Tony Brown is an award winning published poet and performer whose work straddles the line between page and stage. His work has appeared in journals such as The Furnace Review, The November 3rd Club, Home Planet News; his poems have been anthologized in volumes such as 100 Poets Against the War (Salt Publishing) and In Our Own Words: Poems from Generation X (MPW Books). He has been involved with slam poetry for many years in many capacities, has read and performed his work all over the US, and currently runs a reading series in Providence RI. He also is a columnist at http://www.gotpoetry.com.

David Keali’i  is a poet who was born, raised and still lives in Springfield, Massachusetts. He has been published in The Ballard Street Journal, The November 3rd Club, Ashe, and Look Up In The Sky!- An Anthology Of Comic Book Poems( Ryk McIntyre and Melissa Guillet editors. 2007). For three and a half  years he has been the host of the Community Voices poetry open mic in the town of Westfield, MA. He attends readings and slams in Western Mass and Worcester.

The Rooster Crows:
Creative Nonfiction from Thoreau's Rooster

Featuring  Prof. Mike Land, Nicole Dellasanta, Mark Deming, Ryan McNeill
and other Assumption College Student Writers

February 20, 2007
Fran Quinn, Assumption College Class of 1965, was the poet-in-residence and director of the internationally known Visiting Writers Series at Butler University, Indianapolis, Indiana for fifteen years.

He was a founding member of the Worcester County (MA) Poetry Association, and has given numerous workshops and readings throughout the country. His poetry has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and won the Hopewell Prize. He has published three books of poetry, most recently The Goblet Crying for Wine.

Fran's students have gone on to such programs as Warren Wilson, Bennington , Purdue, University of Massachusetts and UCLA. They have become editors, teachers and poets and have won several prestigious awards including the National Poetry Series. Their books have been published by such presses as Random House and Graywolf.

February 16, 2007

Hardware Store   There's a reason why a two handed pipe wrench looks like a Brontosaurus thigh bone. We are made of cosmic stuff, dinosaurs. We reach for what we know, outline tools on pegboard so they go back where they came from, build chests of drawers for lock washers and hex nuts. Hang a tool belt hung by the cellar door. The nail pings with the vibration of retrieval, reminds your ear of driving that nail, ascending notes as you command a 16 ounce hammer, a hammer your father would be proud of.   There is a precision to socket sets, a satisfaction in vise grips, metaphors lurk in weather stripping and spare keys.  Life can be messy. But there's always a hardware store in town.  A Robertson's-Ace-True-Value-Aubuchon, round-the-corner, been-in-business-for-years hardware store. The building blocks of a marvelous universe are here, a universe of copper joints and chalk lines, apple peelers and salt blocks.   At the hardware store in my last adopted town you could ask for a left handed copper elbow with a thirty degree twist and a backward thread and the guy behind the counter would say, sure, got just the thing, and you'd wander through a warren of dusty shelves, tiny yellowed boxes nestled with shrink wrapped high tech and there on the bottom shelf would be that item.  Two of that item. An old hardware store is an ark, there are always two of something. You know that if you un-sweated the joint and the whole thing fell apart, or worse, you'd want to come back five years from now and do that job over, that part would be there. And a spare.   On my last trip to that hardware store, I bought an electric saw, some drill bits, saw horse brackets, and a two ton floor jack.  I don't need these things every day, but I might. Recently, a friend gave me a chain saw. It came in a neat box, disassembled.  It was good to have the tools to put together this thing that cuts other things apart. The saw's pristine destructive potential leaves me in awe. I imagine sawing firewood and pianos in half.  Wonder what I would've done with such a tool when I got divorced.  You want half of everything? Some choices are more difficult than others.  But this isn't about taking things apart, this is about building things.  With those tools I can prop up, hold steady at a workable height and rough or trim, create the pieces I need to get the job done.  We live in a McCarthy-esque world, no, not that McCarthy, Jack McCarthy, the poet.  You never know what's going to give out, break up or need a tow. You never know what's going to last, but-- with the right tools, you can fix anything.   Valerie Lawson SoShorePoet@aol.com Images & Imagery

