**Poem: Donald at Boughton Place**

 Donald at Boughton Place

A small dog darts out in the highway,

but not a dog, a red fox,

drags a grey-furred mass off to the side,

glances back at me when he's safe,

ears, tail pointed black.

Black geese, down for the night,

cluster in twos and threes

don't pay attention as the fox

drags his prey past them.

It's not clear what he's got,

but if it's goose, they don’t care,

engaged as they are in discussions

of weather, direction.

At the reading, on a circular stage

layered like a wooden wedding cake,

Donald Lev is the feature.

He reads love poems for Enid,

ever regretting his choice to leave

the hospital that night and who

knew it would be her last?

Donald, eyes of snow, four separate seasons,

reads Enid's own lament for Sari,

lost biblical sister moved to suburbia,

remembering her desert commune.

Donald won’t be mistaken for a fox,

this lazy-haired poet alone

in a cottage of lemon balm and books.

Thunder rattles the theater.

Donald is undisturbed.

Red wine trembles in our glasses,

and already Donald has tried

to wipe a spill from his large, white heart.

Too late, it's already stained through.

CAR  7/31/09

Fundraiser for Donald Lev- Go!

Donald Lev has been a mainstay of Hudson Valley poetry for the last several decades. He was born in New York City in 1936, and since then has been, in my opinion, one of its most heartfelt and honest bards. As a youth, he worked in the mailroom of both the Daily News and the New York Times. He also drove a taxi for twenty years, on and off.  

His first venture into publishing was HYN, a literary magazine born in 1969. Perhaps in an effort to surreptitiously advertise, “HYN” was also the name of the poem he recited that same year as a bit player in the legendary underground film, Putney Swope. Along with his late wife, Enid Dame, he founded the now-online, and for many years actual paper tabloid, Home Planet News in 1979. The pair split their time between Brooklyn and High Falls, NY and for the last few years of her life, Enid taught at Rutgers and NJIT. She died in 2003.

After her death, Donald continued to put out Home Planet News until passing the torch to Frank Murphy a couple of years ago. You can find HPN in its latest incarnation at http://homeplanetnews.org/AOnLine.html.

Donald and Enid scared the hell out of me. Obviously both far more accomplished than I, here were two real life CITY poets, slumming at the readings I attended. I was dumbstruck, which is ridiculous to me now. They were and are two extremely approachable people. Their poetry and activism, closely intertwined in the most logical way, comes from a tradition deeply rooted in faith and friends and New York. The literary world of the ‘60s and ‘70s that they occupied was a dream I was too late to jump into. 

I will regret always the years I shied away from Enid. I finally had the chance to participate in a small workshop with her just a year or so before she died, and keep my notes close at hand. Donald’s wry humor has been the spice of HPN editorials and readings alike. He continues to publish, and his latest chapbook, Focus, came out in the spring of 2017.

Now a full-time resident of High Falls, Donald recently had some renovations done to his home to allow him to live on one floor. A bathroom has been installed, and hand railings have increased his safety. The cost of such work is significant, and a fundraiser is being held to offset the costs of making life more comfortable for Donald. 

The benefit is scheduled for Sunday, January 21, 2018, and will be held at the newly renovated Colony in Woodstock. Performers will include Mikhail Horowitz and Giles Malkine, The Marc Black Trio, and the Cosmic Legends backing Andy Clausen and Pamela Twining. Food and drinks are always available. The show starts at 8:00pm, and doors open at 7:00pm. There is a suggested donation of $20 per person. 

For more information, see the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/177931426136712/, or Philip Levine’s info on the Woodstock Poetry Society page: http://www.woodstockpoetry.com/DLev-Fundraiser.html. Philip is responsible for most of the work, and will be doing the finishing work once funds are available. 

Especially now, artists need to pull together, and help ourselves in the best way we can, by helping each other as best we can.

To Mall or Not To Mall, That Is the Question

It’s not how I usually operate, but for the last few weeks, I’ve been contemplating the idea of a long poem about malls. A few weeks ago, my Beloved and I were killing time, waiting for the latest “Star Wars” movie to being, in our local mall. Unlike the thriving hubs of commerce we know in Albany and Poughkeepsie, NY, our local Hudson Valley Mall, opened to Octoberfest acclaim in 1982, is now a shell of its former self. The new owners have had possession of the property for over a year, but the only improvements to be seen are new carpet tiles and wallboard in the empty halls. They even skipped the oversized Christmas garlands, although Santa still held court during regular business hours in one of the many empty storefronts. 

