Cambridge Chronicle, 1/22/03

Ibbbetson Street Press Poets

To Read at Stone Soup this Monday

By Susie Davidson

CORRESPONDENT

For over 30 years, Mondays have meant Stone Soup Poetry to its legions of loyal word-spinners. This coming week, poets from the Ibbetson Street Press will be reading at its locale, the Out of the Blue Gallery at 106 Prospect St. in Central Square. Cambridge resident, Harvard grad and tax accountant Peter Desmond, who has won two Cambridge Poetry Awards and first prize in the April 2000 Interboard Poetry Contest, will be appearing, along with Cambridge resident David Anderson, English professor Mary Bodwell, and Ibbetson art editor Susan Landon. Also reading will be Ibbetson Update book reviewer Richard Wilhelm, Ibbetson contributor Doug Holder, and Cynthia B. Vincent, editor of the Sagamore, Massachusetts-based Aurorean, which was profiled in Poet's Market. The group will represent a varied and vital reflection of the grand scope and great diversity of Ibbetson authors.

Desmond, who prepares tax returns for several hundred writers, artists, and musicians in the Cambridge area, has been published in the Boston Poet, Compost, Ibbetson Street Press, 96 Inc, Raintown Review, Tucumcari Literary Review, and on the Web sites MiPo Zines, Poetry Porch, and Poetry SuperHighway. Over the past ten years, he’s recited poems at bars, churches, art galleries, antiwar rallies, a funeral, and even at an accounting conference.

Ibbetson Street Press began at the Porter Square Bruegger’s Bagels, where Holder and Wilhelm, an artist and former journalist who worked in human services, would meet for breakfast. “We toyed with the idea of starting a press that would produce a poetry journal, and poetry chapbooks on a periodic basis,” recalled Holder, who then photographed the sign for the street he and his then-ill wife, New England Poetry Club Secretary Dianne Robitaille, lived on. He posted it in her hospital room, marking the occasion as the beginning of the press.

With assistance from friends, Spare Change magazine’s Don DiVecchio, and local book stores and media, Holder’s 1999 Waking in a Cold Sweat was followed by DiVecchio’s Earthsong. To date, ten issues of the poetry journal have been published, featuring well-known poets such as A.D. Winans, Diana Der-Hovanessian, Stone Soup leader Jack Powers and Charles Coe, as well as interviews with Ed Galing, Robert K. Johnson and Marc Widershien, whose Ibbetson book The Life of All Worlds has been a runaway best seller in the local market. Wilhelm’s and Harold Cunniff’s illustrations and photos have augmented each publication. A City of Poets anthology featured 18 poets and has thus far sold hundreds of copies. Ibbetson books are archived at Harvard University, Brown University, Boston Public Library, and the University of Buffalo Library. The press has received endorsements from Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Howard Zinn.

“I don't think Richard, Dianne or myself expected any of this when we knocked it around over bagels,” said Holder. “I think the reason it went so well was because of the community of folks we met, who have given their time, without monetary compensation. But I say with no reservation that it has been worth every cent I’ve put into it.”

Holder, with an M.A. in Literature from Harvard University, is the former president of Stone Soup Poets, on the faculty of Newton Community Education, and runs poetry groups for psychiatric patients at McLean Hospital in Belmont. He writes an arts column for the Somerville News and is a contributor to Spare Change, Poesy and the Small Press Review. He is the new host of the Newton Free Library Poetry Series in Newton.

Monday night’s feature will include Landon, who holds an M.A. in Counseling Psychology and has practiced Transcendental Meditation for thirty years. In 2001, she won a Spare Change Poetry Prize. Her poetry, frequently concerned with travel, spirituality and nature, has appeared in the anthologies Freedom’s Just Another Word, Mothers and Daughters, Rising to the Dawn, and We Speak for Peace, and the magazines atelier, Crooked River Press, Ibbetson Street, Poesy, Romantics Quarterly, Queenshead & Artichoke, Sahara, Sojourner, Sunday Suitor Poetry Review and Storyboard. Her poems have won honorable mentions in the Wilory Farm Poetry Contest and the Sunday Suitor Poetry Contest.

"I think of myself as an urban poet,” said Landon, who has lived in Cambridge for nearly three decades. “My interest in Ibbetson Street was sparked by learning of editor Doug Holder’s interest in healing. My reading, including my poem ‘Forsythia,’ will continue in the spring vein, in the spirit of providing a hopeful focus during this ferocious winter.”

She is currently working on The Solitary Traveler, and a chapbook about a recent international friendship trip to Cuba.

Anderson, a senior at Eastern Connecticut State University and a member of Sigma Tau Delta, Phi Theta Kappa, and the National Honor Society, was a 2002 Frost Place participant, and reviews books for Ibbetson. He received an honorable mention for a rhyming poem in the 2001 Writer’s Digest competition. His small press publications include the Ibbetson Review, Nanny Fanny, The Nite Writer’s International, Pine Island Journal of New England Poetry, and The Blind Man’s Rainbow. “I have work appearing online in the May 2001 issue of The Red River Review,” he said. “I am the winner of the 2003 Leslie Leeds award, and have work forthcoming in the Spring issue of The Connecticut Review.”

Ibbetson art editor Wilhelm, with a B.A. in journalism, works as a mental health counselor at McLean Hospital. A painter, he has exhibited in a solo show at the Gallery at the Piano Factory as well as group shows in other venues. His poems have been published in Ibbetson Street, Spare Change, the Somerville News, and Crooked River Press. “They quoted one poem in full in the 2002 Poet’s Market,” he said. “I’ve read at many local venues such as Bookcellar, McIntyre and Moore, the Dire Reader at Out of the Blue Gallery, the Cambridge Public Library, and the Tapestry of Voices series at Borders Books,” he added.

Bodwell, with a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics, is an Assistant Professor of English at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, and the mother of two young boys. She has published poetry in Dasoku and Ibbetson’s Journal, and reviews journals and books of poetry and literature criticism for Ibbetson. “My poems tend to be pictorial and narrative, and are centered on the physicality of self, relationships, the world,” she said.

“Ibbetson Street Press is a unifying force in the Boston poetry scene, and the most viable way for poetry lovers to keep in touch with what's happening,” said Desmond. “There's nothing sectarian or clique-y about Ibbetson, and I think the variety of poets Monday night will reflect the breadth of its community.”