Valerie Lawson is co-host of the Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge in Cambridge.  Lawson's poetry has been published in literary journals, anthologies, and websites. Her chapbook, Ribbon Anvil, was a finalist for Best Poetry Publication at the 2002 Cambridge Poetry Awards. Lawson was the winner of Female Spoken Word, Best Narrative Poem, and shared the award for Best Poetry Troupe with Doctor Brown's Traveling Poetry Show at the Cambridge Poetry Awards in 2004. Lawson has traveled to Sweden, Ireland, and Germany to perform poetry. She is a participant in Optimal Avenues, a mixed media cultural exchange between Massachusetts and Ireland, celebrating the United Nation's International Decade for the Culture of Peace. She is a contributor to the Culture of Peace and Next of Kin, exhibits of art and poems currently touring New England. Lawson will be releasing a new book of poems, Dog Watch, in the winter of 2006.

Photo by Valerie Lawson Michael R. Brown has published his poetry, fiction, travel articles and columns in wide-ranging periodicals all over the world. His fourth book of poetry, The Confidence Man, will be published by Ragged Sky in 2006. His newest venture is Dr. Brown’s Traveling Poetry Show, an ensemble of poets who perform their own poetry in theaters.  Brown holds a Ph.D. in English and Education from the University of Michigan. His dissertation was a literary history of the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance directed by Robert Hayden. For 43 years he has taught at high schools and universities from the South Side of Chicago to South Korea. Currently he is Professor of Communications at Mount Ida College where, in 1999, he won the first Ronald J. Lettieri Award for Teaching Excellence.  Brown was a finalist in the 1991 individual competition of the US National Poetry Slam. In 1992 he organized the national slam, and he was on the Boston slam teams that won the National Championship in 1993 and finished third in 1995.  In 1998 he won the 6th International Slam in Amsterdam. He won the open slam at the 2000 Provincetown Poetry Festival, and he was the hit of the 2001 Rockland (NY) Jazz and Blues Festival. He has performed his poems from Jerusalem to Taipeh and Vancouver to Key West. For 13 years he hosted the Boston slam at the Cantab Lounge, Cambridge. Michael Brown is co-producer of The Culture of Peace, an international exhibit of art and poetry organized under the UN mandate for a decade of the Culture of Peace.  This project has created an art and poetry exhibit and resulted in four exchanges of poets between Ireland and Massachusetts. He is general secretary of the Poetry Olympics, first held in Stockholm in1998. Brown's first published poem appeared in the first issue of Beyond Baroque (1969). His most recently published poems have appeared in The Asheville Poetry Review, Windsor Review, Sensations, 100 Poets Against the War, and Spoken Word Revolution.              Brown conducts workshops in writing and performance. His full-length play, The Duchess of York, will receive a staged reading in fall 2006 as part of the Cape Cod Playwrights’ Competition. He is working on a novel and wants to teach for another 15 years if anyone will have him.

The Confidence Man   I sit in the Galleria dell’Academia in Florence. At the end of the hall stands David, looking like a quarterback about to rifle one downfield. Around me stand the four "Prisoners," unfinished blocks of marble where the figures struggle to get out of the stone the way Michaelangelo said they should while he was off writing a poem. My favorite is the guy with the raised elbow, struggling like hell to break the stone's silence.   A man sits next to me wearing a stylish raincoat, fedora, soft leather shoes, and says, "I can teach you Italian in two days." I say, "What?"  He says, "Take your hands out of your pockets. I'm not talking your around-the-corner-pizza-shop Italian with slow syntax and crude gestures, not that Kevin Kline I'm-in-the-movies stuff.  I mean the real thing, the Italian of Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Petrarch, and Dante, the Tuscan dialect, restrained yet expressive, a constant commentary on whatever you say."   "Two days?" I say.  "How can you be so quick?" "I practice," he says.  "Aspetto momentito.  Look around you. These are my students."                                     "But they can't speak."                                                                          "Not yet. Okay, my little joke, but by trying to teach them, I get good. Look at that one you like so much.  See how he suffers. Already he knows Hebrew.  And the one with the stiff hands at his side could do English very well.  You can do Italian."   They call them con men because we give them our confidence. The light in his eyes blazed into my imagination, and I was navigating a Lancia sedan in downtown Roma, cigaret in one hand gesturing to a lovely lady next to me, the left hand talking to traffic so much more gracefully, yet as emphatic as any Boston trucker.  I could do this. "Tomorrow?  Domani?"                                               "Bring lira," he says.  And I dream.   **First Place Winner 2006 Mulberry Poets and Writers Association Michael R. Brown

Her new book, Shallow Empire (Lethe Press), is the next logical step after a series of chapbook publications from Doublebunny Press. She has been published in numerous anthologies, including the 1995 Bottomdog Coffeehouse Poetry Anthology and Manic D Press's, Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry, as well as publication in 2X4, Poetry Fly, and The Boston Poet.

