The heat of summer has hit Maryland. Oppressive, it’s feels just right. I have noticed the grass has stopped aggressively growing, which it did all June. Together we are baking and making our way in a slower cadence. Of course, time for summer reading! I am reading these gems right now:

Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri (Vintage 2024)

You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith (Simon & Schuster 2023)

Crossing the Tape (poems) by Michael Salcman (Spuyten Duyvil 2024)

The River Is the Reason (poems) by Meredith Davies Hadaway (Word Tech 2011)

Rumi’s Little Book of Life: The Garden of the Soul, the Heart, and the Spirit by Rumi (trans. Maryam Mafi & Melita Kolin) (‎Hampton Roads Publishing 2012)

I just finished Maggie Smith’s hybrid text memoir about her life during and just after divorce, combined with a bird’s eye view of her life as a working poet and concerned mother, her hopes as an adult, plus her ascent into national recognition, all jumbled together. Composed of vignettes of one to two pages, notes to self, vows and questions, and sparingly, the occasional poem, Smith’s shared self-exploration is a moving account.

Smith’s husband is a college playwright and adult lawyer, she reports, so the book explores what it means for them to live out different sort of dreams, including him being the breadwinner, maybe abandoning writing (though that is at most implied), and Smith becoming increasingly engaged with literary events and teaching gigs as the marriage frays. These days, Smith’s poetry career, and now prose too, has taken off. It provides the income that did not exist during the marriage, which is a poignant arc of the memoir evident in the events, though the point is not emphasized.

What is explored here? Love, betrayal, parenting in divorce, the writing life, how it all happens, what to make of it, how to feel about it. Smith’s collage notebook of a memoir has the atmosphere of both breezy open window and echoing water well.

It has occurred to me — with Tolstoy’s fictional memoir is on my bed stand (“Childhood Boyhood Youth”) and waiting for me to read into the middle section — whether Smith’s hybrid format can really equal heartfelt realism exemplified by Tolstoy in depth of detail, compared to entertainment and surprise. Maybe it does not have to. Smith’s book also is not a tell all. Rather, it’s insightful, self-reflective, searching, and at times, gregarious and fun.

I also am one story away from finishing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories: ineffable and poignant tales from an esteemed writer who now lives in Italy. I remember her first two books, but have not kept up with her oeuvre. Lahiri can write about the mundane in meticulous yet effortless detail and with tremulous resonance.

If someone else told you one of her stories at a dinner party, you might scoot off bored. In her hands, you travel to Italy, enter other people’s lives, hear the bird outside or see the watermarks stain on a used glass, while diving into universal humanity, to arrive back in your chair. Wonderful.

While less dramatic in Roman Stories than the great Irish short story teller William Trevor, her elegant simplicity like Trevor gets at the heart of people’s lives, each unique and intricate, though none of them here would, on the street passing by, catch your eye. If a future society asked, What was it like for an average individual including non-Italian immigrants to live in colossal Rome in 2010-2024?, these stories would be a historian’s treasure trove.

Michael Salcman and Meredith Davies Hadaway are Maryland poets that write delicate work. Salcman’s Crossing the Tape takes place in his ’70s, and does so with range, grace and his usual cosmopolitan insight. Divided into five sections, there are ekphrastic poems, poems on war and social violence, plus poems on intimacy, everyday living, and aging. Recommended. Salcman is moody, wise, intelligent, erudite, and caring; he deserves a national audience.

Hadaway’s 2011 The River Is the Reason is themed around the ways of rivers, which is fun way to craft a book for the reader. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Hadaway writes sparingly and exacting as might early William Carlos Williams if alive today. However rather than crowded and urban New Jersey, the atmosphere here involves the open space, rivers and breezes, and the broad sky of Maryland’s eastern shoreline. I had the pleasure to see her read recently, and she identifies herself as an environmental or ecological poet, observing with care more than loudly political. Recommended.

Click on their names to find out more about Salcman and Hadaway.

Maryam Mafi & Melita Kolin’s translation of timeless Rumi poems hits the spot. It is my second time dipping into this collection. Stunning stuff.

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

I am excited to announce new poems forthcoming this year in MAIN STREET RAG, THE POTOMAC REVIEW & GARGOYLE in Fall 2024, COMPASS ROSE based in D.C., WAYNE LITERARY REVIEW, and SURVISION MAGAZINE of Ireland.

