Giving Tuesday!
POeT SHOTS - Columbarium by David Moolten
POeT SHOTS is a monthly feature published on the first Monday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ray Greenblatt
POeT SHOTS #2, Series C
COLUMBARIUM
Legend says doves saved the Altneu synagogue
In Prague in 1558, really
Angels in disguise who hovered cooing
Along the roof while the ghetto burned.
You can imagine the faint creak as their wings fanned
The flames away from Europe’s oldest shul
The obdurate roost of tradition
After each purge, but not why children
Never felt the same blessed shuddering
When the Germans stoked their kilns in Terezin.
The ancient poor called themselves lucky
In Rome to have if not an ornate tomb
For the body then a small hole in the wall
For its residue in a row of such holes,
In a stack of such rows, like the better off
For their birds. In 1944 those children
Not yet ash stood as in a fire line and passed
Box after box from the shed with the arched doors
And tired brick, a spur track to the river,
The Russian tanks getting close. Perhaps
There never was a way to contain such truth.
Though as they scattered handfuls of gray silt
To cloud and clot the current they must
Have fluttered a little, carried in the wind
As when a flock is released and wheels
With calm restraint over a city’s spires and eaves
Before returning to its niches. The humble
In the ancient temple sacrificed pigeons
Instead of lambs on the altar, all
They could afford for their burnt offering,
Their holocaust, Greek from Hebrew, the word olah
Meaning that which goes up. Perhaps when you stand
In the synagogue on a Friday night
Once the crowds disperse, listening to the past
Quietly murmured in a dead language
You are that small opening, that repository
Of memory, which is its own homing
Crossing the impossible distance like a dove.
A columbarium is a room where funeral urns are stored. This poem traces centuries of Jewish hardship culminating in the most devastating event that could befall anyone. These strong lines strike nerves and reverberate: “The obdurate roost of tradition.” “To cloud and clot the current they must/have fluttered a little.” “Once the crowds disperse, listening to the past/quietly murmured in a dead language/you are the small opening, that repository/of memory.” Dust becomes birds becomes soul becomes, perhaps, hope.
Ray Greenblatt has been a poet for forty years and an English teacher longer than that. He was an editor of General Eclectic, a board member of the Philadelphia Writers Conference, and is presently on the staff of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. He has won the Full Moon Poetry Contest, the Mad Poets Annual Contest, and twice won the Anthony Byrne Annual Contest for Irish Poetry sponsored by The Irish Edition. His poetry has been translated into Gaelic, Polish, Greek and Japanese.
Mad Poets Planner, Week of 12/1
Mad Poets Planner
Local Lyrics featuring James Feichthaler
Local Lyrics hosted by Amber Renee appears on the 3rd Monday of each month. In it, Amber features the work and musings of a local poet.
“Give me a cold can of beer, the jukebox playing loudly on a Friday night, and an old toothless couple arguing over the tab, and therein lies poetry... ”
Don’t cry over spilt beer by James Feichthaler
My Pabst Blue Ribbon spills out on the table
And runs a little while, until it slows
And oozes toward the corners of a mat,
Which I soak up with napkins. How life flows
Is not dissimilar from this, in that
We slow down when we're forced to, or we're able,
Under the spell of long commutes and days
That keep us looking down at blinking phones,
From phones to roads, to phones then back again,
While random texts distract us from our plans
Of getting out alive while we still can;
Of starting over, moving on by choice
And not by way of circumstantial severing,
Knowing full well that 'how' we'll leave means everything.
Q&A...
1. Give us one poet, dead or alive, you'd want to get together & spill a couple beers with.
Bukowski. We'd both be spilling beers accidentally, then pouring out 40s purposely for the dead poetry critics who gave us nothing but snobbery and muck through the centuries. We'd probably toast a few old friends too, then come to fisticuffs over who has the better last name.
2. Listening to anything lately that's been speaking to your soul, musically?
Of late (back in summer that is), it's been Nas' "Lost Tapes 2." Super-hyped that a new Gang Starr album is out, which I've heard a few tracks off and can't wait to cop in full. Elliott Smith is always my go-to; dude's a poet on wax. Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Beatles, and way too many hip-hop artists to name. Depends on my mood really.
