Astopovo Station

 

Astopovo Station in 2010

That train has left the station joins wheelhouse, sounds like a plan and same page as another shorthand for experiences that are pregnant with simplicity. Tolstoy ran away at the end of his life and died in the Astapovo Station. A wheelhouse is defined as a place of shelter for a person like a captain who is steering a ship. When you use this expression, the implication is that you're going somewhere where there a limited number of  possibilities in your ken. Sounds like a plan is clear enough but what does it really mean  to be on the same page in this era of devices where few people use paper anymore?

read the review ofThe Wormhole Society by Francis levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star 

What is Poetry?

What is a poem? Why write one in lieu of a short story novel or play? Poetry seems easier to write since many poems are “pieces d’occasion” scribbled out as declarations of love as in the case of Plutarch and Laura, Dante and Beatrice or death such as in Thomas Grey's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." Indeed passion produces sinners and grief requiems. Many people who resort to poetry fail to realize there are journeyman poets like instance, the Pulitzer Prize winner, Jorey Graham. There are many poets that also write in different media. Eliot wrote a play, Murder in the Cathedral. Nabokov was a novelist but one of his greatest works was a book length poem Pale Fire. There is no poets union but there are practitioners who are not polymathic in their endeavor. Poetry is their medium as was the guitar wax for Chuck Berry. So what defines the poet's metier? Economy, rhythm and meter, liberal use of figures of speech, synecdoche, metonymy simile and metaphor and lastly color. Isn’t the spectrum the palette of the painter? Color as it’s applied to prosody refers to lights darks shadows, bright and dim. Poets turn the lights down, the sound up then begin to swing.

read the review ofThe Wormhole Society by Francis levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star 

 

Place

photo: Francis Levy

Place is something you may tend to take for granted. You’re attracted enough to stay, take turns, snapshot and file your initial perceptions away under “preconceptions.” When you return you see a person, place or thing  that’s in your mind's eye as opposed to reality. The same experience applies to the people in your life. You see them in a certain way—something from which you may occasionally find yourself experiencing pushback e.g. when a child, spouse, friend or lover doesn’t agree with the mnemonic frame in which you’ve put them. They’re no longer the flighty dreamer and resent being patronized as such. Coming back to physical landscapes, you may suddenly realize that the oculus of the Pantheon looks into a void!

read the review ofThe Wormhole Society by Francis levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star 

Siddhartha

 

There is a truth to adolescent angst and alienation. If you walked around with a copy of the New Directions Siddhartha in your back pocket as a gloomy teenager you may be disconcerted to find out you weren’t far off the mark. Whether you’re cremated or buried, you’ll end up alone with no one to help you—even your mother! You start as potential and end in finality, the only saving grace being, you’re no longer there to realize it or care.

read the review ofThe Wormhole Society by Francis levy and Joseph Silver in The East Hampton Star