Angele Ellis's Blog

If you missed out on the Goodreads giveaway of Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh, you have another chance to win this book through Amazon--FREE through Aug. 19. Enter at https://giveaway.amazon.com/p/aa38e29...

My life has been filled with lakefront views and Italian cookies--although I skipped the ice cream--since my last blog post. A reunion with my mother's family on the shores of Lake Ontario and a visit to a cousin on Canandaigua Lake ALMOST sated my desire to wake up near the water. And to talk from morning until midnight!

Goodreads lists 62 books of fiction set on lakes. I have yet to write my own. https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/2...

Since my last blog post, I've had another personal/political poem published at Vox Populi, and a flash fiction piece inspired by my father's hometown, an easy drive from the great lake Ontario, at Sonic Boom. Here are the links:

https://voxpopulisphere.com/2017/08/0...

http://sonicboomjournal.wixsite.com/s...

Enjoy these last weeks of summer...

It seems a long time ago--although it's been only two weeks--since I bid goodbye to my baby brother and his family as they headed from Philadelphia to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for the last leg of their summer vacation from Florida.

My 9-year-old niece now shudders in disgust at the mere mention of her first crush, Justin Bieber. Her current obsession is Rocky Balboa. I had my first ice cream of the season--a Neapolitan sandwich--as she posed with a plaster statue of The Man. Later, she ran up all the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum, lifting her fists in victory. (Auntie followed at a more sedate aka "Burgess Meredith" pace.)

"Rocky," my niece growled, "if you wanna win, you gotta work harder than you ever worked before." "Rocky!" I growled in assent.

The only book I read during this brief vacation was The Girl on the Train. It would make things neat to say that I perused Paula Hawkins's bestselling psychological thriller on my trip to and from Rocky's city via Amtrak, as I daydreamed about the owners of the houses I glimpsed through the train window. But no--I read it late in the evenings, when fears and shadows lengthen. (See my review of TGOTT in my feed.)

Since my last blog post, I've also published a vegan-influenced flash fiction, "Agnes Dei," in The Drowning Gull, and a poem about madness and revival, "Morning Glory," on VerseWrights.

Here are the links:

https://thedrowninggull.wordpress.com...

www.versewrights.com/

Next, on to soft ice cream and gelato...

Gentle readers, I am ashamed to say that the summer solstice has passed, and I haven't bought one ice cream cone yet--neither hard nor soft, plain or with mix-ins.

Later this week, when my 9-year-old niece and 13-year-old nephew pull me around the Liberty Bell in steamy Philadelphia heat, I will give in, with pleasure!

But I have experienced a double scoop of literary happiness. This past Saturday, "Landscape"--a poem from Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh--was featured as the "Saturday Poem" in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, both in print and pixels, with a luscious daffodil illustration as a topping. Thanks to P-G poetry editor Lori Jakiela for making this selection:

http://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/2...

And just this morning, "Federal Building," a poem from Arab on Radar, was republished in Vox Populi, an ice cream-rich daily website of political poetry and prose. (It is the fifth of six poems from this book chosen by Vox Populi editor Michael Simms.)

https://voxpopulisphere.com/2017/06/2...

Onward to our nation's first capital city!

So pleased to see poet Fred Shaw's review of Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh in this week's Pittsburgh City Paper:

https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsbur...

Question for readers who have the book: Were you disappointed in the photograph resolution? We've made a few tweaks since CP received a pre-publication copy months ago.

Using high-quality paper for the interior photos would jack the book price up to $20.00, which Six Gallery Press and I don't want to do.

Happy summer reading!

I know that Theodore Roethke is not referring to the aftermath of eye surgery in this famous line. But when a retinal repair in late October made reading for any length of time painful to me, I turned my inner eye to audiobooks.

Back in the 90's, my ex-husband and I listened to audiobooks on long car trips. I remember laughing with Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail (and thinking that the Little Debbie snack cakes beloved by Bryson's Falstaffian trail buddy were the perfect road food).

We enjoyed Caleb Carr's twisting and twisted fin de siecle New York of The Alienist so much that we finished the audiobook sitting on the front porch of the Victorian house we owned in those days--while shadows, literal and figurative, lengthened.

But watch out for Michael Ondaatje's overly lyrical The English Patient. This audiobook should come with a narcolepsy warning! I had to shout at my then husband to wake up as his eyes closed and he loosened his grip on the wheel. (I was nearly asleep myself.)

This time around, I lay in bed listening to novels in the public domain from Librivox (www.librivox.org). If you want to be pulled into a book by the ears, there is nothing like a Victorian novel. The experience is similar to driving the roads of West Virginia, where lush foliage gives way to tin-roofed towns, brief straightaways are followed by a breathtaking series of hairpin curves, and faces seem haunted by beauty or evil--or both.