3. Let's get broad: Where do you think poetry fits in the world?
'Everywhere' would, in short, be my answer. Poetry shouldn't adhere to any one society of thinking or rule of excellence; it's the word, alive on the page; the poet penning verses while the world is crashing down around him/her like a meteor shower. Poetry serves those best who don't give one fig for fitting in anywhere. Give me a cold can of beer, the jukebox playing loudly on a Friday night, and an old toothless couple arguing over the tab, and therein lies poetry; or on the flipside, let my eyes gaze on the bluest ocean, with gulls bobbing up and down on the waves, and a sunset that takes its color from every shade of red imaginable, and whatever the moment whispers to me will be enough. Poetry fits into this world because it is this world; it's the truest reflection of the human experience conveyed through words. How cool is that?
4. Okay, your adoring fans are listening: What do you want the people to know about you?
I once challenged Shakespeare to a rap battle in a dream...he won of course. When I read poetry in public, the temperature of the room must be exactly 70 degrees Fahrenheit and a bowl of Wawa hoagies must be present, with all the meat and vegetables taken out so that the rolls remain like empty husks of yeasty goodness. I write poetry i write poetry i write poetry. A book or 5 is on the way. I also rap. Check out this guy Taliesin aka Big Tal if you like hip-hop; I heard he's pretty good.
James Feichthaler's poetry has appeared in print and online journals in both the US and UK, most recently in Toho Journal and E-Verse Radio. The self-proclaimed 'forrealist poet' is the host of The Dead Bards of Philadelphia, a poetry reading series that occurs every 4th Thursday of the month at The Venice Island Performing Arts Center in Manayunk, PA. You can follow James on Twitter @forrealist_poet and find The Dead Bards of Philadelphia on Instagram and Facebook.
AMBER RENEE, she/her, 26, writes from her home in suburban Bucks County, Pennsylvania. A fool hopelessly in love with the pursuit of psychic knowledge, she often writes autobiographically; though without sacrificing her distinctive off-rhythm canter. 'Thoughts on This Most Recent Episode' was her 2016 full length collection of self-published poetry ruminating on her thoughts & illnesses. Currently she is working on a musical album of poetry.
Mad Poets Planner - Week of 11/17
Mad Poets Planner - Week of 11/10
POeT SHOTS
POeT SHOTS is a monthly feature published on the first Monday of the month. It features work by established writers followed by commentary and insight by Ray Greenblatt
POeT SHOTS #1, Series C
PLUNDER by A.R. Ammons
I have appropriated the windy twittering of aspen leaves
into language, stealing something from reality like a
silverness: drop-scapes of ice from peak sheers:
much of the rise in brooks over slow-roiled glacial stones:
the loop of reeds over the shallow’s edge when birds
feed on the rafts of algae: I have taken right out of the
air the clear streaks of bird music and held them in my
head like shafts of sculptured glint: I have sent language
through the mud roils of a raccoon’s paws like a net,
netting the roils: made my own use of a downwind’s
urgency on a downward stream: held with a large scape
of numbness the black distance upstream to the mountains
flashing and bursting: meanwhile everything else, frog,
fish, bear, gnat has turned in its provinces and made off
with its uses: my mind’s indicted by all I’ve taken.
A poet’s poem—it sings symphonically! Fresh language: “drop-scapes of ice from peak sheers,” “shifts of sculptured glint,” “mud roils of a raccoon’s paws.” Just chew and slosh around those phrases in your mouth—best tasting dark chocolate! The many continual colons allow the poem to roll on like a mighty river. A sequence like ”frog, fish, bear, gnat” underscores the power of our English language to use its many monosyllabic words.
Ray Greenblatt has been a poet for forty years and an English teacher longer than that. He was an editor of General Eclectic, a board member of the Philadelphia Writers Conference, and is presently on the staff of the Schuylkill Valley Journal. He has won the Full Moon Poetry Contest, the Mad Poets Annual Contest, and twice won the Anthony Byrne Annual Contest for Irish Poetry sponsored by The Irish Edition. His poetry has been translated into Gaelic, Polish, Greek and Japanese.
It's Baaaack!
