Poetry Dogs to Read in Sleepy Hollow Friday Evening

No, it’s not like those Dogs Playing Poker paintings. 

Images and revealed life details will be shared by Susana H. Case, Elizabeth Haukaas, Laurence Loeb, M.D., and Myra Malkin, collectively known as the Poetry Dogs, at a reading this Friday, April 8, at 7:30 p.m., at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center in Sleepy Hollow.

The group’s name began as a joking observation that the dogs attending their weekly meetings were as numerous as the people.  As for many of us, their dogs were a significant presence in their lives and they became a lasting part of the group’s identity.  

All four poets are formally trained and have other notable accomplishments:  Case is a professor, Loeb a psychiatrist, Haukaas a corporate communications executive, and Malkin a former actress and lawyer. 

Case’s poetry has numerous references to her pets, her travels, and her love life.  The Cost of Heat, a collection of her poems, won the 2010 Pecan Grove Press chapbook competition.  It brings us right into her marriage to painter Eric Hoffmann, who did the painting on the book cover.  

In “Dark Matter,” we’re with them as she reflects on “dinners at 4 a.m. in the emptying 24-hour/ coffee shop on 3^rd Street……/ you’re too skinny for even me, angle and bone/ smoking away the night, honing your artist persona.”  And at home:  “the slick of moisture that spells summer,/ my cheap air conditioner that doesn’t blow//  hard enough, the grime in my sheets/ we hardly ever get around to changing./  We fight a foreign war./  We fight each other…”

She told me that her 25-year marriage is “two neurotic creative people with intimacy issues who are motivated to have a connection and you get a loving marriage with a lot of messy complication.”  And what of the chance of loss?  In “And Now Let’s Revisit Sex and Death” she writes  “Getting into bed with you, it’s afternoon,/  my mind on play….”   They stop to look at something on his lip, the mood broken,  "there’s a definite thing that doesn’t belong, like a dog in a tree…"  then the fear of loss and being left alone,   "always this conjunction of sex and death,/  it’s like the good twin hopelessly sharing a brain/  with the evil twin,”   the one she blames for drinking and smoking,  “...if you’re ill, I’ll shoot myself, kill you/  for carelessly leaving me in this …place alone.”

The intimacy of Case’s poetry is vivid and zesty.  Pain and pleasure and the everyday all co-exist in these brief visits to her full life.  Case is a sociologist, a professor at New York Institute of Technology.  She told me that her training in sociology is not as relevant to her writing about marriage and sex as it is to the research skills which she has used in another book, The Scottish Café, for which she needed to learn about pre-war Poland.  She is using those same research skills in a new series of poems that deal with “the nature of sexual expression and knowledge of sexuality in the nineteen forties and fifties in this country.”  For more, see her website at NYIT.

Laurence Loeb, M.D. is a Hartsdale psychiatrist who shares with us, in his poems, some of his fifty-five years of practice.  He has published in many periodicals such as The New York Quarterly, and will read on Friday from his chapbook, Asylum.  He told me that he has always been “interested in the music of language,” and in one of his poems, “AHA,” he alternates his voice with that of a distracted adolescent patient who goes from announcing that she knows “why treatment takes so long” to discussing her study of French in school.  She muses, “That’s what you must go through with every/ patient!  You have to learn their very own language,/ what they mean when they say something…”  He ends the poem with a simple, “Oh, yes.”  The ability to listen and distill meaning from a jumble of words and experiences reflects in his poetry.

Another of Loeb’s poems, “In Middle Night,” seems to refer to the attempt to understand what is going on in a world of many possibilities, and how interpretations are tentative and shifting.  He begins with the phrase “objects in mirrors are closer than they appear,” a deeper thought than car makers probably realized.   It is an evocative expression of deceptive superficial interpretations.  He follows this with “eyes closed no compass points inside outside up down,” then more opposites, then “hear see myself watch in an inner mirror until/ the saga disappears reappears as another tale/ of unsure import appears.”  The reading is a wonderful opportunity to spend a little time inside a mind of great depth and understanding of the human psyche.