Cheers!

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

My review of Disease of Kings (Norton 2023) is live at HEAVY FEATHER REVIEW, since April 11, 2024, and linked below. I also had the pleasure to see Anders Carlson-Wee read from it sometime earlier, including the attention-grabbing opening poem of the collection, in Baltimore at the HOT L reading series.

He’s quite the performer, and these poems sing both on the page and in the reading of them. The collection’s worth the gander and meander!

To read the full review, please do: Click to the HEAVY FEATHER REVIEW here.

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

Are iPhones the new cigarette?

I have found myself struggling with checking my phone too often and specifically my email too often through the phone during April 2024. The pull of this product, yes our cellphones are tools but also products, has caught up to me.

In other words, rather than reach for a book, I reach to check my email again. This over-checking is laughable because like most, I get less and less interesting emails. It’s full of more and more announcements from any store or web site that’s snagged it during some past visit or purchase, and never loses track of it, so it seems. The occasional chance of something notable and new is a huge pull if I’m near my cellphone.

Technology companies these days portray themselves as horizon-gazing thinkers, cool disruptive innovators, or know-it-all mega-millionaires, but they also are designers of addictive products. Their phone products, email products, social media products, Twitter and Tic Toc products, all feed into the human questions: What’s next? What’s happening now? Who, what, and where?

Are iPhones the new cigarette?

Social media as well as iPhones are not that much older than cigarettes were when they were advertised widely, used in movies and widely modeled, and probably even promoted as healthy.

Well of course, I can do something about it. It’s called self-control. I often leave my cellphone in my house mail box when I come home, so I can be more at home when home. This said, it’s stayed in my pocket recently.

The poet William Carlos Williams said, “The pure products of America go crazy” in his poem, “To Elsie.” One way to read that phrase is to recognize the tsunami of hype surrounding sellers who sell you out. Time for higher ground.

I miss the peace of reaching for a book, even the quiet boredom yielding to entering a book’s world. As poet Emily Dickinson said, “there is no frigate like a book.” That sentiment could become history. The electronic age is upon us, one predicted by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media. Al Gore wrote about it in his own way, from the perspective of democracy, in his 2007 book, The Assault on Reason.

Are iPhones the new cigarette? It’s also just beginning.

Stay safe,

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

The review of Dark Bird (Galileo Books, 2024) is live at the LOCH RAVEN REVIEW (2024). This book length collection of linked lyrics takes you on a mystical and personal journey of a typical family man in an everyday semi-suburban nook, to surprising results.

To read, click here: https://thelochravenreview.net/sam-schmidts-dark-bird-reviewed-by-g-h-mosson/

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

Of the collections of poetry relished in 2023 and earlier this winter, I very much enjoyed Luke Stromberg’s debut, THE ELEPHANT’S MOUTH (Kelsey Books), Mag Gabbert’s full-length debut, SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS (Mad Creek Books), Diana Whitney’s second book, DARK BEDS (June Road Press), and Tony Hoagland’s posthumous collection, still humorous yet poignant and piercing, TURN UP THE OCEAN (Graywolf).

I also revisited and found still compelling Philip Schultz’s FAILURE, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Stephen Dunn’s LOOSESTRIFE, and Li Young-Lee’s ROSE, among many others worth savoring, in 2023.

David Hinton is a translator of Chinese poetry whom I have been happy to discover. I just finished a selection of Tu Fu translated by Hinton. I am now reading Hinton’s translation of Chinese poet T’ao Ch’ien, AD 365- AD 427, and titled, The Selected Poems of T’ao Ch’ien (Copper Canyon). Wonderful.

For more on Hoagland, I reviewed TURN UP THE OCEAN at the Loch Raven Review, linked here.

I also reviewed Mag Gabbert’s SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS at the Heavy Feather Review linked here.

What’s next? Well, I am reading through Robert Bly’s anthology, NEWS OF THE UNIVERSE: poems of twofold consciousness (Sierra Club Books 1980), which I came across in a sort of casual and random fashion, and . . . .

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

If you are in the Delmarva area (Maryland, Delaware, Northern Virginia) and also a writer, the Eastern Shore Writers Association is holding their annual one-day conference for writers at Chesapeake College in Wye Mills, Md., on Saturday, March 9, 2024.