After several dormant years, the Mad Poets Blog is making a return. Welcome both to those of you who enjoyed the blog before, and to those of you visiting the blog for the first time. We aim to make this blog a place where you can get information about The Mad Poets Society, see work by local and established poets, and find inspiration for poets and enjoyers of poetry alike.
Here’s what to expect from the blog in November:
Mad Poets Planner - A weekly (every Friday) post that brings you information about the Mad Poets events, coming up in the following week.
POeT SHOTS - Poems by established writers accompanied by commentary from Ray Greenblatt - Nov. 4th.
A monthly feature of work by local poets curated by Amber Renee - Nov. 17th
Starting in December: Video of interviews with local writers conducted by Mike Cohen and Steve Delia
To your right is the Planner for the week starting on Sunday, November 3rd. Be sure to subscribe to get emails about the newest content we post!
POeT SHOTS # 6 (Series B) - Ray Greenblatt
LOVE IS NOT ALL by Edna Millay
Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.
Sonnet is an Elizabethan poetic form; but this one uses contemporary language and sensibility. The theme of love is tested by forms of possible death--starvation, exposure to the elements, drowning, TB, contaminated blood, broken bones . . .What may be a worse trial is directed toward the soul when "a man is making friends with death . . . for lack of love alone." Yet the poet reaffirms her belief in love: "I do not think I would."
POeT SHOTS # 5 (Series B) - Ray Greenblatt
HELEN OF TROY DOES COUNTERTOP DANCING, by Margaret Atwood
The world is full of women
who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself
if they had the chance. Quit dancing.
Get some self-respect
and a day job.
Right. And minimum wage,
and varicose veins, just standing
in one place for eight hours
behind a glass counter
bundled up to the neck, instead of
naked as a meat sandwich.
Selling gloves, or something.
Instead of what I do sell.
You have to have talent
to peddle a thing so nebulous
and without material form.
Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way
you cut it, but I've a choice
of how, and I'll take the money.
I do give value.
Like preachers, I sell vision,
like perfume ads, desire
or its facsimile. Like jokes
or war, it's all in the timing.
I sell men back their worse suspicions:
that everything's for sale,
and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see
a chain-saw murder just before it happens,
when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit and nipple
are still connected.
Such hatred leaps in them,
my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary
hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads
and upturned eyes, imploring
but ready to snap at my ankles,
I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge
to step on ants. I keep the beat
and dance for them because
they can't. The music smells like foxes,
crisp as heated metal
searing the nostrils
or humid as August, hazy and languorous
as a looted city the day after,
when all the rape's been done
already, and the killing,
and the survivors wander around
looking for garbage
to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion.
Speaking of which, it's the smiling
tiresme out the most.
This, and the pretense
that I can't hear them.
And I can't, because I'm after all
a foreigner to them.
The speech here is all warty gutturals,
obvious as a slab of ham,
but I come from the province of the gods
where meanings are lilting and oblique.
I don't let on to everyone,
but lean close, and I'll whisper:
My mother was raped by a holy swan.
You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.
That's what we tell all the husbands.
There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.
Not that anyone here
but you would understand.
The rest of them would like to watch me
and feel nothing. Reduce me to components
as in a clock factory or abattoir.
Crush out the mystery.
Wall me up alive
in my own body.
They'd like to see through me,
but nothing is more opaque
than absolute transparency.
Look--my feet don't hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I'm not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you'll burn.
Modern--"Not that anyone here/but you would understand" she says directly to the reader.
Mythic--"I come from the province of the gods/where meanings are lilting and oblique."
Shocking--"Humid as August, hazy and languorous/as a looted city the day after."
Men beware: "They gaze at me and see/a chain-saw murder just before it happens."
Why should beauty, tenderness, vulnerability be destroyed?
POeT SHOTS # 4 - (Series B) -Ray Greenblatt
QUARANTINE by Eavan Boland
n the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking--they were walking--north.
She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.
In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:
Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.
The couple's tortuous trek: "walking, walking, west, west, and, and, last, last, worst, worst." Fragments capture the fits and starts of dying. "Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history." Yet their loving sacrifice for each other endures in history.
