Saturday, July 23, 2005

List of interviews, books, etc...at Harvard University Libraries










(Doug Holder) Here is a partial list of some of my interviews with poets, my own books, and books that I edited that are archived at the Lamont Poetry Room ( Harvard University) and the Harvard Libraries.
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1
Holder, Doug.


Of all the meals I had before : poems about food and eating /
2007
Book
Holder, Doug.



No one dies at the Au Bon Pain /
2007
Book
Doug Holder



Louisa Solano : the Grolier Poetry Bookshop.
2006
Book
Edited by Doug Holder/Steve Glines


Ames, Lois.
[Interview] [videorecording] /
2005
Visual
Interviewed by Doug Holder


Chase, Naomi Feigelson.
[Interview] [videorecording] /
Interviewed by Doug Holder

Wrestling with my father /
2005
Book
Doug Holder

Houlihan, Joan.
[Interview] [videorecording] /
2005
with Doug Holder

Cramer, Steven, 1953-
[Interview] [videorecording] /
2004
Interview with Doug Holder

Der Hovanessian, Diana
[Interview] / [sound recording]
2004
Interview with Doug Holder

[Interview] [videorecording] /
2004
Visual
Galluccio, Lo.
Interviewed by Doug Holder

[Interview] [videorecording] /
2004
Visual

Slavitt, David R., 1935-
Interview with Doug Holder

[Interview] / [sound recording]
2004
Audio
Solano, Louisa.
Interview with Doug Holder

[Interview] / [sound recording]
2004
Audio
Solano, Louisa.
Interviewed by Doug Holder

[Interview] [videorecording] /
2004
Visual
Fox, Hugh, 1932-
Interviewed by Doug Holder

Boston : a long poem /
2002
Book
Doug Holder

City of poets /
2000
Book

Holder, Doug.

Dreams at the Au bon pain /
2000
Book
Doug Holder

Lifshin, Lyn.
Interview] / [sound recording] 2000
Interviewed by Doug Holder

Poems of Boston and just beyond : from the Back Bay to the back ward /
by Doug Holder

Thursday, July 21, 2005


Doug Worth is a Cambridge poet who is member of our "Breakfast With The Bards," group that meets every Saturday in the basement of Finagle-a-Bagel in Harvard Square. (9AM)

CATCH THE LIGHT: Selected Poems (1963-2003)
By Douglas Worth
Higganum Hill Books; 2004
Reviewed by Richard Wilhelm, Art Editor, Ibbetson Street Press. $18

During the course of a reader’s life, she or he may come across a handful of books that have such a transformative effect that one remembers them the rest of one’s life, often giving them multiple readings. Such books are remembered because they have made a reader see the world differently, understand things in a new way. They may be works of fiction, non-fiction, drama, or poetry. Douglas Worth’s CATCH THE LIGHT is a marvelous book and I suspect not a few people will remember where they were living and what they were doing when they first encountered this book. And for those readers who have, thanks to the academics and language poets, written off poetry as incomprehensible jottings of those with too much time on their hands, Mr. Worth’s book will serve as an elixir.
Forget for now his astounding craft and control; these will be apparent. Look instead at what these poems actually bring to the reader. Mr. Worth gives his readers food for the senses and the soul. And like Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, to name a representative few, Mr. Worth offers “soul food” to his country, not that many of the gang of cretinous thugs currently running the country would have much of an ear for what Mr. Worth or anyone of any real spiritual depth has to say. And Mr. Worth has real spiritual depth. But he has great analytical depth as well. He addresses, in the poems of his 1987 collection, ONCE AROUND BULLOUGH’S POND, the primal trauma that, along with slavery, gnaws at the core of the American psyche: the genocide of the Native people. But he takes on his subject imaginatively, eschewing political rants and instead showing contemporary readers what America has really lost by allowing this tragedy to occur and then repressing the guilt as we continue to do. In the poem dated (titled really; all of the Bullough’s Pond collection have dates as titles, as if they are journal entries) “February 27“, Mr. Worth muses about the pond:
I wonder what its real name is--or the one
it had for thousands of years before we arrived
with our charters and wigs and arrogance and ambition
to build a new town and put Newton on the map--
Great Spirit’s Eye? Gull’s Wing? Kingfisher’s Mirror?
The Bullough’s Pond poems develop a narrative of sorts whereby the early poems describe Mr. Worth’s library investigations of indigenous American culture and his musings about the natural landscape before him. Then the magic begins as Mr. Worth, like a poet-shaman, conjures up from his imagination Native characters who speak to us of their lives and the values they hold. This reviewer is not qualified to speak as to the anthropological veracity of his depictions, but as poetry and as myth these poems give us much to savor and meditate upon. “March 19” is about one’s relationship to the animal that is killed for meat and will be familiar terrain to readers of Joseph Campbell. The poem talks about the solemnity and respect that indigenous people had (have?) for the animals they kill. The last tercet reads:
A curse upon him who slaughters with pride for sport
lugging the head home, leaving the carcass to rot!
Come, we will eat you now, properly, with respect.
“March 7” begins
Sometimes I imagine someone running before me
ahead a few paces, and a few hundred years,
The poem goes on to imagine
--people living more simply in a time
when humans were closer to birds and trees and water
and profits were edible, and bits of seashell
were crafted and strung in patterns as gifts to wear:
wampum, before we dulled that term with trade.
Mr. Worth’s work has many tender moments especially in poems dedicated to lovers, family and friends. In “A Purple Rose”, he tells his lover:
No one before ever lay with me all morning
naked, belly to belly, mouth to mouth
without thinking it must be time
to turn away to more important things--
the news, pilling bills, the phone,
brushing their shrill urgency aside
for some future Now,
Many of the poems in the book find Mr. Worth outdoors, contemplating nature. Like most writers of the Romantic-Transcendental tradition, Mr. Worth finds in nature a keyhole through which we, if we are quiet and focused, can catch a glimpse of divinity. But divinity is not seen as a force that always looks approvingly on all that has been wrought by the species that views itself as the crown of creation. In “Osprey”, a poem from the 2003 book ECHOES IN HEMLOCK GORGE, Mr. Worth describes an encounter with an osprey. The final stanza reads:
I stood for a while
eyeball to eyeball with Nature,
then slowly backed off, turned
and came away
with his message concerning
this fisher king’s toxic wasteland
and his question for all of us:
What’s keeping Galahad?
CATCH THE LIGHT features selections from seven of Mr. Worth’s books, the first OF EARTH, having been published in 1974 (though some of the poems from that collection apparently were written as early as 1963) and the most recent, ECHOES IN HEMLOCK GORGE, came out in 2003. Mr. Worth’s books of poetry have garnered praise from the likes of Denise Levertov, Richard Wilbur, and A.R. Ammons. Poet-activist Daniel Berrigan has said that that “Like good wine, Douglas worth excels with age.” Historian Howard Zinn has called him “a visionary dream-weaver of the future global tribe.”
There are many fine books of poetry out there for poetry lovers to spend their money on. CATCH THE LIGHT is a superb volume that represents 40 years of Douglas worth’s poems. But this book is something more than just a lot of good poems. It is a visionary work, or more accurately, a selection from seven visionary works of art and it is a book that will astound and inspire readers for many years to come. Perhaps other readers will find themselves rushing into another room, looking for a spouse, paramour, or roommate, as I have during the course of reading this book, startling my wife, crying, “Oh my God, oh my God, let me read you this poem!”
Richard N. Wilhelm/ Ibbetson Update/ Somerville

