Doug Holder
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Doug Holder was born in Manhattan, N.Y. on July 5, 1955. A small press activist, he founded the Ibbetson Street Press in the winter of 1998 in Somerville, Mass. He has published over 50 books of poetry of local and national poets and over 20 issues of the literary journal Ibbetson Street.
Holder is the arts/editor for The Somerville News, a co-founder of "The Somerville News Writers Festival," and is the curator of the "Newton Free Library Poetry Series" in Newton, Mass. His interviews with contemporary poets are archived at the Harvard and the University of Buffalo libraries, as well as Poet's House in NYC. Holder's own articles and poetry have appeared in several anthologies including: Inside the Outside: An Anthology of Avant-Garde American Poets (Presa Press) Greatest Hits: twelve years of Compost Magazine (Zephyr Press) and America's Favorite Poems edited by Robert Pinsky. His work has also appeared in such magazines as: Rattle, Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics and Poetry, Doubletake, Hazmat, The Boston Globe Magazine, Caesura, Sahara, Raintown Review, Poesy, Small Press Review, Artword Quarterly, Manifold (U.K.), Microbe ( Belguim),The Café Review, the new renaissance, Quercus Review, Northeast Corridor, and many others.
His two recent poetry collections are: "Of All The Meals I Had Before..." ( Cervena Barva Press- 2007 ) and "No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain" ( sunyoutside-2007). His collection "THE MAN IN THE BOOTH IN THE MIDTOWN TUNNEL" was released in the summer of 2008 by the Cervena Barva Press. It was a pick of the month in the Small Press Review (July/August 2008) He holds an M.A. in Literature from Harvard University.
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Death Is Communion
Stay inside. Let the gray matter
undulate against your skull.
Let your flesh
keep a tight
separate peace
with the world.
Wear the “self’
like some impenetrable
suit of armor.
Soon enough
you can let
down your guard,
let the life ooze
from its neat
self-containment.
And then
Commune
with what you must,
Dust to Dust.
Father Knows Best, Mother Does The Rest.
* The TV series with Robert Young “Father Knows Best,” was a good example of the “idealized” father of the 50’s.
The bland tyranny
of the cardigan sweater.
His smile
creased in brutal condescension.
Mother corseted in apron strings.
Bud--
with a Greaser’s
black defiant lock
rushes to the freedom
of the front door.
Father calls
“Princess!’
and she arrives
dancing with the dog
with an anxious, scripted
girlish giggle.
And don’t
you think
they would like to
kill him
just a little?
Infinity
In its lurid light
my gestures
are warped,
grotesque.
Each word
I write
engulfed, consumed.
The love I feel
petty,
comically ephemeral.
But still
in the
face
of this
frightening
endless expanse
I must still--
take a chance
and
dance.
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