Archive of Doug Holder's articles

Steve Almond: MY LIFE IN HEAVY METAL

2008-07-21T16:55:00.000-07:00

Steve Almond: MY LIFE IN HEAVY METAL

By Doug Holder

This is an interview with Somerville writer, Steve Almond. * published in the Somerville News.

There is a saying from an old television show, to the tune of, " There are a million stories in the Naked City, this has been one of them." This statement referred to New York, but this could apply to Somerville, Mass. as well. And not only are there a million stories, but there is an ample supply of writers in our locale to pen many a compelling tale.One new kid on the block is Steve Almond, who has written a critically acclaimed collection of short stories, MY LIFE IN HEAVY METAL. Almond, who teaches at Boston and Emerson colleges and has been published in any number of prestigious literary journals, has completed a work that explores the capricious nature of that thing that bewitches, bemuses, and bother us, namely, LOVE. I talked with Mr. Almond at Starbuck's in the heart of Davis Square, Somerville.

DH: Many writers get their start as journalists. Off hand I can think of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen Crane. You worked as a journalist for awhile. Did this spur you on to write fiction?

SA: Yeah. I didn't have the courage to write fiction just out of school. I was too beat up by my family, lack of self-esteem,etc..I did want to work with language. I needed to be pushed into the world a little bit. I was a reporter and it was the best thing I ever did. It forced me to shut up and listen to people. It gave me an ear for dialogue. I learned to write every day. I was slowly getting enough recognition and I was able to develop confidence.I was in my late 20's; and I thought" You know, I got to break away from the corporate setting. I have to try fiction, or I will hate myself if I don't."

"My Life In Heavy Metal" was my first book, so it was a big break for me. It is so hard to get stories published, and so hard to sell them. You have to sell books. I love readings, but the hard part is how many you sold, the numbers.

DH:You live in Somerville, the Winter Hill section. Is Somerville a good place to be?

SA: I have lived in Somerville for four and a half years now. I moved straight from North Carolina where I was in graduate school. I got an MFA in Creative Writing at the Univ.of North Carolina. I didn't want to stay in the South.In New York I felt I would be too distracted. I came up to visit in Boston and found an apartment in Somerville, one of those big, old houses-I loved it. I also knew I wanted to teach, and I knew I could teach here. I love the Portugese Bakery around the corner from my house( Winter Hill Bakery). I like a place where I can hear both Portugese and Italian being spoken. I like being close to Boston,but not being right in it. I like not living in Cambridge; it's too expensive.
Somerville is working class; there are some artists;there are university kids who bring energy, not a lot of corporate types. I am happy to have a quiet niche.

DH:Have you written any Somerville based stories?

SA: None of the ones in this book. The one story in the collection that is informed by Somerville, is: " The Last Single Days of Don Viktor Potapenko." It is about a pickpocket,and a lothario. There is a poetic squalor to the scene. It has the idea of gangsters...you can't live on Winter Hill without hearing about about the Winter Hill Gang and Whitey Bulger. There is some romantic danger just down the street. It takes me a few years to soak up a place that I live in, in order to write about it.

DH:In MY LIFE IN HEAVY METAL,you write about love, lust and relationships. In spite of all the ironic and glib barbs thrown in this book, there is still a sense of romanticism. Do you agree?

SA: Oh yeah. I am glad to hear you say that. In its worst moments it's glib. What I wanted to write about is the heartbreak and the suffering of desire. That's what everyone goes through. If they don't I pity them. The stories are about how we throw our bodies before our hearts.We pay a price...always. There is a larger endorsement of the effort for love in this book. I hope people who read these stories feel less alone with their dangerous desires...mistakes.

DH: Critics say that you write beautifully about sex. Can you comment?

SA: I have no interest in exploiting sexuality. I think sex is one of the deepest emotional, intellectual and spiritual experiences. There is no such things as "casual sex." There is a lot more going on.

DH:You teach at a couple area colleges and schools. How does this help or hinder your craft?

SA: I teach at Boston College and Grub St. I love it. I am energized by it because I get a chance to talk about what I love, and get paid for it.

DH: Are you in touch with other Somerville writers?

SA: I knoew (poet) Joe Torra. Josh Barkin is a friend of mine. I try to find other young writers to hook up with.

DH: As the song goes" It's still the same old story"; but is it? Is the search for love the same as 40 or 50 years ago?

