Steam Bath

on the lower east side
every friday afternoon
the holy rabbis
come to get their
steam bath
and shower,
sitting on wooden
benches,
with the fog
enveloping them
so you couldn't even
see them,
these holy ones
turn into sexual
monsters, as they spew
dirty jokes, laugh
out loud
remark on the size
of their penises
and what they would do
to women,
and forget their holy mission,
you would be shocked
and surprised
but they still don't
care,
and later, the attendant
comes along with the
switch broom, to smack
their asses, till they are
red, till they scream in
agony,
as if to atone for all those
dirty thoughts they had,
feeling they deserve every whack
and thus,when they leave later on,
and return to their normal religious
virtues, they almost feel like
born-again christians


--- Ed Galing

In the summer shade of the Quercus Review (number eight)—featuring Ed Galing

In the summer shade of the Quercus Review (number eight)—Review by Michael Todd Steffen


The summer edition of Quercus Review (number eight), across the country from Modesta, California, will be of interest to Boston area readers and poets and writers. Its featured poet, Ed Galing, at 90 years young, stands as a great oak of the small press, with a publishing career that spans sixty-some years. Ed is known widely to the local eyes of the nation, not least to friend and editor of the Ibbetson Street Press Doug Holder from Somerville.
I became aware of Galing’s work first through the Ibbetson Street web site and in the pages of Holder’s Off the Shelf run weekly in the Somerville News.
The featured section in Quercus gives 42 pages to Galing’s work, the first four consisting of an informal essay by Doug Holder who characterizes Galing’s experience as a “hardscrabble life,” the poet’s compositional effect a “no-bullshit, call a spade a spade style” and his poetry’s turn of wit a “calculated ironic distance.” It is an apt description of a craftsman’s unseeming wisdom and acquired skill with words and sense and how to place them, ever so nonchalantly, as in ONE DAY IN A NURSIN HOME, in which Galing, pushing his wife in a wheelchair to the cafeteria for lunch, is asked where his is taking her, and—

i reply with a smile
i thought today we would go
into the forest, and see the
lake, and the trees, and maybe
stop in the pizza parlor…


Galing’s answer here is as wry as the names of those with whom he plays cards in SENIOR CENTER—

during
lunch.
every day,
there is moe epstein,
abie weisberg, and sam
adelman, and me.

Galing’s poetry bears on you to the extent that you are immersed in language. People of some age and wisdom are keenly attuned to language in a way others are not. Some of us must especially focus in order to perceive the music in what is being said. A dip of the hand
does not find the resistance of wading up to your breastbone in a pool or shoreline. Galing’s wit and expression are so at one with the fluency of his spirit, after these some years, the demarcations in the language, the poetry, simply breathes from him. Ed sums up the almost transparent union in his composition process:

I sit at the electric typewriter and bang them out… It is as if the poem has come to mind long before it develops on paper.

Quercus is a reputable biannual literary journal of poetry, fiction and b & w art, which has featured such names as X.J. Kennedy, Naomi Shihab Nye and Charles Harper.
Their number eight, along with this generous feature of Galing’s work, includes poets and writers from every direction in the United States, from Ashland, Oregon to Bristol, Rhode Island, from Houma, Louisiana to Broomfield, Colorado, not to forget poet Mary P. Chatfield from Cambridge, Massachusetts whose quiet description of waterfowl and winter ice melting on the river in “Waking” reads itself as carefully as the observation “the wing display the splashing the feathering/the reeds.”
The fiction section highlights Frank Arroyo’s “Acceptance,” written with an exquisite patience for detail and palpable ambience. Reserving the story’s plot for your curiosity, I can’t leave this article without quoting from Arroyo’s deft descriptive style, the narrator’s perceptions as a child lying in bed at night toward the end of the story:

The silence of the house turned the air around me electric. I could hear the steady hum of the refrigerator; a car slowly turning some corner, and then speeding up; the wind seemed to rise with some great force, as if the ocean had come with it, leaves crackling against the bottom of the house, the wind caught in the swaying trees, a branch tapping the roof in a steady rhythm. Outside my bedroom window, through the twisting and blurring black branches, I focused on the thick blue air of the back field, how deep and tangible it seemed because for a moment it became a dark ocean of waves rolling with the rhythm of the tapping branch, the bright windows of the distant tenement building bobbing in the waves…

For a peak at this issue of Quercus Review and ordering information go to www.quercusreview.com.

Ibbetson Update/Michael Todd Steffen/June 2008

*Michael Todd Steffen is the winner of the 2007 Ibbetson Poetry Award.
Labels: Steffen on Quercus

The Elevated by Ed Galing

The Elevated


the trains of new york rumble
through the night

overhead they snake along
curved rails, clattering
their way overhead,
as the train passes old
tenement houses, and people
walking down below
on the streets.

entering tunnels where it
becomes very dark, until it bursts
out into the light once again...

as a young boy my parents lived
close to the EL, and my bedroom window
faced the elevated trains, which
made noise all night long, as they lumbered
overhead, in the dark,

and often I would lie there in my bed
and listen to the rhythmic noise of the
wheels, and it was so strange that even
the noise they made was true to the
beat, making a kind of symphony of the
sounds, hurling the train through
poverty laden east side streets,

while inside the train itself, were many
drunks, gangsters, homeless people,
with no where to go, but just to ride
the rails all day and night,

while I listened to the sounds,
and was glad I didn't have to worry
about tomorrow.