I started with an orgy of classics from my childhood: Louisa May Alcott's Little Men and Jo's Boys, Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Jane Austen's madly funny Love and Friendship. Then I ventured to Alcott's thrillers--which she secretly preferred to her children's books. In Behind a Mask, Or, a Woman's Power, a worn-out actress beguiles a sorry crew of aristocrats into thinking she is a charming governess of nineteen.
The Mysterious Key and What It Opened rattles some family skeletons--and how!

But these diversions were only the prelude to Wilkie Collins. In the quartet of his best novels--bookended by The Woman in White and The Moonstone--this friend of Charles Dickens displays amazing plot chops, but also creates fascinating and well-rounded characters, including strong women and sensitive, intelligent people of color in an era of colonialism, servitude, and hypocritical proprieties. Wild rides from start to finish.

One note of caution: as Librivox is staffed by volunteers, the readers range from professional to competent to poor. A few times, I had to squint over print chapters when the listening got rough...but I'm still going.

P.S. My literary clock is running a week behind, but 20 copies of Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh from my recent Goodreads giveaway are in the mail to the winners--whom I hope will be moved to rate and review the book.

Many thanks to the 662 Goodreads members who showed #booklove by entering my giveaway for Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh, with photos by Rebecca Clever (Six Gallery Press). TWENTY copies soon will be winging their way to winners in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Kansas, Massachusetts, Texas, New York, Washington, North Carolina, Florida, California, Missouri, Utah, & New Mexico! They will bear autographs and contain a one-of-a-kind surprise.

Today brings me a double scoop of literary goodness. VOX POPULI, a website for political poetry and prose run by Michael Simms of Autumn House Press and Coal Hill Review, has featured another of my poems from Arab on Radar (Six Gallery). "If We Live" is complete with a vintage photo of my grandfather, Toufik Traad Kmeid/Ellis:
http://voxpopulisphere.com/2017/05/15...

I will be continuing my blog posts and book reviews on a weekly basis. Next up, the pleasures of audio books.

Arab on Radar
Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh

When my mother was in grammar school, she was expected to memorize poetry, and then to recite it in front of class and at school events.

Learning poems by heart was important to Mother. A bookish girl, the daughter of Italian immigrants, she discovered poetry in a paper mill village in far northern New York State, during the years that encompassed the latter part of The Great Depression and World War II. Young Loretta--she preferred "Lorrie"--became a champion reciter, although her secret dream was to be a movie star.

On finding herself a stay-at-home mom with five young children--here the scene shifts to the suburbia of the 1960s--reciting poetry to her brood became a means of entertainment and escape, not only for Mother but for us. The notion of poetry as an oral tradition, as a living performance, was as much a part of Mother's gift as the words themselves.

The poems that Mother knew were a mixture of works from the canon and poems that have slipped utterly out of time and fashion. She taught us "Casey at the Bat" complete with the pantomime of a baseball game. When she (and we) recited: "The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate / he pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate" we assumed the furious batter's stance, smacking our imaginary bats and glaring at the imaginary pitcher. We learned to change voices in the middle of a poem, too: Mother's "Strike one!" and "Strike two!" were rendered in perfect umpire-ese.

But Mother also excelled at the quieter poems (what some might call the "real" poems). I learned to hear the hush-hush rhythm of falling snow in Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," as well as the melancholy notes of what Mother and I agree to this day is a suicidal despair. "Whose woods these are, I think I know"--when I place the emphasis on "think," I bring the poem and myself to a new place.

And in Countee Cullen's "Incident," the poem that was my first lesson on racism, both poet and reciter assume the memory and voice of a child. The epithet on which the poem pivots--that terrible, irrevocable word, here sneered to one little boy from another--still stings.

Every day, lines from the poems that Mother taught me come into my head, unbidden. "I saw the whole of Baltimore / From May until December; / Of all the things that happened there / That's all that I remember." "The only other sound's the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake."

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks...

I had Mother in mind when I was writing the following poem from Under the Kaufmann's Clock:

The Death of Duse

The Italian Eleonora Duse (1858-1924) was the most celebrated stage actress of her time, with the exception of Sarah Bernhardt, her great rival.

Blackened sills like swaths of crepe
on the windows of the Hotel Schenley.
This room is her final creation. Born
on an Italian train, and speeding in public
ever since. So much is provisional.

A coliseum looms across the street,
baseball park named for a general.
At her age, to consent to play America,
this frigid Pittsburgh, in cruelest April…

She will take all bows from bed.
White hair melts into rented pillows.
A crowd is gathering. On the table,
a closed book. Underneath, silver
oxygen tanks, lethal as bombs.