Tuesday, July 19, 2005







Susie Davidson








“I Refused to Die: Stories of Boston Area Holocaust Survivors and Soldiers who Liberated the Concentration Camps of World War ll. Susie Davidson. ( Ibbetson Street Press 25 School St. Somerville, Mass. 02143 ibbetsonpress@msn.com http://www.ibbetsonpress.com ) $13.

Susie Davidson, correspondent for the “Jewish Advocate,” award-winning poet, and political activist, was awarded a Mass. Cultural Council Grant in 2004 to help her complete the book she was working on: “I Refused to Die: Stories of Boston Area Holocaust Survivors and Soldiers who Liberated the Concentration Camps of World War ll.” ( Ibbetson Press 2005) Davidson writes in her introduction: “ This compendium for the Boston area, which includes contributions from Holocaust community leaders and poets; is not about the profound legacies left by those imprisoned in death camps: the secret theatre troupes, the hunger study,...the musical compositions resurrected in modern concert halls, the clandestine letters, poetry, journals and other writing... It is rather a portrait of the ongoing legacies of the still among us, those without even the graves of loved ones to visit, those who courageously continue to live their best...inside the walls and the chains of the stark, unforgiving past.”
“I Refused to Die...” includes poetry from well-known local poets, essays from community leaders and supporters, articles on Holocaust community topics, Boston-area Holocaust survivors’ stories, testimony from World War ll liberating military units, and many more areas of interest.
Davidson worked for three years on this project. This is not a book for the beach or to kill time between flights. It is testimony to something that is very likely to happen again if we forget. Given the short memory of contemporary culture; a book like this is essential as an elixir to our collective senility.
In a book as comprehensive as this, it is difficult to give a fully-fleshed picture in a short review. But even within these confines the terrible flavor of the camps are resoundingly clear. In this harrowing account by survivor Sylvia Hack; we get a nefarious slice-of-life in the Auschwitz concentration camp:
“I had malaria at the time. Malaria is a terrible disease which leaves you horribly hot and thirsty. I would step on the bodies of the dead at night when I went down below to urinate. I would envy them, because they didn’t have to see the things I was seeing. I prayed to G-D to take me then.... One time I was so overcome with thirst and burning, I was forced to actually drink my own urine. I never knew it was so salty...” (120)
In this poem by asurvivor Sonia Schreiber Weitz, the poet hails a black solider liberator, a welcomed and unexpected messiah who arrives at her camp:
‘” A black messiah came for me...
He stared with eyes that didn’t see,
He never heard a single word
Which hung absurd upon my tongue.
And then he simply froze in place
The shock, the horror on his face,
He didn’t weep, he didn’t cry
But deep within his gentle eyes
...a flood of devastating pain,
His innocence forever slain.
But there’s a special bond we share
Which has grown strong because we dare
To live, to hope, to smile...and yet
We vow not ever to forget.” (217).
In a conversation I had with Davidson she told me that in her role as a journalist she has written about other people’s accomplishments over the years. She said she has reached a point in her life in which she wants to contribute something herself; of herself...her mark.
Davidson has compiled a collection that should be read in the classroom, and in the home. It is an antidote to a malignant amnesia that seems to have been draped over us, as we experience Holocausts on a lesser scale, but Holocausts nonetheless, in many parts of the world.
Doug Holder is a writer living in Somerville, Mass.

Sunday, July 17, 2005


Ibbetson poet Jennifer Matthews will be in NYC this weekend performing at "The Living Room." I am told that high level record company execs are checking her out, and are very impressed with her writing. We published Jen's "Fairytales and Misdemeanor" in Sept of 2003.
Jennifer has released a new CD "The Wheel," that is getting great notice. Jen will be featured in "Metronome" next month, and she will be on the front cover...that oughta increase readership!
See her play at Toad this Wednesday, (10PM) and find out what went down in NYC. We wish her the best of luck! http://www.jennifermatthews.com