The conference runs about five panels simultaneously across genres and attendees choose what they wish to attend. Last year, I presented as well as attended, like this year, and it was a great experience.

See here: https://www.easternshorewriters.org/

In the morning, I will be teaching a generative workshop on using collaboration in poetry. Here’s the detail:

Workshop Description: Come blend your artistic voice with someone else or the world’s chorus! Join noted poets G. H. Mosson and Marcus Colasurdo, the co-creators of two collaborative chapbooks, as they employ a fun exercise from improv theatre and explore the concept of T.S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” to frame and prompt collaborative writing!

It should be fun. Hope to see you there.

Cheers,

For more: http://easternshorewriters.org

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

A. E. Stallings, an American poet living in Athens, Greece, is one of the most accomplished living American poets writing in English meter, and for this alone, her Selected Poems is a keeper.

Yet I borrowed it from the library, and literally the day I am writing this, it’s overdue. I very much enjoyed her last two books, Olives and Like, and had only read her first two books across a few poems seen in magazines until this year. Selected Poems let me dive into her first two books for the first time. I did not have time, before returning this today, to dive much further.

Stallings has both lived and intellectual insight into the mythology of Ancient Greece, and as a result, the poems are expert, felt, and fun. Especially in her first two books, the fluid, beautiful verse often offers intriguing new twists on old tales. Her poetic lines flow at ease, bite with wit, and are concisely sculpted. Her ability to “make it new” is what elevated Stallings from the get-go; it’s no small task to say something new about myths thousands of years ancient.

Sometimes Stallings writes what seems like a contemporary scene, but it is infused and informed by Ancient Greek myth behind it, and so bolstered with resonance, such as in “Song for the Women Poets,” which I had never read before. Looked at as myth, the poem retells the Orpheus story from the internal psyche of a female poet, “who are both Orpheus / And She he left in Hell.” An intriguing thought–a female poet has this dual root and role. It lends itself to further parsing, such as only Persephone lives past Orpheus’ singing. Reading this analogy further through feminism, the female poet now sings her own song, more so than years ago.

Stallings uses this same technique brilliantly in “Asphodel,” from her second collection, which is spoken in the voice of a tour guide about the flowers, and yet eerily retells the story of Hades and Persephone and how spring can be eerily linked with death even as we admire its resurgence.

I think the Internet has made the daily feel busier. Anytime I get away from a computer and phone, the world quiets down to a human pace. The well-wrought metrical poetry of Stallings feels shaped for this more human pace. Her poetry presents itself as an art object, framed with thoughtfulness and cleverness, compared to the free-verse voice-driven poem that arguably is a form of realist art: seeking to seduce the reader into theater of the voiced character, forgetting for a second that one is reading a poem, such as with Sylvia Plath, Philip Levine, or Jericho Brown.

In this sense, Stallings and her fascination with Ancient Greece presents a sort of rarefied air, more so than the Selected Poems of Carol Ann Duffy, the British metrical poet with a street smart, sassy poetic voice in these selected earlier poems. Compared to the Irish master poet Seamus Heaney, Stallings does not use diction to create a unique Irish sound, nor is she enmeshed in contemporary settings in her poetry like farming, Ireland, and family. When Stallings does write about her domestic life, often it is quite touching. This all said, Selected Poems offers many delights, to be read again and again.

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

          

The new poems section of Major Jackson’s New and Selected are delicious verbal candy. Full of atmospheric insights, these newest poems dance across ambivalences arising from contemporary living. With urbane linguistic tonalities that his work has displayed from the get go, Jackson’s newer work has more whimsy, looser wisdom, more dreaminess out loud, all mixed with a certain sort of giving up on final answers.

While Major Jackson is a poet that I’ve long admired, his new poems could be deemed among his best. They are quite mature: a thinking person’s poetry, and a poetry of consciousness, point of view, and memory. They are set further from the Philadelphia of his youth and first book, which remains a strong book of urban Phili vignettes, often set in one scene as it unfolds, and sharing the deeply felt voice of someone growing up in the visceral, East Coast, inner city, aspirational, and African-American milieu.

In terms of Major Jackson’s new poems, they remind me of what Wallace Stevens described in “Of Modern Poetry” as

The poem of the mind in the act of finding   

What will suffice. . . .