The stage swells with love, hate.
Sarah Bernhardt—swagger, dyed
red curls—cradles a lewd coffin
in those damned translucent arms.

D’Annunzio—traitor who swore
he adored them both—waves a script
she refuses to read, no matter
how he pleads. And poor Mattino,
her journalist—still so young.

She forgives him the death of their child.
But no tears for anyone.

She is on the other side of the curtain
watching the lights come up—
choked, choked with longing
for someone’s life to begin.
Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh

P.S. GOODREADS GIVEAWAY for Under the Kaufmann's Clock ends TONIGHT at midnight Pacific time (3 a.m. Eastern time)!

The first time I got ready to read at PAGE, I threw up. Lawrenceville--a Pittsburgh neighborhood a mere two miles from my house--was out of my comfort zone. Such is the emotional balkanization that can occur in a city of many neighborhoods, of hills one fears to climb and bridges one fears to cross.

That night, I did find friends, old and new. And magic in a high-ceilinged art gallery where poets, fiction writers, memoirists, and an inspired puppeteer performed to warm applause. Joann Kielar, who coordinates this periodic series, is a maker of many forms of art, and has the gift of gathering good spirits around her.

Last night's PAGE 10 began, for me, with a walk down Penn Avenue in early evening sunshine, the changeable weather once more promising summer. I turned into Lawrenceville at 37th Street, taking comfort from St. Augustine's Church, which dates to 1863. Its orange bricks have weathered many changes and sheltered many people.

I love the things that barring disaster, will outlive me, as they have outlived generations.

Inside the gallery, I listened to an old friend read a funny and liberating short story, and a new friend read the promising beginnings to three different tales. Heard fresh nuances in the familiar poems of a close friend, and laughed as the puppeteer staged a kitchen fight between a metal ladle and spatula, both fitted with googly eyes and cloth noses.

And I read this poem:

East End Aubade

One dawn I'll board the Chicago freight
through the long pull of the whistle.
One dawn I'll stop envying
the industry of the pileated woodpecker.
One dawn I'll gather a dozen suns
orange as the eggs of pampered city chickens.
One dawn the blackbirds on the wire
will share the secret of their Yinzer chatter.
One dawn I'll go through the arched door
somewhere between blue and indigo—
a new shade of the spectrum
vibrating like the very breath of ether.

Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh

P.S. Goodreads giveaway for Under the Kaufmann's Clock ends THIS SATURDAY.

Yesterday--a cold rainy Saturday--found me snug inside the Staghorn Cafe in Greenfield (yet another Pittsburgh neighborhood), receiving a psychic reading.

Pittsburgh is a town of psychics as well as a town of writers. I believe that the two vocations are connected. Both utilize sensitivity to other people--the sympathetic curiosity that can lead to sudden revelations and flashes of insight--along with sensitivity to nature, the fluctuations in mood that changes in landscape and atmosphere can bring.

We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at (and interpreting) the stars.

I won this psychic reading in a raffle to raise funds for a timely and forthcoming poetry anthology, Nasty Women & Bad Hombres, edited by Greenfield writers Deena November and Nina Padolf. Nina did my reading. The Staghorn--a charming mixture of down home and New Age--is Deena and Nina's neighborhood hangout, workshop space, and reading venue, both psychic and literary.

Nina doesn't find lost objects or reveal winning lottery numbers. (Although I once paid for a psychic reading from a woman who worked lottery numbers into her nearly unintelligible patter, as she shuffled dingy old greeting cards on a bar-room table. Yes, I mean birthday and holiday cards, not the Tarot or a regular playing pack.)

This was a character reading, mixed with insights into my past and the people in it, along with a sense of what the coming year might bring to me. Rich and somehow comforting, like the cup of hot chocolate spiced with cinnamon that I was sipping.

Afterward, I walked out into the wet world feeling a lot warmer.

The Mediterranean in me has always been fascinated by such rituals. In Arab cultures, women "read" not tea leaves, but the patterns left in a cup of Arabic coffee. Here is a poem from my book Arab on Radar, "Reading the Cup":

Unfathomed, the deep blue sea
is black and bitter – Arabic coffee
boiled three times in a copper pot.
Drink to the silted grounds
in heart-scalding gulps.
Turn your cup over.
Fate will drip downward,
settling in cloud-negatives.
Believe me when I say:
I read what I see in the cup.
Rock, paper, scissors.
You will build a home,
receive the news you long for,
cut short your bad luck.
To scry is to be seer and sieve,
straining hope into each sign.
How else could we bear
to gaze into the dark?
Arab on Radar

P.S. ONE MORE WEEK TO ENTER THE GOODREADS GIVEAWAY for my new book, Under the Kaumann's Clock!
Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh

...as 10,000 Maniacs sang at a concert in the South Hills Theatre one night in 1988. I remember the concert taking place in January, but the date was April 23. Remember myself wearing a parka, but the temperature that day was 79 degrees. Remember "special guest" Tracy Chapman as an unknown who blew us to smithereens with her guitar and powerful voice, all alone on the stage.

