Alternate Endings
Mike James
Foothills Publishing
P.O. Box 68
Kanona, NY 14856
www.foothillspublishing.com
Alternate Endings is a 36 Page hand-stitched chapbook. $7.00


Review by Martin Willitts, Jr.


Mike James claims that he talks for a living. I believe him and I agree with him that his poems tend to be
conversations. When was the last time you had a good conversation with a book? If you are like me,
then the answer will be: never. This is what makes his book so special. Here is a sample from his recent
chapbook, “Alternate Endings”:

“if this bar had a p.o. box/I could live here” (from “Carl’s Tavern”)

I could see this poet musing this out loud during some beers. It reaches the comfort zone that a bar
regular express.

I decided to contact this easy-going writer. I am told that he knew Jack Wolford and Carol Sineni (the
editor of www.Hotmetalpress.net). This magazine has sponsored a contest in Jack’s memory. Mike was
the mystery judge. I was not associated with the magazine at the time, so I did not know his secret
identity. So the first thing I asked him was to tell me a little bit about him.

Mike said that he is a banker. I feel this is odd for a poet, but Wallace Stevens sold insurance. He says
that he has been writing since he was sixteen and still going strong twenty years later. His recent
poems are forthcoming in 5AM, Bathtub Gin, Buffalo Carp and Muses & Stone.


Martin:  How would you describe your poems?

Mike:  I don't know that I would ever describe my own work.  Normally, I let other people do that.  
Someone once asked Bob Dylan what his songs were about.  He told the interviewer, "Some of them are
about 3 minutes and others are about 8 minutes."  I feel the same way about my work.  Some of my
poems are about 4 lines and some are about 40 lines.  Most are in between.

I liked the off-hand response. This is what I get for asking such a vague question. I needed to refine my
questions in order to get a better answer in order to get into the soul of a writer. I was hoping my next
question would be more helpful to the reader of this interview.

Martin: What is your process of writing?

Mike:  I write almost every day.  Six days out of seven.  I often write late at night, after my wife and four
kids are in bed.  Lately, my schedule is more varied.  I now spend some of my lunches working on
poems.  Occasionally, when I am out driving, I pull over on the side of the road and sketch out a first
draft or mark down a few lines for later use.  I throw a lot of my work away. I also keep a notebook of
lines that I would one day like to use.  I write on a typewriter, a computer or by hand.  Whatever is most
accessible.  The only reason for writer's block is a broken typewriter.

At this pace, I might be as good a reporter as Lois Lane. I remember a story about Wallace Stevens
being bored as an Insurance agent that he started writing his poems at work.

Martin: How did you get your recent book published?

Mike: I read a book Foothills published by another Pittsburgh poet, Dorothy Holley.  I liked the poems, as
well as the quality of the production.  When I checked the publisher’s website, he was accepting
submissions.  So I submitted.  He accepted my manuscript on August 30th and the book was published
at the beginning of January.  

I am very familiar with Foothills Publishing. I was published in an anthology called “Confluence” that was
printed by them and edited by Susan Deercloud. They hand set the type and hand-sew the books. I
recommended to Carolina Sineni for our first chapbook contest. I think the winner will be pleased by the
quality of Foothills.

Martin: What inspires your poems?

Mike: I don't try to create a mythology of my life or work.  I am not Charles Bukowski or John Thomas. My
life is pretty boring.  I put the best of who I am into my poems.  None of the facts of my life should matter
to my reader.

Jack Wolford is the subject of this poem by Mike James:

Obituary

say nice things about me     jack said

tell everyone that i loved
black olives
sinclair lewis and the early work of
philip guston

my secrets were numerous and
avowedly profane

only once in my life did i quote
rick flair
(the greatest wrestler of all time)

the quote is in greek
and untranslatable

tell people i always said
what i thought
i never danced around a subject
like a bird around a tree

that's not true, but it is how
i would like to be remembered

surely, you can see that


I can see these two friends back in that same bar, sharing a beer, when the mood darkens into the color
of dark German ale and Jack starts talks about things that were important to him. Jack is portrayed as a
manly-man that might concede to another guy like watching “professional” wrestler Rick Flair. Rick Flair
is an older wrestler known for his flamboyant boa, his ‘dirty tricks”, and entering the arena with a loud
“wooooooooooooooooooo.” Somehow I imagine this is exactly the kind of wrestler they would both
enjoy.

Mike James finds the relaxed evenings just as common and poetically interesting:

The Budget

my wife calls us
"involuntary vegetarians"

what she means is
these days
it is not steak
and lobster
but rice and salads

it is coffee
on the back porch
for dessert

it is playing cards
in the evening
and watching the stars
at night
to see how they
change in number

it is how things
lately are
in this vegetable world
that changes

with phone calls
and bill collectors
and sighs

I like the common interruption at the end of the poem, when he answers the telephone to hear a bill
collector and heaves a sigh. I can almost see his shoulders sag.

