Video of Lawrence Ferlinghetti Reading

A video from youtube of Ferlinghetti reading his poetry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrHv6IASWQ4

Poem: Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

the reed of a loom
the guideways, of a loom, or

when suddenly, when suddenly
this is spring, and this is summer

and this, this is open sky.
the birds resemble a man.

dandelion. giddying.
budded. spree.

roundly, with joy
for nothing and for everything

the day, with my own heart
too soon, arrayed. this haste

this pasturing. this coffee companion.
this cup. this yellow sky

reprinted w/ permission from The Valise by Gregory Vincent St Thomasino -2012

Sunday 7-22 Italian Amer Poets Read at The 2nd Annual Poetry Festival

Italian American Poets: Vittoria repetto, Angelo Verga, Clare Ultimo and Angelo Zeolla will read on Sunday July 22nd at 4pm at the 2nd Annual Poetry Festival on Governor’s Island.

THE POETRY SOCIETY OF NEW YORK PRESENTS

THE 2ND ANNUAL NEW YORK CITY POETRY FESTIVAL

Headliners include Mark Strand, Patricia Smith, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Amber Tamblyn, Valzhyna Mort, Cornelius Eady, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Joanna Furhman, Jennifer L. Knox, CAConrad,

Maggie Nelson, Dorothea Lasky, and Timothy Donnelly

Saturday & Sunday, July 21st & 22nd, 11am-5pm

Governors Island, Colonel’s Row

Pre-sale tickets: $5 for both days

Day-of tickets: $5 per day

New York, NY – The Poetry Society of New York, producers of The Poetry Brothel and publishers of Brothel Books and Quartier Rouge, announce the full lineup and schedule of events for the 2nd Annual New York City Poetry Festival (NYCPF) on July 21st & 22nd. This is an all-outdoor event with a rain date of Saturday, July 28th. The event will include over 50 reading series and 200 poets on its three stages, a Vendor’s Village where booksellers, artists and craftmakers will sell their wares, a VIP Tent sponsored by Brooklyn Brewery for members of The Poetry Society of New York, healthy and delicious food options, poetry-inspired performance and installation art throughout, and for the first time, the Children’s Poetry Festival at NYCPF! Pre-sale tickets are five dollars, and give ticketholders access to the festival on both Saturday and Sunday. Tickets are $5 each day at the door. For full 2012 details or to buy tickets click here.

The following poetry organizations, presses and reading series will be featured at the festival:

A: Argos Books, Augury Books, B: Boundless Tales, Bowery Books, Bow Wow @ BPC, Blue Flower Arts, The Bratty Poets Series, C: Cave Canem, Coldfront, Cornelia Street Graduate Reading Series, COUPLET, D: DDay Productions, Deadly Chaps, Drunknsailor, E: Earshot, Exit Strata, Explosion Proof, F: Feminist Writer’s Organization, Fireside Follies, Futurepoem, G: Gigantic, great weather for media H: The Highwaymen NYC, I: InDigest Magazine, Italian American Writer’s Association, The Inspired Word, K: Kundiman L: Local Word, louderARTS, M: Madhat, The Mom Egg, Moonshot Magazine, My Brother’s Keeper, N: New School Poets Corner, New York Quarterly, No Dear Magazine, O: La Otra Orilla, P: Patasola’s Parlor, PEN American, PeopleHerd, Ping Pong, The Poetry Brothel, Poets House, R: The Red Wheelbarrow Poets Series S: Southern Writers Reading Series, Stain of Poetry, Stonecutter, T: TOTEM, The Truth Urban Theater Group & I Am the Voice, U: Underwater New York, V: Vets and Poets, W: The White Swallows Reading Series

Review of Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s The Place I Call Home

“The Place I Call Home”

A Spiritual Landmark (and a Glimpse at Horror)

By Emily Vogel

Poetry Editor

Typically, when we think of “place” we consider first its physical geography, what exists in its proximity and what best describes its coordinates and physical dimensions. To consider that a “place,” perhaps besides being a physical location, is also a dimension of the memory, a particular habitat of the mind and heart which cannot be drawn on a map, suggests a type of vault of emotional reserve that can best be channeled through the medium of poetry. Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s book of poems, “The Place I Call Home” (forthcoming from NYQ Books in September) easily taps into this dimension, and while the landmarks that might be mentioned in many of the poems are recognizable as physical realities, there are without doubt other “spiritual landmarks” which carry the reader through all fifty-two poems so that we’re not only in a city in New Jersey, but also journeying through the story of the “self,” which has its own “emotional coordinates,” in its own right.

Gillan succeeds in constructing the “herstory” of an Italian immigrant girl. Her work is honest and bears the integrity of a woman/narrator we’d all like to sit down with and have four o’clock tea (or espresso), tell stories, and exchange matters of heart. She recalls the details of her growing up with a sense of real specificity and awareness. While reading the book the first time, I received what I’m used to after reading the last line of a really good poem or novel: the chills – what I’ve come to know as a brush with the Holy Spirit. It is the kind of physical sensation which demands you just appreciate the beauty of the poem without the need to examine it immediately for its deeper meanings with an “intellectual” ear.

The deeper meanings of her poems resonate viscerally, as opposed to the type of poems which beg we impose the intellect, eviscerate them of their emotional impact, and analyze them until it’s no longer the poems that we appreciate. Gillan’s poems are easy to appreciate, and require no second-guessing or deconstructive examination beyond what they attest. She does not cloak by gestures of language that leave us confused and dissatisfied, wondering why someone just doesn’t tell us a story we can identify as a story. In this book of poems, she has opened the vault of the self, with all its shame, joy, passion, triumph and discovery, that anyone would argue requires a certain kind of courage that many poets on the current poetry scene are not willing to employ.

