

http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress

 

Review by Gloria Mindock, Cervena Barva Press

With poetry so honest and images so powerfully quiet, Mignon will be your guide to the many areas of Boston. In one instant, you’ll be in the North End. In another, Teele Square, with life captured in between.  Mignon is a woman who knows the spirit of her family, friends, and the
neighborhoods of Boston, but more importantly, herself. This book is one  you’ll read over and over.
 

 

Review by Lo Galluccio, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene, Mar 8, ‘09  

Apparently, Mignon had a Grammie too, to which she dedicates this vivid, rooted, musical collection of poems that seem to grow like the sycamores, out of Boston’s earth. My Grammy was on the Welsh side of my family, but I must confess it really grabbed me; Mignon’s little portrait of the old North End –obviously Italian– where you are hard-pressed these days to buy a Ricotta pie on Easter. In “Mario the Tailor Works Wednesdays” she writes:

“and bistros where the biscotti
is mwah and the gelati a tapestry
of smooth, rippled almond.” p 3

In Mignon’s book, the City issues reverence, imagery and drama in formal and idiomatic language and so much more — out of objects and food and people of all stripes….including visceral scenes in institutions, job-sites, apartments, and historical avenues. In King’s book, it’s not just the graceful trees talking, though they do pack their wizened meaning along rivers and parks in Greater Boston, a Greater Boston Mignon knows inside and out. It makes me realize how much of a snob I am for always touting New York as the truly great metropolis in the USA, “fire of my loins,” my Gotham. 

What I especially like is the fable-like-realism that Mignon is able to employ for most of these exquisitely concrete episodes of life as she comes of age and then colorfully sketches her fair City’s environs and happenings. Shut up in Brigham and Women’s Hospital, after some procedure, Mignon is fiddling with the oxygen tube and the CD player to get a pumped in bang of Aerosmith, the great Boston rock band. In a delightful punk unraveling, Mignon envisions Steven Tyler in his “nails shiny black, sculpted face and perfect teeth pleading for me to dance with him.” p.14 “Oxygen and Aerosmith {To Steven Tyler.} In her pneumonia-induced dream-state she must decline a dance with the Cherokee-boned rockstar and in the end, humorously reports,

‘Steven was truly hurt, but very forgiving:
Maybe another time, then?”

In her introduction: A City of Trees, she says she hesitates to call the book “autobiographical” because she herself is an embodiment of many women and their perspectives –“urban, multicultural, bookish, educated, creative, professional, happily single, nocturnal, or some combination thereof.” And what is striking about the collection is how comfortable with all these emblems she is while also capturing the love and ambivalence that reigns between the male and female, in poems like “Love without Sex” p 44 and “My First Love” p 37.

In “Another Creation Legend” she invokes the pagan origins of love and poetry from a matriarchal point of view. In a simple ode she runs it down this way:

‘When god was a woman….pagans worshipped
Mere human endeavors, like love.” And ends with:

“I guess when god was a woman
is when poetry was born.” p 27

In “A Real Job at 9:11 am,” Mignon brilliantly describes the strictures she’s facing, the “prissy temp in wedge heels stuffing envelopes as of with valentines…..” And ends on an ominously poignant note: “Sink-water draining in the ladies’ room sounds like something being strangled.” In a couplet she sums up what others might have just called that sick feeling in the pit of their stomach when they’ve got to face a “real” or “corporate” job. She gives us something more….precise and scary.

Mignon pays tribute to her Daddy – gone now – while also in a kind of choked up nightmare poem describes how his going and coming imprinted her as a child:

{WHEN YOU LEAVE ME}

“I know it seems finished.
You only left me once,
Yet in my dreams

you are always leaving,” p 30

The bond between them is manifested especially in another great poem about a Boston pub and its fare, pastrami, where she and her Dad used to go and [ingest] the great messy stuff. In”Ken’s Pub: When My Father was Alive,” she describes:

“The pickles lured us in, floating like an experiment
In avoiding temptation. But the pastrami’s black edges
sealed the deal for me –“ p 32

That poem is dedicated at the bottom as many of Mignon’s works are to her favorite and local poets – this one to Ed Galing. There are many other finely crafted and fascinating scenes dedicated or let’s say influenced in some mysterious way, to Afaa Michael Weaver, Regie O’Hare Gibson, Doug Holder, Walt Whitman and Sharon Olds, among others. 

In a tribute to Regie Gibson, (SCOWL: Ballad of a Face), the streets are the varied constructs (colors?) of race and they also shout their critical relevance:

“I still hear you, there in Roxbury! So here is
one truth written across the face of America.
Feel free to label it my scowl as it trails quietly down
the tan, bronze, caramel, mahogany, black street.”
p. 58

In “Freedom Trail” King perhaps epitomizes her credo as a poet and an artistic person, one which makes her poetry both fascinating and generous to those around her: in Mignon’s work there is an explicit balance between the objective and the deeply-felt subjective:

“Contradictions are okay. One hopes anyhow
that it makes cosmic sense to love both trees 
and books, the city and the dirt trails, breathe salt….”

Freedom Trail, p 49

I very highly recommend this wondrous collection. Mignon Ariel King’s work encloses my spirit like a sister of the Boston-planet.

Lo Gallucio is the author of “Sarasota Vll” (Cervena Barva Press)

 

Black History Month Series (V)

Q: What are the dangers for a Black woman writer of writing first-person-narrator poetry?

A: The White-male-authored “I” of a poem is often seen as a universal spokesperson, a representative of the “human condition”; the White-female-authored “I” is viewed as the puppet of a man-bashing and very self-obsessed girl; the African-American male “I” is the authority for Black America…. This is a throwback to the sexist and racist roots of formal literary analysis. See how far removed the multicultural Black woman writer is?

A: Some readers see it as a personal invite into the “world of the Black female,” viewing the actual poet as a gateway to a supposedly-exotic or previously-forbidden realm. The specific poet/poem is lost or misread.

A: The poet must define subsequent non-autobiographical work as such when employing “I.” (Although this is a minor issue, comparatively speaking, it’s there).

There is the double bind of being Black and a woman opening herself up to artistic critique, for certain readers will focus first on the poet’s physical features, interpreting the term “Black” as purely biological, then mentally translate to African-American, interpreting the culture as “alien” to American-ness in general. Old stereotypes of race, class, and gender invariably combine here to define and confine the multicultural Black woman poet (and, indeed, the African-American woman poet). There’s the art, the artist, the assumed artist, the actual artist, the past artist, the future of the artist—that’s a lot to sort through just to get a poem read.

Considering the negative energy expended by the Black woman poet dodging such ad feminam critique, especially that which is both overly-restrictive and at least vaguely belittling of her own unique experience, voice, and talent, makes it a wonder that so many of us keep writing. And think of all the energy wasted by the reader who could have been simply enjoying poetry. Why buy trouble?

Black History Month Series (IV)

Removed for publication in MoJo! Issue # 2 (my online journal).  Check Publications page.