Mignon Ariel King Features: April and May

Sorry if you missed  The “Boston Poetry Marathon” this year.  It was a blast!  I’m still exhausted after 30 days of writing poems followed by 3 days of poetry marathon pre-activity and activities.  It’s already Wednesday?  I sat in the house in my jammies staring at the rain all day yesterday, yet a sense of refreshment hasn’t kicked in.  What do you mean I have one more feature to go this Saturday before I can rest my brain?!  Tooooo tired.   –”I grow old, I grow old….” (T.S. Eliot)

MAY:

The Poet Populist of Boston presents the Cambridge Poetry Jam, Saturday, May 5, 2012, Cambridge Public Library, Main Branch, 11am-4pm  [Red Line to Harvard Square; cross Harvard Yard just for the view and ask anyone where it is on you rway to Quincy Street to Broadway.  First: www. mbta.com  it!

Mignon Ariel King Features, 2-3 forum: Poetry Music Mash-up. 

Can’t tell you the exact time I’ll be reading.  Be there by 2 if you want a seat as a  lot of popular Cambridge poets will be there.  I’m one of the few brave Bostonians who will be showing up to ignore comments about my accent all day

These are my only two features this year before I batten(sp.) the hatches to finish self-editing two books by 2013 and launch my own small press Hidden Charm Press.  For an unemployed person, I sure am busy!

I Miss My Muddy Water!

OMG!   The water main broke, so we have to boil water here in Beantown before drinking it.  It tastes nasty as hell boiled!  Well, technically, it tastes like absolutely nothing.  Boston water, even with the too-much chlorine and other junk added since I was a kid drinking the good stuff, is like its architecture.  It has Chahm! I don’t even care that I brushed my teeth in the iffy back-up reservoir water before getting the FYI on that; I just care that the water tastes too pure, like unspoiled woodland or rainforest water.  This is the city, baby.  Give me some rust.

2nd Annual MASS POETRY FESTIVAL: October

Kudos to the organizers of that huge three-day event.  Man, that was fun!!   Great audience  at B&N!   Thank you to the readers who bought my book.  Big thank you and apology to the would-be listeners who missed me because of the time change and took the time to come tell me they were disappointed.  It really means a lot.   I was sooooo nervous.  Mark, my friend, you rock!!

I’ll be back with a list of cool publishers, etc. I met at the Small Press Book Fair.

Ah, Autumn: The Smell of Sports in the Air

Monday night, the Patriots.  Come from wayyyy behind win!  Last night, the Red Sox.  Classic rally to win 4-1.  Welcome back Matsuzaka!  This is the time of year that makes me love New England living:  the trees’ leaves revert to their natural glory, and my favorite athletes show their true colors.

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)

 

September Poems

Chilling with Longfellow

If a body meet a body
in Mount Auburn Cemetery,
that’s probably not a good thing.

But coyotes aren’t a big threat
regardless of the springing dash
of a tan jackrabbit into bushy cover,

making a break right before
Longfellow’s crypt looms up to the left
of the leafy-lined Indian Ridge Path.

Dead men don’t care what I wear
or how much I weigh the pros and cons
of coupling over this blissful solitude.

I’m sorta hoping Emerson drops by to shoot
the breeze. Melville might bring flowers with
Hawthorne, wrinkling his handsome brow.

I love you still, no matter what they say
about you now. Still born, still dead,
you do indeed tell many tales.

 

The Lot of Us

Oh, man, if Hemingway were here

there wouldn’t be

enough booze for everybody, but we

wouldn’t mind sharing.

A few more ice cubes

would probably do the lot of us a world of good.

When were nachos invented? 

No matter, historical accuracy isn’t

all it’s cracked-up to be. That wasn’t

a Fitzgerald joke, poor chap.

 

For that story alone—

the one about a solitary traveler

putting his shoes out

in the hotel hallway to be polished,

noting all the other rooms

had two pair of shoes outside:

a big square male duo

and a smaller, pumped female

set—

 

that story alone

makes me forgive ol’ Ernest for shooting

all those lovely tigers.

Man, at a pub I do not want to hear writers

whining about being

screwed-up by mothers who stopped

breastfeeding  too soon

or made them do too many chores.

Oh, God, if Hemingway were here!

Drink up, writers.  Talk about the war on love.

 

 

Literary Trail

 

Removed for publication–will post the link when it’s up!

 

Open Manse

 

Tim told me not to drink the water

’til after, but, hell, it was about a hundred

degrees in Salem’s Athenaeum. Poor Nathaniel

was practically running off the painting

in the well-shelved tiny room where

I read Raggedy books while Tim

 

checked out the snazzy old “washroom.”

The raspberry water was cold and yummy.

Besides, I didn’t look through books

for famous signatures while the author

was reading. That would be rude, indeed.  

But some people will rifle through stuff

while listening to a story, if left unchecked.

 

 

Lo’s No Witch

 

Salem’s famous for witches, so Lo’s

gonna have a poetry reading there

in October.  Now that came out wrong.

 

–Don’t mean Lo’s a witch. She’s a musician-

poet who can’t sit still at readings, like me,

when Mike plays his drum, hum, hum.

 

I’ll be there too, in a Salem cafe

keeping score with Dracula of all

the necks I’ve nibbled.  We’ll try not

 

to act too batty, this ol’ gang of poets,

blending right in with various spooks,

just children of rhythms and the night.

 

 

North Shore Writers’ Group

A new North Shore Writers’ Group (The Parlor) has formed, and I heard Hannah Tinti read from her debut novel The Good Thief in her native town Salem.  The setting is a fictional yet familiar-seeming New England town.  The main character reminds one of Johnny Tremain and a few good Dickens protagonists rolled into one. 

The talkshow-style format, in which the host asked the author questions before opening the floor for the usual Q&A made the reading interesting and inviting.  Sitting in the lovely Salem Athenaeum  surrounded by favorite 19th-Century New England authors’ work and portraits wasn’t exactly the worst way I’ve spent a Saturday either.

It never occurs to those of us from Greater Boston how isolated writers from farther off the beaten track must feel.  We who can hop on the T and stroll into workshops and a variety of other supportive writers’ groups are rather lucky.  This new group fills a void—in stylish fashion.

Play-by-play of Bookmaking

I’ve just received the edited version of Part I of my book.  Man, I love feedback!  Word of advice to aspiring authors:  Never proof and edit your own work then hit Send.  Someone else needs to see it first!   Veeeer-y helpful.

I’m tapped out this week.  Good thing I don’t need too many brain cells for a party tonight.  I need a party!

Yayyyyyyy, Celtics!!!!!

Green is my new favorite color!