POeT SHOTS #3 (SERIES "B") BY RAY GREENBLATT
POET SHOTS # 3 (SERIES B) by Ray Greenblatt
Pasiphae, by Joanne Hayhurst
From the leathery leaves of olive trees nearby
an open window, a winter rain's been weeping
while her blood is slowly seeping onto
sheepskin where she lies in silence
of the birthing room. As if she's half
asleep or dreaming in the rain light
of a cave, where shadows without margins
merge and shift and sounds sometimes confuse,
there seems to be a whimpering from somewhere.
Rising, dreading, drawn beyond her will,
she shudders as blood trickles down her thighs--
she comes closer, sees the swaddling clothes,
the small stirring in the cradle. Time swallows
time: she's flung, fragmented, into
dark, through whirling worlds, free-falling--
as though her womb had filled with dross or stone,
she settles to the floor beside the cradle.
Beyond her will, fierce trembling hands unbind,
unwind the rags, the endless swathing--
naked now, exposed--a small thing, limp,
and wet, unfolding the old darkness
of a dream. A moan--his, or hers?--
Smother it or back away or leave it
here to dry and wither, disappear.
The small thing turns his head: dark eyes open,
seeking hers; in them wells the sharing
of their sorrow: his delicate long lashes,
the flesh, the downy hide, the muscular
perfection, the cord, the velvet flanks,
the fetlocks, hooves, a fine and graceful tail.
The baby's fingers tighten at her touch--
nails, thin as skin of grapes, pale as water--
his infant fist closes on her finger;
she brings him to her: hot familiar breath
upon her neck, his smell of rising yeast
or forest floors in summer. She rests her face
upon his face, on two furred nubs that will
become the terrifying horns. The queen
begins a heavy humming: old sounds
of the Aegean Sea and winter rains--
Maybe she expected it: the door's
flung wide and, oh, the animal howling.
A mother's love knows no boundaries--not even for something unearthly: "the downy hide, the muscular/perfection, the cord, the velvet flanks,/the fetlocks, hooves, a fine and graceful tail." Although a queen she has suffered so much, as he will: "in them well the sharing/of their sorrow."
POeT SHOT # 2 (SERIES "B") BY RAY GREENBLATT
POET SHOTS # 2 (SERIES B) by Ray Greenblatt
ON THE BALCONY by Emily Grosholz
We understood at last the native tongue
of the candle struggling to maintain
its story on the balcony, in the wind,
set opposite the quiet moon.
We felt ourselves grow darker with the wine
and an increasing reticence
that waited near us like the sleeping children.
Perhaps it was the music playing
deep inside the rooms behind the wall,
blues from south Chicago with no words
but those the flame supplied,
curved and falling like the wind in veils
or flights of stairways down,
a failure and advancement, always down.
Perhaps it was the blind wall with its traces
of ivy, advertisements, empty rooms,
pattern of our two dark heads by moonlight
broken by the candle's shifting tongue.
All our talk became a listening
and echoed from the wall
in letters and the seams of vanished stairs.
The moon, the candle, answered to each other;
we heard the small one gutter
in imitation. loving and unstable,
mocking and shaking, of the silent moon.
We listened till we half believed
it was the language of the dead,
their strange flat hands like ivy on the wall.
So distracted by the task of living,
we must turn for wisdom to the ones
who wear the past upon their faces
as the walls of houses do,
as the moon reveals itself in phases
moving from a scored white vacancy
into the baleful silhouette of fire.
We watched the flame embrace the wax,
the crumbling wall surrender to the touch
of ivy, sinking deeper in its scars.
Close behind, the music played,
the children slept enfolded in a dream,
their respiration like a lower
run of minor notes, descending scales.
Later the flame dropped off, so suddenly
we wondered, drunk and silent as we were,
why our light companion fled
and left us to our old abandonments.
Your darkened face, just after, lit
to features I could understand;
I read it with my mouth and hands
because my eyes were full of night.
The night is alive for lovers. All things become sentient--"candle," "moon," the voice of "music."
"All our talk became a listening
and echoed from the wall
in letters and the seams of vanished stairs."
"as the moon reveals itself in phases
moving fromscored white vacancy
into the baleful silhouette of fire."
POeT SHOT #1 (SERIES "B") BY RAY GREENBLATT
POeT SHOTS #1 (Series B) - by Ray Greenblatt
TRYING TO RAISE THE DEAD by Dorianne Laux
Look at me. I'm standing on a deck
in the middle of Oregon. There are
people inside the house. It's not my
house, you don't know them.