Both my Beloved and I have firsthand experience with the mall in its heyday. His ex worked at a long defunct kitchen supply store there, and I was an employee of McBooks for three years in the late 1980s. My ex and I made the trip from New Paltz to see the place, while we were still starving students and even after we became starving wage slaves. I remember when the food court was new and full of choices, the same food court that even McDonald’s has given up on and Taco Bell limps along in. 

Before this mall, there was my hometown mall, the Walt Whitman Mall in Huntington, Long Island. Even before I drove, I was able to hang out there because of the busses. It was the first mall I was able to explore on my own. I still have my paperback copy of, ironically, “Leaves of Grass,” purchased from a small bookstore that was located on one of the far wings of the mall. 

Malls to me mean romance, adventure, responsibility and community. To express all that in an interesting way is the challenge. I have trouble lately believing I have anything left to say, or any interesting take on things to offer. I have forgotten how to ‘trust the process,’ as the writing coaches say. I made the time to take a stab at it this morning, before I left for work. It’s going somewhere. I plan for a few ghosts to appear, if they are willing. Ghosts love abandoned buildings.

* Excerpt from "Llama Love" *

Bone Song

Why are you with a man who boils tar for amusement,

then walks the walk like the Holy Book says?

Why are you eating the best buzzard’s brain?

Why don’t you like a twice-charged halo?

Why are you frank with him only behind his back?

You sully your wings flying so low behind.

When one is so disconnected from reality,

one isn’t usually in favor of auditing people’s flight.

There’s no clear evidence that flight even exists

outside of your imagination.

-excerpt from Llama Love, c. 2017 Flying Monkey Press

Experiments in Poetry- Acrobatics or Expression?

For most of my writing life, I have been a practitioner of the style commonly referred to as “free verse.” My only nod towards form is to imitate common speech, allow the lines to fall as the breath does. I will throw in a dash of alliteration here and there, if the situation allows, but more often than not, the result ends up feeling obvious and corny.

In high school, I experimented with formal styles, like sonnets, haiku and the like, but abandoned any hope of producing substantial work along these lines decades ago. Cummings could do it, Shakespeare created the mold many of us seek to shape our work by, but beyond those two examples, not much good, in my experience, can come from us mortals using the same rhyme patterns.

Every few years has brought a shift in my work, whether subtle or jarring. Recently, due to exposure to the work of Anne Gorrick and Adam Tedesco, to name a couple of local examples, I was inspired to try some more abstract methods. I took a workshop with Katrinka Moore, whose work transcends the seemingly simple procedure of erasure. I clipped and blacked out, drew random words from a cup, reversed lines and tore papers into shreds.

As a matter of fact, that last one is one of my favorite RANDOM WRITING exercises. I have participants work on a rough draft or a freewrite, and then ask them to tear the work up into chunks. We tape the scraps together, and examine the new, convoluted text for intriguing phrases created by juxtaposition. New poems can often emerge from these accidents. I like to use this exercise to help participants to loosen then hold on first drafts, to learn to not be married to the words as they fall on the page. More than one poet has gasped at these instructions, but warmed to the activity soon after.

I began to employ these methods with my own writing, to see where they would take me. After a couple of years, I must admit that I myself am perhaps too “married” to the basically autobiographical roots of my work to feel much satisfaction in writing from abstractions. The Ziegfeld poems I discussed last week are based on actual events, not my own life, but for the most part, my poems have been inspired by my own activities, emotions, and observations. I’ve been able to craft some pretty decent fictions from some of these exercises, but I still can’t get past the feeling that for me, they feel like parlor tricks, and not actual expressions. I’ve regarded them as a sort of lesser body of work.

I’ve tried fitting them into readings, since they are by no means works that I’m ashamed of, but they are so very foreign to the majority of my poems I’ve never been comfortable presenting them. The reaction consequently has been lukewarm. I pulled a bunch of them together into a small chapbook, creating a home for my seeming orphans. I called it Llama Love, after the longest poem, based on Facebook’s poor translations of a friend’s Egyptian posts. They sold well, but I have to attribute that to my llama sketch on the cover (see above). I only printed up a few, and even collecting them together was unsatisfying.

I’m glad I pushed the boundaries, and may go back to these experiments from time to time, but as far as where I’m at now, I’ll be to returning to my former narrative full-time. The poet I am is a reporter, a witness, and not the abstract wordsmith type. It works for many I know who produce rich, textured work, but not for me.