My favorite poem in the collection is one which recalls a dream (In My Dream, The Light). The poem’s vivid imagery succeeds in suggesting a kind of horror story: “someone with huge dark circled eyes and a bright/red gash of a mouth and huge stitches bisecting/her face and body, as though someone had cut her/in half and sewn her back together, and the dishes/on the table are full of severed heads and pulsing/hearts.” The shock of these images helps us to see the difference between the narrator of the conscious world and the Gillan of subconscious magnitudes. Perhaps the real essences of our truths are revealed in dreams? In narratives over which we have no dominion or control?

While we are given a long glimpse of Gillan’s childhood and early relationships in the first half of the book, much of the poems on the topic of her late husband are in the latter half of the book. These poems certainly suggest a shift, both in perspective and in sentiment. More anger and grief become the focus, yet with a real sense of maturity, integrity, and originality. These poems reveal details that are not always pretty: “even your face/looks delicate, the skin drawn/so tightly over the bones of your head that it’s almost transparent,/your neck so thin it cannot support your head” (The Other Night, You Came Home), and “There is no medicine/for the sound guilt makes at 3 am.” (How Do I Pack Up the House of My Life?).

There is much more to Gillan’s poems than simply well-crafted stories about life. What becomes evident in many of the poems in this collection is the portrait of the narrator’s fear, in the same way a child might tremble in her bedroom at night when the shadow cast on the wall by the lamp becomes a terrible monster – when perfectly ordinary images are transformed into something violent. In the latter half of this book, the narrator is revealed as someone who is confronting these horrors and conciliating with them. Perhaps the Gillan we know of in the poems is not only haunted by the ghosts of childhood, her late husband and dreams, but dares to resurrect these ghosts and render them remarkable aspects of the self. “The Place I Call Home” is truly a work of literary merit. Look forward to its release in September: New York Quarterly Books, www. nyqbooks.org

http://ragazine.cc/2012/06/gillan-book-review/

The Place I Call Home

NYQ Books, ISBN: 978-1-935520-67-2

See also, http://www.mariagillan.com/

Poem: Confession by Susan Gerardi Bello

I wasn’t there, here. I was asleep
in an apartment in Santa Monica.

I saw it on TV, didn’t smell the smoke,
flee over the bridge. I moved back a year later,

rented a row house in Brooklyn
from a man who lost his son in the North Tower.

When I moved in, I was told his son had lived
in the same house with friends, had stained

the dark wood in the living room. I was told
I could paint anything, except that dark wood.

Some nights when it was late and I climbed
the creaky stairs to bed, I’d listen for his son,
but all I ever heard were my feet on the floorboards.

IAWA – Italian American Writers Assoc. May Newsletter

Please go to http://iawa.net/may2012.pdf for the May 2012 newsletter..Thanks
Vittoria Repetto – Vice President of IAWA

If You Want a Friend, Get an Italian by George Guida

I could watch mine all day long.
He has the most interesting habits.
Sometimes he just sits in the corner and chatters.
Sometimes he jumps up and rattles the bars.
If I hum, he sings to me.
If I feed him olives, he spits the pits into perfect little mounds.

Saturdays he wakes up and immediately cleans his cage.
Sunday mornings he sleeps in.
On walks, if he sees another Italian coming towards him,
he gestures with his hands and makes funny faces.
He’s very discreet about relieving himself.
He won’t go out at all unless his hair is perfectly combed.

I could swear sometimes he’s laughing at me.
Whenever the kids come home, he waves them over.
Sometimes he stays up all night, waiting for them.
After he eats a big meal, he puts his hands behind his back
and walks in circles.
Sometimes, for no reason at all, he just starts crying.

He’s older now, but you still have to watch him around a female.
His hair is gray around the muzzle, but it makes him look distinguished.
He shivers a lot and smiles when I put him in the sun.
If I show him a map of Italy, he claps his hands, then sighs.
Sometimes he sounds like he can talk.
My wife is convinced he can say ?I love you.?

Published w/ poet’s permission

George Guida is the author of four books: The Pope Stories and Other Tales of Troubled Times (Bordighera Press, 2012), New York and Other Lovers: poems (Smalls Books, 2008), Low Italian: poems (Bordighera, 2006), and The Peasant and the Pen: Men, Enterprise and the Recovery of Culture in Italian American Narrative (Peter Lang, 2003). When not writing, he teaches English and creative writing at New York City College of Technology, and co-edits 2 Bridges Review.

Blue tears by Mary Russo Demetrick

Scattered
through the grass
grape
hyacinths
peek at us
from their green carpet
remind us
of their history
here
there once was a
purple flower bed
rows of these
hyacinths
planted
by a woman
to honor her parents
and now
many years later
they honor their planter
my dear mother-in-law
whose earth-stained
hands
nurtured her garden
planted bulbs and annuals
on each of these graves
and now long dead
she has no flowers
on her own grave
unless
I bring them
I cannot understand this oversight
and even though
it isn’t my childhood tradition
in the spring time
I bring pussy willows
place them on her grave
and on those of her parents
after all
these are my children’s
forebears
their history
their heritage

Mary Russo Demetrick April 15, 2012

Mary Russo Demetrick is a poet who survived brain aneurysm surgery 11 years ago.
She strives to retain her poetic voice and vision while celebrating the life she came so close to losing.

Suggested Reading List on Our Linkedin Page

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