They're drinking and singing
and playing guitars. You love
this song. Remember? "Ophelia."
Boards on the windows, mail
by the door. I'm whispering
so they won't think I'm crazy.
They don't know me that well.
Where are you now? I feel stupid.
I'm talking to trees, to leaves
swarming on the black air, stars
blinking in and out of heart-
shaped shadows, to the moon, half-
lit and barren, stuck like an ax
between the branches. What are you
now? Air? Mist? Dust? Light?
What? Give me something. I have
to know where to send my voice.
A direction. An object. My love, it needs
a place to rest. Say anything. I'm listening.
I'm ready to believe. Even lies, I don't care.
Say, burning bush. Say, stone. They've
stopped singing now and I really should go.
So tell me, quickly. It's April. I'm
on Spring Street. That's my gray car
in the driveway. They're laughing
and dancing. Someone's bound
to show up soon. I'm waving.
Give me a sign if you can see me.
I'm the only one here on my knees.
"Stars/blinking in and out of heart-/shaped shadows, to the moon, half-/lit and barren, stuck like an ax/between the branches." Simple words. Complex thoughts. Her lost love. Dead love. She is the lost Ophelia in so much anguish.
Ray Greenblatt (rgreenblatt71@comcast.net)
THERESE HALSCHEID TO READ ON SEPTEMBER 7, 2016 AT COMMUNITY ART CENTER
Therése Halscheid
will read her poetry and share her visual art
Wednesday September 7
7:00 p.m.
at the Community Arts Center
414 Plush Mill Road
Wallingford, PA19086
Open Mic will follow
The First Wednesday reading series at the CAC is sponsored by the Mad Poets Society. For more information see the web page (www.madpoetssociety.com) or contact First Wednesday series host Sibelan Forrester (610-328-8162, sforres1@swarthmore.edu)
POeT SHOT # 11 Blog Post by Ray Greenblatt - On Greenblatt
POeT SHOT #11
BACK FROM THE DEAD by Ray Greenblatt
Renzie came back from the dead
really back from hell
literally he was dead and
was sent back. I believe him
his honesty is compelling
as well as his honest anger
he has nothing to hide.
He slouches over there
in filthy clothes and flesh
pockets jammed with swatches
of newspaper he picks out
of trash cans and gutters
--dirty is nothing compared to hell—
pretending to read as cover
pace a few steps then back
he tells me he is thrilled
to be here. Bored? Never
of course being really dead
he doesn’t have to sleep
but he pretends to
for the sake of others
especially the cops
who would confine him.
He loves hanging out
in this underground station
where people come and go
all the time—he laughs—
a little like hell.
He begs money to
sometimes buy food to
pretend he must eat
yet he does like some tastes
--not like during life
it was almost compulsion—
he also likes some odors
garbage at its rottenest
doesn’t offend him.
I could go on, as he does
but I have to continue
my real life as he his death.
I see Renzie standing there
in his great bulk
--in hell you don’t wither—
eyes shifting in their sockets
empty gums contorted
cursing the invisible
waving a dirty piece of paper
like a fatal summons
people swirling all around
used to his odorous presence
his eccentric reality.
We have seen many ghosts wandering through the year of poems above. Ghosts of the past, ghosts of our hopes, ghosts of our hurts. Renzie claims he has returned from the dead. We see men and women who seem to be caught between life and a living death. How did they deserve such a fate?
POeT SHOTS # 10 BLOG POST BY RAY GREENBLATT
TOAST ON A SUMMER AFTERNOON
- Eileen M. D’Angelo
I ordered a Guinness and thought of you,
on the deck of The Inn at Jim Thorpe. It is August,
and the wind sighs a hint of fall. The scent of sage
drifts down the mountains, over stone mansions,
to the Switch Back Railroad on the hill.
Here in Mahoning Valley at the bottom of a bowl of trees,
Sunday falls gently on my shoulders like late summer light,
here where the Mauch Chunk Creek secretly runs
below the streets, rushing all the way to the Lehigh River.