The Boardwalk by Ed Galing

THE BOARDWALK

In those days we went
To the beach by train,
We would disembark
And walk the boards
Smellin’ the sea breezes,
Admiring the way the
Swelling waves hit the shore,
And curled away in
Rhythmic motion.

We were young
And we would get to the
Sand and open our umbrella
Shedding our outer
Clothes.

We had our bathing suits on
Ready for the dip
In the ocean.
We laughed a lot
In those days
I remember
Admiring the way
We both looked
For young flesh is so beautiful.
I flexed my muscles
And grinned as she snapped away
We got sunburned
We ate our hotdogs on the boardwalk
Made love in secret under a blanket.
We soaked in the juices
And loved ourselves,
And to hell with tomorrow.

--Ed Galing

Confessions of a White Hat by Ed Galing

Confessions of a White Hat by Ed Galing ( Alternating Currentc/o Propaganda Press POBOX 398058 Cambridge, Mass. 02139) propaganda.x.press@gmail.com $5

I speak to 91 year old Hatboro, PA. poet Ed Galing on a regular basis, and I am amazed that despite his advanced years his mind is still sharp, and he continues to regale the small press with his prolific output of poetry and prose.I am also glad that a local press: Propaganda Press, headed by Leah Angstman, has published a new chap from Ed. Ed has written extensively about his days as a boy on the streets of the Lower East Side of NYC, his stint as an occupation soldier during World War ll, and life in Amercia as a Jew, family man, and the many roles he has played in the expanse of his lifetime. His latest book "Confessions of a White Hat" deals with his time as a naval reservist in the post World War 11 Cold War era. In characteristic Galing style he gives the reader the taste and texture of the Navy-life as he knew it. Here Galing describes the milieu,and the sensibility of his place and time:


The Begining


we are a motley
crew
as motley as
you could ever wish
for; fresh out of
other branches
of the service,
after world war
two,
the Reserves
wave a silver
platter before
our eyes;
ex marines
soldiers
coast guard
Waves
we all clamber
on board,
not willing to
forget the
military yet;
the cold war
is still on;
unrest in other
parts of the
world.
Russian Bear,
i had to be nuts
but six months
after i get out
of the Army
i am now a
member of the
Naval Air
on Active Duty
at an air station
four miles from
home,
and the fat is in
the fire once
again.

Just Because by Ed Galing

everyone who wants his
name to be known
should write
his or her own obituary.

do not wait
for others to write
about you,
this is not a
good idea.

they will
not do
your name
justice.

no one knows "you"
better than yourself,
so while you are alive
sit down
and begin to
write your own obit.

make it a good one.
put in all the
wonderful details
that made you what
you are.

omit disasters,
do not mention pitfalls,
dwell only on your accomplishments,
how beloved you
were while alive,
and all the good
things you did.

send it to your newspaper
omit the date of your death

fill that in much later.

--Ed Galing

A PROMISE

BREAKING NEWS: Sam Pierstorff, the editor of the Quercus Review, will be reprinting my Ed Galing article previously in Rattle Magazine "Ed Galing: A Poet of the Greatest Generation" in the May issue. The issue will be a tribute to this 90 year old small press legend....









A PROMISE

i have an
obligation
to perform
as a Jew,
i have a solemn
duty,
not to forget
the past,
no matter how old
i become.

my heart as
always
yearns for
the homeland
for a place of our own
we Jewish people
so long without one,
I shall not
forget where i
come from,
the tenement house
on the lower east side
where the early
jews first settled
down in this new land


all of those memories
lodged in my brain
like a newsreel of the past
and i can still see
the ship, and those
who stood on the top deck,
watching as they
approached the statue
of liberty and freedom.

In my ninetieth year
in my mind
i have just been born.

BURLESQUE by ED Galing

BURLESQUE

I alway sat in the
front row
with the bald-headed guys.
I was eighteen years old,
and all i wanted
to do was see a naked
girl in the flesh.
it only cost about
a buck or so to sit
downstairs,
there was a blacony
for fifty cents,
but you couldn't see
anything looking down
on the stage.
the orchestra was loud,
the drums with the
boom, boom, boom
the trumpets so loud
it broke your eardrums.
the curtain came up
and after a half hearted
chorus number,
the strip teaser came out.
we all hollered, take it
off, take it off,
the stripper pranced up
and down the stage,
bit by bit she peeled
off her clothes until
the G string.
she would wiggle her
ass, give a wink and
dissappear behind the
curtain.
then i went to the
men's room to take a
pee.

PHYLACTERIES by Ed Galing

The phylacteries on
my forehead (small box)
were like a hot iron
the little Black Box
in the center of my forehead,
as if to brand me, once
and forever,
as a son, my father
wanted me to follow
in his footsteps
and the thongs on my left arm
wrapped around,
wrapped so tight,
as I recited the
"Shema" with
my father-
I at
thirteen felt like a
convict in irons,
and felt like I
was condemned
because God
could punish me
and I would die!
My father was Orthodox.
He wrapped himself
daily in ritual ceremony--
His proper shawl and mine
the mark of Cain
I wanted
none of it.