Photo Study of Bards by Melissa Shook and Zvi Sesling

ZVI SESLING ( Photos 1 to 3) Melissa Shook ( 4 and beyond...)

( Click on Pictures To Enlarge)

Upon Hearing of Your Death in Your 34th Year.... (For Mike Amado)

( Mike Amado second from right)


Upon Hearing of Your Death in Your 34th Year

For Mike Amado

I fear losing your brightness to shades of memory,
the way you lean forward when you are being kind,
which is all the time,
the way you build your poetry in spades
and it comes out in hearts,
The way the drum beats our hearts beat the words beat.

Within the hour,
I dig into my box of childhood treasures, so insignificant now,
for two polished Winged Victories for your eyelids,
to pay Chiron’s fee and then dredge up three
lint-covered Valiums for Cerberus,
who like a good dog will eat Anything.
I am worrying that if you can’t translate
into three languages on a good day
you might end up excluded from
The Elysian Fields Anthology.

Nobody’s fault you grew up grappling
with a pain shaking you by the balls
over a cliff, each breath reminding you
when the pain stopped you would be dead,
a promise it kept (like a heartless sundial ever
burnishing the Spoken Warrior’s words).

There is a question poetry asks of common sense:
Is it our language that leaves us incredulous
of any reality that doesn’t measure itself
by a beginning and an end?
Is Plath’s Ariel simply a nightlight
in a black, chaotic universe?
Ah, there’s the rub.
Who was it exactly named the stars?
The constellations? and would that be enough?
To live on in that way? When art crosses the line
becoming myth you might oh so quickly
forget the name of this young poet.
But I would be happy to remember this line
of poetry on any battlefield life takes me,
in any last breath if there were time,
“There is a river I call Sky.”


--------- Linda Larson is a Bagel Bard and former editor of "Spare Change News."

Harris Gardner , Doug Holder and the Bagel Bards to read at the Somerville Library Central Branch 6:30 to 8:30PM April 27, 2009

Bagel Bard Poetry reading at the Somerville Central Library

The Central Library, located at 79 Highland Avenue


Monday April 27 @ 6:30-8:30 pm

Special readings by founders: Doug Holder and Harris Gardner as well as the other Bards.


According to Regie O’Hare Gibson, a Bagel Bard is “a poet that is glazed and ring-shaped whose poetry has a tough, chewy texture usually made of leavened words and images dropped briefly into nearly boiling conversations on Saturday mornings -- often baked into a golden brown.” The Bards featured in this reading represent part of the 51 poet members who come together as writers over breakfast every Saturday morning at the Au Bon Pain in Davis Square. Every poet -- famous, unknown, or somewhere in between -- is welcome to share breakfast with the Bagel Bards while baking up some tasty treats.

Bagel Bard Gloria Mindock will tour Romania in Spring 2009 for her new poetry collection: "At the Heaven's Gates"

Gloria Mindock’s book, “At the Heaven’s Gates” will be published by Cogito Press in Oradea, Romania. with translation by Flavia Cosma.

The editor/publisher, Mr. Ioan Tepelea will write the introduction in her book. Mr. Tepelea has published Gloria’s poetry before in an anthology called “Murmur of Voices” and in the magazine he publishes called, UNU: REVISTA DE CULTURA.

Gloria and her translator are planning a book tour with her publisher in Romania in May of this year.

Harris Gardner makes a home for Bagels and Bards at the Au Bon Pain Cafe in Davis Square, Somerville

(Gardner at the Au Bon Pain cafe in Davis Sq.,
Somerville home of the Bagel Bards)


Article about Harris Gardner ( co-founder of Bagel Bards) in the Northeastern Alumni Magazine




The People's Poet




“It brings community together—a common ground, you might say,” says poet-about-town Harris Gardner, LA’69, reflecting on the unifying power of verse.

Gardner expresses his enthusiasm for his craft by writing prolifically—a collection of his poems, Among Us, was published last year. He also hosts regular poetry events around the Greater Boston area.

He recalls being introduced to poetry at age fifteen by his tenth-grade teacher: “She gave us an assignment to write a poem. And I said, ‘This is fine; I’ll try another one.’ Just because I wanted to, not because anyone told me I had to.”