After reading Mike James, I want to head off to an all-night game of Liar’s Poker with Mike and Jack
Wolford. We could sit around and tell the most outrageous lies. We could smoke smelly cigars, throw
chips at each other when there are sixteen aces of spades on the table, see which of us could smash
the most beer cans on our foreheads, recall the biggest fish we never caught, and shout poems at the
moon.

Still In Soil
Kyle Tork
2007, $15.99
World Audience, Inc
25 Sickles Street
Suite 6E
NY, NY 10040
www.worldaudience.org


Reviewed by: Martin Willitts, Jr


Here is a man who puts his family among the “galaxies, expanding like shotgun pellets” (Dander) and still deals with
those normal moments like his poem Camping where they are “safe,/cocooned in sleeping bags, sentient as bears.”
The chaos of the universe has met the stillness of the quiet. His family reappears throughout the books, especially
his sons, proving he is a proud dad. He does what a father does to make those moments for his sons. Moments like
his sons digging graves for their dead mice during a snowstorm in the poem Borrowing, ending with:

The two boys consider the graves.
I will miss my mouse, one sighs
With a sniffle, and the other grabs
My hand: in summer, they are grass.

When the family guinea pig dies in Cold, he puts the body in the freezer, “beside/the tater-tots and stiff pizza, nestled
against the peas”. Notice all the death imagery in a new way with images like the stiff pizza. He puts the guinea pig in
the freezer so that he can bury that animal with his sons later. This is the type of things a father would do with his
grieving sons. He would wait for them to be present.

The sons are not the only family members to appear, peeking between the poems. The family dog appears in the
poem Salt, sleeping;

…in a spot of sun on the floor, a biscuit
rising in the oven, her legs splayed as if the bullet
knocked her to carpet. The paw flexes,
and her whiskers twitch….

Just like in the Dander poem, there is the combination of creation (a biscuit/rising in the oven) meaning the dog is
pregnant, and the restfulness of the dog sleeping in the sun light so gone in sleep that “her legs are splayed”, and
yet the dog is having one of those dog dreams where they are chasing something.  The family dog appears in Old
Skins sleeping in pile of shirts/fresh from the dryer, warn as a cave”. This is one dog that knows how to find those
soothing comforts. And like all normal dogs found in Nimble, it flops in the grass:

…..tongue lolling
like an uncooked steak, ribs a bellows
flooding the lawn as if the blades could inflate
and carry her to a cooler heaven.

What is the reader to make of this private universe? It is so normal that anyone can enter it. Anyone could have seen
these things. Yet we do not see these things until he shows them to use, right there, in front of our very own eyes if
only we had just choose to open them.

This is what separates a poet from a person that is trying to write poems. This is the kind of father we all wish we had.
He is the kind of father that if Sylvia Path had Kyle for a father, her poetry would have been different. Kyle makes
even simple moments like a child trying to name objects (The Naming of things), seem important and existential all at
once.

It is not only his family that becomes important, it is also other things that become both common and important. In his
poem The Answer, he notices a pole-vaulter with a “simian posture and relaxed muscles”. I can see the tension of
this athlete as he gets ready to run toward the pole, the pole-vault in his hands, as the pole bends, the muscles
getting to rush forward, gripping the pole, then point it downwards and flings the body over the vault, “a chicken/
bone whose wish won’t snap”, hoping to land in the soft other side, triumphant, and the pole above not falling to
become disqualified. I used to do this when I was in high school.

Even a day at the beach can be an experience. He puts a simple shell in a couple of poems. But it is not so simple. In
his poem Conus Geographus, the cone shell has “the eye-tooth emerging, like plant shoots, to root in dirt”.

I want you standing in one moment of awe, when the chaos meets the normal, at a typical American celebration:

Hostage Negotiations In Negative Land

Tobi Cogswell
Chocolate Pudding Press
47 Page Chapbook


Reviewed by Carolina


These are poems of intelligence, the life of the mind --, even the senses, examined with laboratory tweezers and noted
on paper.                                                                                                                         
In the poem”Senses”

“A Ferris wheel of wishes /flings change and Cheshire cats/across the skies like diamonds/ on the edge of stars. “  The
poet observes, “Sitting on the bench,/ silver car after silver car, the ritual, the sadness, the madness, the senses.”

Always in the mind of these poem is a resignation to loss and an acute yearning for what it does not even believe.  