Somewhere in the woods I know the first curled leaf
is beginning to change. It has taken every ray of white sun it can,
and will take no more: it has held on for this very afternoon.
When autumn’s first chill steals down the valley, it will let go.
The afternoon light shifts on the wooden floor of the pub,
where men walked a hundred years ago, me with dark hair
and light eyes like yours, hearts burning hope
in a new land, hands full of black diamonds, lungs full of coal dust.
Maybe your ancestors and mine, these mining Molly Maguires,
their very lives owned by the Philadelphia & Reading Coal
& Iron Company. Innocents hanged for crimes invented by rich men,
lies spun to hold Irish mineworkers, to chain them to the land.
Their spirits haunt the old stone jail: Walk now, where their bodies
once swung before a crowd. Strange: the sound of bagpipes on the air.
Whispering voices rise from the dark earth, cry out from dungeon cells,
from collapsed tunnels far below. Their scattered bones
ache between coal veinsand underground streams.
Today, I raise my glass to all of them. To you.
The Guinness is dark and strong. The froth soft upon my lips.
Sunlight warms my pale cheek, as the old clock tower,
in the center of town, tolls the hour.
(Previously published in Philadelphia Stories)
* * *
We each have a history. History is where we live. Sometimes we must move to a new setting for complex reasons. Often unjust, often haunted, always mixed with emotions. Our memories, our memories of those we know and love flow like rivers, like the seasons.
-Ray Greenblatt
A Friend in the Theater & on the Court - Blog Post by David Kozinski
A Friend in the Theater & on the Court
by David P. Kozinski
Native Philadelphian Michael Toner, wrote an elegant, personal eulogy in memory of Brian Friel, in response to the death last year of the great Irish playwright – and, as I learned, short-story writer. Michael’s article was published in the November 2015 issue of The Irish Edition. Titled “The Magician of Ballybeg: Brian Friel (1929 – 2015),” the article relates biographical information about Friel and his work, and observes his place in the history of literature. It also offers insight about how the writer affected Michael’s life and work; as an actor, playwright, director and dialect coach.
My wife, Patti Allis Mengers, also an actor, director and writer, knew Michael from their participation in the Philadelphia theater scene before I met him. She introduced us to one another in the mid-1990s. Almost immediately he and I found that we had much in common; literature, ideas, a love of poetry and language, and, most importantly, the need for a tennis partner.
For the next five years or so we played singles on public courts in Northeast Philadelphia, at Roosevelt Park in South Philly – contending with the traffic noise from I-95, just above us – and even in Maine a couple of times when Patti and I visited Michael at his summertime digs in Belfast. Because of the aforementioned highway noise, we developed hand signals to keep score and to indicate whether a shot was in or out.
I do not recall either of us ever offering the middle finger as commentary on the other’s “out” call, even though our matches were quite competitive. The mood always remained friendly. In 2001 we began playing doubles with two pretty good athletes, which was both a bit easier on the legs and lungs, and also raised our games, somewhat. We did not become good tennis players, but we’ve had a great deal of fun and decent exercise in our mediocrity.
In his tribute to Friel, Michael notes, “Memories flood me of working Brian’s plays…the great ensemble of Volunteers under Deen Kogan at Society Hill Playhouse…the east coast premiere of Translations at Villanova, directed by the Abbey Theatre’s Paul Moore…acting and directing Dancing At Lughnasa in Portland and Belfast, Maine…performing my one-man show of Friel monologues, The Humors of Ballybeg, at Rowan University…doing Molly Sweeney, directed by Mimi Kenney Smith for Amaryllis Theatre…assisting the late Frank Olley in directing Aristocrats at Saint Joseph’s University…each play had its own unique magic, and you knew that with Brian Friel’s words on the page, you were in the presence of a master…” Through his friend, the late Professor Lester Connor, Michael met Friel and his wife Anne in the summer of 1980, visiting for tea at their home in Muff, County Donegal. This was shortly after Translations had been premiered by Friel’s Field Day Theater in Derry city and was touring to sellout crowds in Ireland.