But Tracy Chapman had been released two and a half weeks earlier, on April 5, and by June 11 of that year Chapman would shoot to stardom, doing two sets at the Nelson Mandela Tribute Concert in London's Wembley Stadium after Stevie Wonder's hard disc of synthesized music went missing, and Wonder walked out--although he returned to end the concert in triumph.

If I wrote a poem about the long-ago Tracy Chapman/10,000 Maniacs concert in Pittsburgh, should I set it in January or in April?

Poetry is a mixture of memory and make-believe, even when based on fact--the magic "weather" of its music. The historian in me did some research when writing the following poem from Under the Kaufmann's Clock, but not everything in it is factual, although for me it is as genuine as the chill in tonight's air.

Rocking the Apollo at The Stanley Theatre, 1979
For Scott Silsbe

It wasn’t James Brown, cape running with sweet sweat and swimming
with stars like the Monongahela River. But Brown’s Please, please, please
reached this burg’s brothers and sisters like echoes from the Great Migration,
like thunder from the god’s lyre: make music, change your lives.

It wasn’t Harlem’s neo-classical temple, that landmark music hall,
the Apollo whose columns rise like fresh gardenias behind Billie Holiday’s
ear, like Mahalia Jackson’s hymns to the divine, like Ella Fitzgerald’s golden
basket, like Louis Armstrong’s legendary trumpet sounding at heaven’s gate.

It was Pittsburgh’s Stanley Theatre, in 1979. The Stanley, once a movie palace
whose 20-foot chandelier shivered crystal tears when Bill “Bojangles”
Robinson tapped onscreen with little Shirley Temple—but chimed
when he danced there live—and jived with Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington.

Eras shifted; rock stars supernovaed. On that stage in 1980, another god,
Bob Marley, would burn with love in his last public performance,
beads rising from his dreadlocks like the flares of a thousand Zippo lighters,
wailing—against the cancer of our world—his redemption song.

But this was 1979. Pittsburgh’s own Phyllis Hyman was opening
(like a flower, a red iris in a slit satin gown) for the smooth Peabo Bryson.
I didn’t know who they were when the music editor at the magazine
where I was an intern handed me the tickets. Didn’t know that my

poor-little-college-girl uniform of sweater, jeans, and Mia clogs
(just like my roommate’s) in which we’d trekked the Himalayan slopes
of The Syria Mosque for Bonnie Raitt, wasn’t right for this evening—not
against the gleaming dresses that swirled and dipped and swooped like jazz,

the slick hair spangled with blossoms, the stilettoes scaling like skyscrapers,
the sharkskin suits and shiny ties, the bronze and ebony brilliantine,
o god, if you want to know the beauty of black, sink like two lumps of dough
into a concert hall where the only other white face is the Elton John-ish dude

tickling the ivories for Phyllis Hyman. Don’t shoot the piano player. He is doing
the best that he can. His grin caught the groove like our own dim reflection, while
Phyllis was beautiful, a torch song glowing in the first act of her trilogy. An eon
away from the day she canceled her engagement at Harlem’s Apollo with one note:

I'm tired. I'm tired. Those of you that I love know who you are. May God bless you.
(Yes, the god is creation and destruction, his eyes pitiless and blank at sundown.)
But in 1979, Phyllis stood radiant before the coiled crowd waiting for Peabo.
When Bryson appeared, a groom in his cream tuxedo, the ladies’ man, the crooner,

better than wedding cake trimmed with silver roses, the hall erupted like Vesuvius.
The wan bouffant teenagers who swooned like falling dominoes for Beatlemania
had nothing on the ladies of all sizes and ages giving it up for Peabo, sacrificing
like vestal virgins, screaming like Maenads—bridal and funereal, lustful and divine.

Later, Peabo crossed over to Disney to duet “Beauty and the Beast” with Celine,
became the promise tinkling like music boxes in white girls’ princess bedrooms,
but that evening he belonged to his people, the black and proud, and no, he wasn’t
James Brown, but something was liberated in me that night, rising like a small star

formed by that explosion, triumphant despite the set faces of pale bristling cops
whose cordon sanitaire could not contain the celebration, the joy spilling down
the steps of The Stanley Theatre, and yes, it was enough to make me into a poet,
that night in Pittsburgh, in the year of Apollo and the Good Lord Jesus, 1979.

P.S. Goodreads giveaway for Under the Kaufmann's Clock ends on May 14! For real.
Under the Kaufmann's Clock: Fiction, Poems, and Photographs of Pittsburgh