In  “World Cup Distance” there is another notation, “ While you read a poem about sex/ I chew on lime…”  then the
lovely affirmation, “When you whisper that you want to brush my hair…”  which, touching as it is,  will  soon be denied
as the poem turns away to the safety of, “TV on the flat screen above the bar.”

Again, in “Precision Excision”

“The smell of slick magazine curdles
while the clock ticks
which the angry boy cries
while the light explodes in a blistering display
while the washer cycles
while the spider spins its web
which way do you go
which way do you go
when people give up
how do they not die?    *(underline added)

Then again the enigma of this mind:
an imagination which can reach into itself and find a simple, everyday, but, just as it is everyday, it is a rare definition of
love.


W-2

You have been with your boss
as long as I was married.

He is good to his mother, and
he was good to yours

when she was dying.

Friday night at 7:00pm you are,
at your desk finishing his work, not

even finishing your own work.

Tell me, if that’s not love
I don’t know what is.

Throughout this book which by metaphor and keen observation distinguishes itself with the fine brush strokes of an
artist, there is always the enigma of beauty and humanity imagined and known in that sense, but somehow never
grasped as if to grasp it – it would disappear, or worse, disappoint.


A Quiet Kiss

Let’s kiss under the bridge
A quiet kiss, to see if we fit.

......
A gentle kiss, tasting our tastes, testing the safety of us two,
we shrouded within the fairytale,

.......
I see a yielding in you and
that makes it safe for me
to bend a bit

.....
....You walk
away for the moment, a sillouette of
wide shoulders in a dark suit
but not forever.

Throughout, this book has become a mirror in which the readers must confront themselves.  Yet with the final poem
the poet has experienced, as do the readers, this "...Quiet Kiss" with it's illuminating affirmation.

God Is In The Cracks
A Narrative in Voices
by Robert Sward
Black Moss Press 2006

Here he is, the fourteen year old boy, the fledgling poet.  It is morning and his parents are conversing about
his budding sexuality.   His mother is concerned about educating him and designates his father, a podiatrist,
to do the educating

(mother)"Shh. Talk to him, You're a Doctor."
                  (father)     A podiatrist, not a putzmeister ."     

And so we are introduced to the often amusing scrutiny to which the young poet is subjected as so many
fourteen year old boys feel they are scrutinized.

"And he scribbles, oi!                                                                                                                                                             
               scribble, scribble, scribble.
He's a shlimazel."        

                                      "He's a dreamer."
But unlucky, You know what it means, son,
shlimazel?

.........
So, Shlimazel
you look into the river,
the fish drop dead
You deal in shrouds,
people stop dying.


Poor child!!  From this the poem progresses to:

                    "He's round shouldered.
           He walks with his head down.  See?
                                               And he toes in."

On and on they go.  Now after learning there are fifty-two bones in the foot we hear from the podiatrist father:

"So the foot is the mirror of health.
What's that smell?
Let me see your feet. Oi!
How many times do I have to say it?
A pair of feet have 25,000 sweat glands,..."

The humor is always there, filling  pages about how the poet's mother, Miss Chicago, the brunette rich girl
"whose body was the world, "
     "Rest in Peace?  I'm dead for god sake.  / What good will rest do?"

Mother applies Pond's Beauty Cream...When she dies they bury her in not in a /shroud, but in pancake makeup.

The boy's grief becomes "no to the rabbi
              no to morning
              no to twilight.
              ..................
           No is my Kaddish
           No is my prayer
           I am the no
           I am the not.

A boy who will not render his shirt, who will not, will not, ---but does renders his heart.  His father sobs to
him,"But you, the un-mourner/ will mourn for her all your life.

There is Leopard Dog who, becomes voyeur and teacher as they look through the keyhole at the father's love
making with the blond Lenore.  The boy is disgusted and Leopard Dog says, "THAT'S HOW YOU WERE MADE LITTLE
BOY./ NO WICKY WICKY, NO LITTLE BOY."

We continue  through this story past four marriages, past his father's Rosicrucian mysticism and to the death
of the father, all in a delicious soup of Leopard Dog bow wows and pronouncements about feet,  (as even God
is revealed to be a PEDESTRIAN).  

Speaking of feet,

               "You I didn't walk out on,
                 For you I stayed --even now,
                 I may be dead, that's true,
                 but I'm not going anywhere
                 This is a father."

This is a story; this is a conversation.  How does it become poetry?  Didn't you hear their very voices.  Didn't
you see the expressions on their faces?  Did you not recognize the truth when you saw it.   And is this not the
the most beautiful Kadish, prayer for the dead?  

"Death is the mother of beauty," says the boy's grandfather.                                                                                         
" The Angel of Death is made entirely of eyes."                                         

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

We know this family as we know humanity.   This is the poetry; we have fallen in love with them.

Reviews