I was able to attend several of the Friel plays in which Michael participated, including Translations, Aristocrats, and The Humors of Ballybeg which deepened our friendship and widened my rather narrow theater education. I’ve been in the audience when he’s acted in Eugene O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten, in Rock Doves by Marie Jones and in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Michael is a voracious reader and Vietnam vet whose own plays address a variety of themes. I’ve enjoyed his one-man show, Ever Yours, Scott Fitzgerald, its title taken from the closing the novelist used in his letters, and Michael’s large-cast Vietnam veterans’ reunion play, Another Dead Soldier.
Over the years, we’ve occasionally exchanged our own works-in-progress, as well as books by great writers; most of them of or about poetry. Gifts from Michael of collections I’ve savored by Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon and Richard Howard come quickly to mind. We participated in an evening of scenes from Shakespeare that Patti organized, upstairs at Philadelphia’s Plays & Players on Delancey Street in the mid-1990s. Highlights of the evening were Patti’s late mother, Eileen Kovatch Mengers, cast as one of the weird sisters in a script-in-hand scene from MacBeth and wearing two pairs of glasses in order to read her part, and Michael’s performance. I don’t recall which scene he acted from memory – it may have been from Hamlet – but I do remember that his entrance was arresting and his delivery natural, convincing.
In June, Michael was halfway through the four scheduled performances of the late poet and playwright David Simpson’s autobiographical play, Crossing the Threshold into the House of Bach, a production of the Amaryllis Theater Company. In the play, a blind organist, practicing J.S. Bach’s last chorale prelude late at night, strikes up a conversation with a youth minister that reveals experiences from Simpson’s own life, while exploring profound themes. Michael had completed two performances of the challenging play at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Elkins Park (PA). He was preparing for the second pair of shows at St. Mary’s Church at the University of Pennsylvania, rehearsing at the Amaryllis, located on Sansom Street, when calamity struck.
Walking to catch the train home to Northeast Philadelphia, sometime around 11:00 P.M. and in a heavy downpour, Michael was hit by a driver who fled the scene. The proximity to Jefferson Hospital may have saved his life, but the doctors could not save Michael’s left leg, which was amputated. (Don’t believe the postings on the web that cite his having lost his right leg.) This was Tuesday, June 9th, just days before the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference started, always a busy weekend for me. As soon as she heard the news, Patti visited Michael in the hospital and reported that he was awake and communicating, which was very encouraging. Meanwhile, the Philly theater community reacted with alarm and concern, spreading the news widely and quickly.
Gentle and intellectually inclined, my friend is nevertheless feisty; tough-minded and determined. Anyone who carves out a place for himself in the theater must be. These qualities have no doubt contributed to his recovery, as did keeping himself in shape through running, tennis and exercising at a gym for years.
In a phone conversation last summer Michael told me he had counted 15 visits to Jefferson’s O.R. during which he was under anaesthesia; four times for operations and the rest for other procedures. After being released from the hospital, he received a prosthetic leg and rapidly learned to walk with it. Michael credits the hospital’s staff and that of Moss Rehabilitation with excellent care. He also told me about meeting the daughterof the late Penn professor and U.S. Poet Laureate, Daniel Hoffman, at Jefferson. She was helping Michael plan his post-hospital care. They not only discussed aftercare, they talked literature, which was, no doubt, excellent therapy.
Before the injury, Michael was cast in a production of Eugene O’Neill’s Moon for the Misbegotten, reprising his portrayal of Phil Hogan. On January 20th, Patti and I attended a performance upstairs at the Walnut Street Theater along with a large, enthusiastic audience. “Phil” is an old farmer and Michael’s hindered gait seemed like a natural part of his character. While we were having dinner at a nearby pub after the performance, a couple approached our table. The woman told Michael that she hadn’t realized before the performance that he had a prosthetic leg. She thought his limp was part of the role!
When the play’s run in Philadelphia ended, the cast took it on the road for a month, visiting universities and arts centers in ten states. They performed the play and conducted master classes in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and New England and headed south to Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and then west to Indiana and Michigan. Michael told me the tour was both exhilarating and exhausting, as one might expect, and quite fulfilling.
With luck, Michael will be fitted with a new, computerized prosthesis in the near future that would allow for much greater mobility. I look forward to seeing my friend on the boards for years to come, and someday joining my brother-in-racquets out on the tennis court; volleying at the net, exchanging friendly japes, and laughing.