She has competed on four National Poetry Slam teams for Worcester, MA, including the championship finalist team in 1997 at CT, and has completed two novels, the most recent, Chrysanthemum, currently being serialized on GotPoetry.com. She has her BA in Russian Literature from Ohio State University. Sou lives in Worcester with her husband and son, where she plays in an acoustic band called Daily Mouse.

Heather J. Macpherson  lives in Worcester, MA with her beautiful husband. Her work has appeared in REAL WOMEN PRESS, THE SUN, BEGINNINGS, WICKED ALICE & other publications including POETS IN THE GALLERIES, a Worcester Art Museum and Worcester County Poetry Assocation anthology. She is also the publisher and editor of BALLARD STREET POETRY JOURNAL. Photo courtesy The Poet's Asylum http://www.poetsasylum.org/

YOUR MARRIAGE ONCE WALKED A ROCKY SHORE You traveled miles in rubber soles and leather uppers, through high grass, and empty barnyards where you tip-toed around chicken shit like dirty laundry on the basement floor. Tired silver eyelets hold frayed laces, grasping an unspeakable tongue of arguments and wet cheeks. Your steps leave no marks, no measurement between strides, your soles are too worn to collect pebbles or sand, even gum refuses to stick. The soft suede around your feet bears no comfort, but you relax. You can't out grow these shoes as they age with you, fade in color.

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Poetry Reading Celebrating Gertrude Halstead's 90th Birthday Friday, October 20, 2006 Area poets will read poems written in honor of Gertrude Halstead: Curt Curtin Eleanor Wilmot-Vincelette R. Joyce Heon Elaine Ploof Tom Ewart Judith Ferrara Ralph A. Hughes Susan Elizabeth Sweeney Eve Rifkah Dan Lewis Frank Miller Michael Hood David Thoreen Bruce Plummer Michael Milligan John Gaumond Laura Jehn Menides

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September 15, 2006

Bryan Rye is a 23 year old student who presently attends Southern Connecticut State University as a junior.  At Southern, he is an English major with a focus on creative writing.  He developed an interest in poetry at the age of 13 during a poetry unit he took in 8th grade.  Bryan has been inspired by such poets as William Shakespeare, George Herbert, William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Donne, and Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe.  He also is greatly inspired by the Book of Psalms and the Prophets of the Old Testament.  Bryan’s poetry can be divided into two distinct fields marked by his conversion to Christianity on July 4th of 2004.  This new found faith and purpose provided access to a whole new artistic realm that he has only recently begun to explore.  Today, he continues to write poetry both independently and in artistic collaboration with his older sister Marlene who is an abstract landscape painter.		Traveler's Rest by Marlene Rye
Rye began work on a collaborative artistic project in January of 2004 with his older sister Marlene Rye, a professional abstract landscape painter.  The project was born out of a mutual recognition that they inspired each other.  During visits to Marlene’s studio, Bryan would observe his sister painting and compose poetry from what he saw taking shape on the canvas.  The two conversed as they worked, both encouraging and inspiring each other.  Out of this initial collaboration came the idea to create a series that combined the paintings and the poems into an overall presentation.  The project is a continuously growing one that expresses the artistic, emotional, and spiritual development of the two artists.		Traveler’s Rest By Bryan Rye   Through dark and tangled places you Have come.  You have pressed through, Pushing aside obstacles that would Trap you in.  You knew that there must be Rest, safety.  As one called, you struggled Onward even when one way seemed the Same as another.  This is a safe place. This place is your rest, stay and be at Peace.  Be done with darkness and despair. Here is your rest, drink and be at peace.