In her poem Pas Seul, Myra Malkin fantasizes about the woman her late husband might have married had she been the first to die instead of him.  She speaks of the conversations they used to have, with what-if’s:  “We used to joke about it/  How each of us would fare/  without a spouse./  I said, who else would have me?//  But you’re a man, I said./  Casserole ladies will blossom…”  She goes on to speculate about how the second wife might be better than she:  “she doesn’t get bored,/  waiting for onions to soften…She’s nicer than I --/  she’s how I’d be/  if I could have you back.”

Gentle and sad and self-effacing in her poetry as well as in the brief biography she sent me, Malkin began her professional life as an actress.  She went to London to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, was a founding member of a “way-off Broadway” theater group, but chose to study law when her husband’s new job in Ithaca took her away from the city.  She was a legal services lawyer for fifteen years and wrote poetry “in fits and starts” as she had for her whole life.  She retired and returned to New York City ten years ago after her husband’s death, began taking poetry classes, and met the other Poetry Dogs.  Her 2010 chapbook, No Lifeguard on Duty, is the source of the poems she’ll be reading.  Most of the poems in it relate to the loss of her husband and her life afterwards.

In “Dodo, Dead As,” she creates vivid word-pictures about dodos and particularly one stuffed dodo that had been on show “for a century, almost,” at the Ashmoleon:  “Some donor must have pined for it,/  some country parson with a dusting wife/  and curio-encumbered study.”  But the poor stuffed dodo is de-accessioned by trustees who found it “wanting in appeal” and threw it in the fire “…from whence/  some stranger resurrected it….for a friendlier venue:/  'we beg your acceptance/  of these dodo-remnants.'”  And there it stayed, “the fire-fangled slowpoke dodo, dead/  as every snowflake self, each cancelled I.”  The seriousness and inevitability of death is expressed, but with the amusing cleverness of phrases such as “we beg your acceptance of these dodo-remnants” and “the fire-fangled slowpoke dodo,” both of which will stay with me for a long time, I’m sure.  For more of her work see the website of the Main Street Rag Publishing Company.

Elizabeth Haukaas’s work has appeared in many journals, been nominated for many prizes, and won the Walt McDonald First-book Award, which resulted in the publication of her book, Leap.  In a 2009 interview on NPR, she said she was so excited when she got word that it would be published that, when she was asked by the publisher if she would mind if they made a few changes, her first impulse was to say “You can publish it upside down!  I don’t care.”  Happily, they really just wanted to change the order a little bit and check out typos and commas.  

Haukaas  got an MFA seven years ago, which she said “was as rigorous an academic program as I have ever undertaken and transformed me as a person, writer and poet forever.”  She  told me  that she loves “the confines of poetry:  spare language, use of the image to evoke, use of the metaphor to get the mind, ear, and heart to sing, all the silences and loud crashings a poem creates inside one’s head, the utter heartbreak of a small collection of words.”

Haukaas has known tough situations, and the poem which got her the prize and the publishing deal, “The Blues,” is about coping with the illnesses of one of her three children.  Her daughter’s battle with multiple sclerosis and epilepsy is the subject.    It begins “Dilantin, depakote, copaxone, keppra:/  I love the small square room/ where my blue-gowned daughter/ sits on the exam table, swinging her legs/ because this week she can, which is why I also love/ prednisone a little.”  You can hear her read the whole poem on NPR Radio.

Haukaas’s ability to cope allows her to feel the positives about the medications, including the interesting sounds of their names, and about the other things and people that help keep her daughter going.  Her work is about “not looking away,” and her poem “Corrida” brings us to a long-ago bullfight, where her father took her to get away from the bad influences that can trip up a teenager.  The bull’s suffering was more than she expected:  “The banderillas sinking deep, lodging in muscle,/ fluttering vibrantly—I didn’t expect./  One of the boys put an arm around me:  No mires, no mires/ He whispered into the air.”  Then one of my favorite images,   “My father stood/ Scattering the boys like pigeons.”  At the end of the bullfight, the bull’s ear is offered to her and her father, but he refuses.  The offer had been “The gesture for bravery, for not looking away.”  Haukaas’s ability to look and to put her observations into her poetry, which she says is “the hardest writing I do,” in which “you have to do the most with the least” will probably get many other people to look longer at their own worlds.  For details about her book see it on Texas Tech University Press.

The reading this Friday evening takes place at 7:30 p.m. at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, 300 Riverside Drive, at the cozy, renovated former Philipse Manor Metro North Train Station.  For more information see www.writerscenter.org, or call (914) 332-5953.