Poems on the frontiers; a lobster lesson on the sea

BY DANA WILDE

OF THE NEWS STAFF

NOW: WORKS ON PAPER 1976-2006: POETRY AND ANTIPOETRY, by Tom Fallon; Transition Books, Waldoboro, Maine, 2007; 112 pages, large-format softcover, $13.95.

Tom Fallon, working out of Rumford, has been industriously stirring up the hinterlands of Maine’s literary scenes for at least 30 years. The hallmarks of his project – as it has strayed intermittently onto my radar, at least – have been energy and quirk. And those qualities are abundant in “Now,” which appears to be a retrospective on his literary oddity.

The book comprises efforts to burst conventional poetic boundaries. There are narrative poems made of shreds and shards of imagery, such as “Ghost Dance” –

“The natives corralled

in a hollow, Wounded Knee,

gathered around chief Big Foot”

– which seem strongly derivative of Charles Olson’s Maximus poems of 50 years ago. Poems such as “last word” splatter type over entire pages, also an old trick. Folded up and tucked into a flap in the back cover of the 103/4-by-81/4-inch book are “works on paper,” with instructions: “This work is a recent direction. They are to be placed on a wall: They should not be read ‘in the lap.'”

Many of the poems express tremendous exuberance for experiences of beauty, sex, social rage and mental illumination. The long poem “The Arena” recounts intense church experiences bordering on, or striving to be, mystical.

Some lines and verses are syntactically inventive, while others try so hard to innovate that they’re just clumsy, as though the Beat poets’ guideline, “first thought, best thought,” got stretched too thin. There’s also a persistent sense of Richard Cory-like isolation, with the ironic twist that the author has for decades emphasized his status as factory worker rather than town patrician.

What you get out of these writings is energy, much of it untamed. On that score, the journey for the author appears definitely to have been worth it. And in a literary age whose dullness is hardly to be believed, “Now” seems almost Blakean despite its shortcomings.

BY JACK WILDE

SPECIAL TO THE NEWS

HOW TO CATCH A LOBSTER by Leslie S. Moore; Custom Museum Publishing LLC, Rockland, Maine, 2007; 30 pages, softcover, $12.95.

“How to Catch a Lobster,” by Leslie S. Moore is a short book which briefly describes the steps you go through to catch lobsters. It also tells the things you need, and the people you need.

In the book, which is illustrated with a color photograph on each page, the lobster boat is called the Anne Elizabeth. It is named after the wife of ship Capt. Ed Black. She is the sternwoman of the Anne Elizabeth. It is like Ed’s assistant. There is also a dog aboard named Nickie.

The first thing they do in the morning is load buckets with herring, which are bait for the lobster traps. Then Anne starts putting the fish into bags that will go into the traps, and they go out into the ocean. They haul up the first trap, and find a crab. The book points out that sometimes you catch, not lobsters, but crabs, eels, or even starfish. When there is really bad luck you only catch seaweed. But in the book, they do catch some lobsters.

Each lobster needs to be a certain size so they measure it. If the lobster is big enough, rubber bands are put around its claws to stop it from pinching people and other lobsters.

They catch different sexes of lobster, and even one with eggs. They throw this one back. But when the bucket gets filled, they clean the ship and head home.

I would recommend this book for 3- or 4-year-olds. It’s easy to understand because of the simple language and the pictures, although I didn’t much care for the book personally. It wasn’t very interesting, and the language it used was too simple. It needed more personality. A small baby might like it for the pictures, although some of them were a little weird – the sculpin fish and the crab might actually scare a small child.

In addition to being the author of “How to Catch a Lobster,” Leslie Moore of Brooksville also has a business called PenPets, where she makes pen-and-ink portraits of people’s pets.

Jack Wilde is a junior at Mount View High School in Thorndike. He can be contacted on AOL Instant Messenger at PntBallAddict09.