To share the vitality he’s found in poetry, Gardner, who lives in Boston, organizes the city’s National Poetry Month Festival, featuring both established and emerging poets. The eighth annual fest was held this April at the Boston Public Library. Writers read from their works in a six-hour marathon.

Three years ago, with friend and fellow poetry enthusiast Doug Holder, Gardner founded a weekly poets group called Breaking Bagels with the Bards. The name came from the group’s original meeting place, the Finagle a Bagel in Harvard Square. When that eatery closed, the Bards switched to alternating meetings at the Au Bon Pain outposts in Davis Square and Central Square. High school graduates to PhDs, the Bards run a wide socioeconomic gamut. Anthologies of members’ poems attract applause outside the café walls.

When he’s not schmoozing with the Bards, Gardner can be found at Borders Books in Downtown Crossing, where another organization he emcees, Tapestry of Voices, invites poets to read each month.

This busy artist, who also finds the time to run his own real estate business, believes the literary arts fill a basic need. “Poetry is very learnable,” he says. “At the community level, people can learn to appreciate poetry, to enjoy poetry, to indulge in poetry, and even to write poetry.

“Even if they’ve never done it before.”

— Nancy Rabinowitz, MA’90

"I Want" by Ingerid White

Ingerid White is a new Bagel Bard and she sent me this poem in response to an article she read about the late Mike Amado in The Somerville News.




I WANT


I want to feel

that life isn't a black sky

I want to know in the marrow of my bones

that there really is a place called home



I want to fly

in my mind

like I did in my dreams as a child

I want this bitterness to leave me

I want to smile

again



I want to feel the grass under my feet

soft and pliant against my skin

I want to gaze at the white-streaked-blue afternoon sky

and feel content



I want you and I to know what we mean

when we say what we do

I simply want

me and you

_________________________

About Ingerid White:

I am a 1972 graduate of The Ohio State University, where I earned a bachelor of arts degree in Journalism, with the concentration being in News/Editorial.


After graduating from college, I worked for a summer as a tour guide in my home town of Tampa for Busch Gardens, and then traveled to Tokyo to see if I wanted to marry my fiance - a Japanese exchange student I'd met my sophomore year. I started off teaching American Conversation at a language school, and segued into editing the house organ for Canon, Inc. for the remainder of my two-year stay in Japan.

I returned to the 'States late in 1974, moving soon after to NYC where I worked in advertising and publishing primarily for seven years.

I divide my time currently between Norway and the Boston area, where my son lives. I am currently looking for work here in order to be able to stay. At the moment I am representing a Norwegian author who has recently published a translation of his latest book into English and is marketing it here.

Bagel Bard Pam Rosenblatt's "On How to Read The Manual" Reviewed

ON HOW TO READ THE MANUAL
By Pam Rosenblatt
2009; 26pp; Pa; Ibbetson Street Press,
25 School Street, Somerville, MA 02143
$7.
http://ibbetsonpress.com
to order http://lulu.com/ibbetsonpress


What we have is a poeticized study of how to existentialistically understand reality: paintings, books, friends, lovers, TV, even sandwiches, cats, dogs and, by extension, anything and everything that surrounds us. And ironically, for all its non-poetic-game-playing simplicity, the poetry itself is a real psychic-door opener: “Harris, you asked, How do you read a painting?..../ Look wide-eyed at the work./Close your eyes and open them,/And hope what you see and derive/Are what the artist wants our mind’s eye/To see and derive Let the images/Abstract, realistic, surrealistic/Take meaning in your eyes....//A smile between you and the canvus,/As though you’re best friends,/Understanding each other, /Understanding that the artist/Allowed this to happen....” (“On How to Read a Painting,” pp. 10-11).
Rosenblatt is a veritable reality-transformer, taking the ambiguous and difficult, the almost-impossible, and giving you some rule-games to play to turn everything into acceptably understandable.
The core-secret is passivity, getting rid of all the usual babblings and scrabblings of the psyche that interfere with direct perception, and allowing The Real is stream in on your inner psyche: “View view stars stars stars/In the night’s sky sky/Sky and imagine the amount/ Of time time time it takes/For you to view that star/That may have exploded/Years years years before.../Time/is time...until time is gone/Is gone like youth like seasons/Like nature...” (“On How to Read Time,” pp.3-4.).