If this applies to Major Jackson, his new poems show someone who–more than solving matters at hand, to tie them up in a bow and shelve them–likes to taste, juggle, and dance. His new poems involve simultaneous overlapping and contradicting sensations and events. In other words, they are poems of a mature, world-traveled contemporary adult. This said, it’s rare to find such a balancing act translated – not just into subject matter – but into language itself: diverse, coming into and out of balance, and dynamic in sound within each poetic line and across lines.

To turn back to Stevens again, Jackson’s new poems, as Stevens puts it in describing modern poetry:

. . . .construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage   

And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and

With meditation, speak words that in the ear. . . .

See for yourself. Jackson’s poem, “It Must Be The Supermarket in Me” is available as a podcast as The Slowdown online (linked here).

That was one of my favorite, though his new poems offer a bouquet of favorites. The extended metaphor in this particular poem, with its apt and yet far-flung comparison threaded throughout the poem, makes one think as well of Tony Hoagland’s later work. Of course this approach also hearkens back to a metaphysical poet like John Donne and his extended figures. If compared to Hoagland, Major Jackson’s “It Must Be The Supermarket in Me” is more intimate, more vulnerable, less finished in its final arrival than Hoagland’s tendency, yet, still arriving into greater self knowledge.

Major Jackson’s Web site can be found here.

Yum.

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com

I recently watched the Stars Wars trilogy with my son, age 12, and we just finished the movie, Return of the Jedi. I can’t say my son was impressed.

It crowned our sharing together of the first three of these movies from the 1970s-1980s, which I enjoyed seeing again. The costumes are cool. The orchestral doom music was scary in a camp sort of way. Since these classics, special effects have advanced. Today’s fare have as much, or more, alternative world-building as these classics. So for my son at least, this trilogy did not blow him away.

Maybe however it’s apropos. At the end of Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker takes off Darth Vader’s mask, and the pale and somewhat malformed face of his father looks back out of his encasement. It is clear that Darth Vader’s humanity has been merged within that black metal machine of a body suit. He can’t live in normal air anymore. In fact, his voice is modulated, and still iconic. He asks Luke, take off my mask so I can see you with my own eyes. He very quickly sees his son, breathes actual air, and dies.

Of course as we grow older, movies are just movies. Books, something to read and pass the time, for many. I recently finished, very slowly over about seven months, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, that 19th century French writer, friend of liberty and democracy, and tale-teller extraordinaire. Literature, made by the master makers, has never been meant as mere entertainment. So, anyway, as I watched the end of the movie last night, that scene with Darth Vader just struck me.

Today at work before a computer, one of the online tools I use, DOCUSIGN in fact, asked if I wished to sign in with my emailed passcode as usual or fingerprints? I was a little surprised. However, why would I want to give a random online tool provider, a subscription service really that I pay for, my fingerprints? Should I let them use my computer to scan my eyes too?

Microsoft Windows is pushing everyone to subscription services starting a few years ago. I think my personal laptop has held out with the prior version (because I own it on a disc), but they got me when I purchased my children computers during the pandemic for school use. Recently, this update system invaded my work computer. Windows updated by work computer and it destroyed some stuff. Now, the Windows on my work computer is part of that subscription. Watch out for Windows 11 updates if you are using No. 10. This past month or so, it keeps prompting me as well to save all of my data on their One Drive storage facility. Why is that? Why would I want all of my personal or business data on their One Drive cloud system?

Maybe I am being a little coy. I am leaving out what I think. However, I have a certain fondness for 15 years ago with less media, less social media, and less everything being online. What will the technology companies do with all this online information, photos, fingerprints, books, tweets? In anchoring everyone’s professional, personal, and maybe even not-public lives online, what might be a use for whatever cable bill, cellphone bill, iPhone access, or subscription service exists now – and is soon to come next?

I am a fan of questions. I have not decided the answer myself yet. However, it’s another development that, for me, at best, feels eerie.

In the end, whether looking at Victor Hugo during the French Revolution and what resulted during his lifetime, or thinking back further or to our present day, what happens does require people to take action or to suffer the consequences.

I think, as in that Camus story about the teacher who lives on a hill during a war, there’s no neutrality over such invasive events and developments.

Cheers,

G. H. Mosson

www.ghmosson.com