Getting to know Dick Lourie

Getting to know Dick Lourie

by Doug Holder

Somerville, has been described as the “Paris of New England.” And it's no wonder that in this often overlooked city that looms in the shadow of Boston and Cambridge, lies a rich mother lode of artists, poets and writers. One of the artistic denizens of our beloved burg is poet/musician Dick Lourie. Lourie is and has been for years an editor for the small press Hanging Loose. The press, founded in 1966, publishes Hanging Loose magazine, as well as individual collections of poetry. Hanging Loose is one of the oldest continually running small literary presses in the country. It specializes in bringing new writers' work to the surface. They have published books by such writers as Sherman Alexie and Dennis Nurske, and continue to maintain relationships with writers that they published more than thirty years ago.

Lourie is an accomplished poet in his own right. He has published a number of collections of his own poetry, and in 2000 released Ghost Radio Blues, a CD that mixes spoken word with the Blues. His work has been in many magazines, including Verse, Exquisite Corpse, Massachusetts Review. He has edited two anthologies of high school writers with Hanging Loose Press, and has worked extensively with students and teachers in poetry programs.

Lourie also excels in the medium of music. He plays tenor sax and trumpet with a 50’s rock ‘n’ roll band as well as a “Doo-Wop” group. He is retired from the University of Mass/Boston, where he worked as an editor.

Doug Holder: Dick, can you tell us about how you got involved with Hanging Loose? Can you talk a bit about your colleague, the poet Ron Schrieber, who died this summer?

Dick Lourie: Hanging Loose grew out of another magazine called Things. Things came from the William Carlos Williams line : “No ideas, but in things.” This sort of indicated the strain of American poetry that we have published. The press was started by Ron Schrieber and Emmett Jarrett when they were both students at Columbia in the 50’s. Emmett and I met at a poetry seminar run by the late Denise Levertov , a former Somerville resident, and I got involved with Things as a result. At the time Things was just too expensive to print. Letterpress printing in the mid 60’s was very expensive. We decided to change the magazine and make it less expensive. This is how Hanging Loose came about. Ron and Emmett came up with the idea to print the first issues as loose sheets of paper in an envelope. The cover was printed on the envelope. It was during the days of the! “Mimeograph Revolution.” Hanging Loose is old enough now to have seen the history of printing for the last fifty years. From mimeograph to computer disk. Today, I hardly see a sheet of paper!

Ron Schrieber, one of the founders of the press, was a brilliant teacher at U/Mass Boston, a gay activist, and a wonderful poet. He penned a poetry collection called John, about John McDonald, his long-time lover who died of AIDS. He also published some collections with Alice James, and other presses.

Doug Holder: In a press release you sent me, it stated Hanging Loose takes pride in the fact of never having to publish special issues for women, gays, or people of color. Do you feel there is a tendency to 'cage' poetry with labels?

Dick Lourie: On one hand literature is literature. On the other hand it is valuable to see African-American poets collected into one place. It just so happens we publish an eclectic group of poets. One of the jokes we have is that Hanging Loose is a leading Asian-American publisher. How did this happen.? I don’t know. We published Ha Jin; we published Turkish translations, it just happens. Maybe somebody who is interested in literature from an ethnic point-of-view sees what we publish, and thinks maybe we will be interested in what they have. Most of the books we publish are from poets that have been published in the magazine before. We’ve been around so long that people just know about us.

Doug Holder: Hanging Loose makes a point of publishing High School age poets. Was there, and is there a big need for this in the publishing world?

Dick Lourie: We have been publishing these poets since the magazine started. Two or three of us were always involved with poetry in the schools. I worked with kids in New York state, for instance. So we’ve always been interested in this. We were seeing some astonishing high school work, so it seemed appropriate to give high school writers a place for their work, that was not just a high school publication, but a professional journal. We did it, we still do it, and we have put out three anthologies of high school writing.

Doug Holder: Have any of your young writers gone on to careers in writing, perhaps even fame and fortune?

Dick Lourie: Some of them. One of our earliest writers, Sam Kashner--he just turned fifty-- just wrote a memoir about his experience at the “Naropa Institue,” and the Beat poets he encountered there like Ginsberg and Corso. We have a poet pretty active in NYC, Joanna Furman. Joanna is in her mid-twenties and published with us when she was in high school.

There are some young poets that make you say: “Where did this stuff come from!?” It is brilliant high school work. You think: “ How can this kid write like this.” Sometimes they go to college, get in the wrong hands, and their work becomes academic, mannered and self-conscious. We have to start turning them down. It’s sad. It’s hard to predict what’s going to happen--but there is brilliant work that comes from the high school.

Doug Holder: Do you feel that the small press is like the minor leagues of publishing? Do poets start out there, and then go on to the big presses, as they did years ago?

Dick Lourie: The situation has changed some what. With the consolidation of publishing, the publishing industry is in fewer hands. Sherman Alexie has gone on to succeed as a fiction writer. But, he remains with us as a poetry publisher, I guess, because, where are you going to go? There are so few poetry publishers out there. The big guys are not really interested in poetry books. And if they are, they won’t push them very hard. We published four of five books for Sherman. Fiction and poetry are different. There can be big money in fiction.

Doug Holder: In the poem from your Ghost Radio collection, 'Forgiving Our Fathers,' you write: “ If we forgive our fathers what is left?” Do we have an ongoing polemic with our fathers, that ironically keeps the memory alive for us?

Dick Lourie: I think with that poem I meant to leave it as a question. I didn’t have an answer in mind. The idea of forgiveness is that when you carry something around that you had with another person it becomes part of you. If you haven’t forgiven that person, it will remain with you. So the question arises: “If we forgive, what do we have left?”

Doug Holder: Has Somerville been a good place for your creative life. What do you like about the city?

Dick Lourie: My wife and I live in the Prospect Hill section of Somerville. For me this city is the right size; not huge, but it’s not a small town. The number and diversity of people is great. I have been a musician for years, but only when I moved to Somerville did I take up the saxophone. This has been a major part of my artistic life, besides poetry.

Doug Holder: Can you talk about your interest in music, and how it plays off your poetry?

Dick Lourie: My major interest in music is the Blues. With my CD I found I could take my poems and recite them with Blues music, and add my own saxophone parts to it. My connection with the Blues lead me to a town in Mississippi , Clarksdale. It has a big historic connection to the Blues. I am currently working on a book of poems about Clarksdale. This brings the poetry and music together for me.