SA: It is very different. The force of society to get married is gone. Men and women suffer for it. The larger message of the book is if you don't know yourself, you are sunk. Previously you banged things out in a marriage, now there is an extended adolescence.There are real prices to be paid.

DH: Any new projects?

SA: I am working on a novel. I am slugging it out. I hope to be done with a draft at the end of the year.

Deborah M. Priestly, is much more than just a poet...

2008-07-21T16:50:00.000-07:00

Deborah M. Priestly, is much more than just a poet...

Poet Deborah M. Priestly is many things. She is the manager of the hub of Cambridge’s art scene, the "Out of the Blue Art Gallery," http://www.outoftheblueartgallery.com that she runs with her partner Tom Tipton. She is a gay rights activist, a survivor of sexual abuse, a mother of two daughters, a painter and an accomplished poet. Priestly has a number of publication credits and is the author of several chapbooks of poetry. Her latest two projects that she completed were the editing, along with Timothy Gager and Maria McCarthy, of the "Out of the Blue Writers Unite" poetry and prose anthology, and work on her own collection of poetry "The Woman Has A Voice." This collection deals with the sexuality and spirituality of women amidst their turbulent lives. Priestly who has read and hosted at the "Toast" poetry series, was a guest on my Somerville Community Access TV show: "Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."

Doug Holder: Can you give us a little history of the "Out of the Blue Gallery" in Cambridge that you run with your partner Tom Tipton?

Deborah Priestly: I am not a founder of the "Out of the Blue Art Gallery." It was originally at 168 Brookline St. in Cambridge, down the block from the "Middle East." Tom Tipton and Sue Carlin founded it about seven years ago. Tom and Sue had the idea to have a really cool space that would give artists a chance to show their work. They wanted to have art and music, etc... One afternoon Tom was sitting at the "Brookline Lunch" in Cambridge with Sue. The owners overheard them discussing this idea, and told them they could hang art at his shop. So they hung art in this luncheon spot. Later they hung art in a loft in Chinatown. One day they were having lunch at the same place, and the owner said: "I have a property available." The rest is history. So--that’s how it happened. Later we moved to 106 Prospect Street. Just like any great idea it started with a conversation and ended up a reality.

The first time I discovered the gallery I was jogging, and I landed out front of the " Out of the Blue Art Gallery." I thought: "What the heck is this place?" I told Tom and Sue that I thought this was a great space. I told them it would be great if they had a poetry reading. Then I basically walked out. At the time I was working at Boston University. Later, I walked in again, and said the same thing. Tom said: " I remember you. You are Debbie. If you think we should have a poetry reading, then you should do it." The rest is history. Now I am proud to say that I am part of this really cool idea.

DH: How do you define yourself as an artist?

DP: I guess as an inventor on-the-fly. I used to say I am a poet. Now I paint as well, but down deep I have to say I am a poet because of the way I think. People have told me that when I drink, and I am a little tipsy, I speak in verse. So down deep I am a poet.

DH: Do you think the troubles you experienced, sexual abuse, epilepsy, depression, etc... spurred you on to write?

DP: In a weird way yes because it gave me an outlet. For the times I felt alone, the writing was really like a friend. When I can’t write now I paint. I always tell younger people it’s really important to get what you are feeling out. If I didn’t have this outlet I probably would be using drugs, and drinking. The book "The Woman Has A Voice" isn’t about feeling sorry for myself. In the collection I try to show people there is a way out of the darkness. There is resolution and hope.

DH: Why do you feel so many poets, and artists have been effected by mental illness?

DP: I think a lot of the times artists are more aware and sensitive to their environment. I don’t want to use the word "mental illness.’ I just want to say they may be over sensitive to the stimulus around them. I react strongly to a siren for instance, while a friend may find it a mere annoyance. I’m just more sensitive to the stimuli.

Marc Widershien interviewed by Doug Holder

2008-07-21T16:46:00.000-07:00

Marc Widershien interviewed by Doug Holder
April, 2001, Boston, Massachusetts
A Lucid Moon Interview no. 11

Marc Widershien has completed a memoir, The Life of All Worlds, due to be released before the end of the year by the Ibbetson Street Press/Stone Soup Poets. This book will deal with Widershien's boyhood in Boston during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Widershien, 57, is currently teaching at Springfield College of Human Services, and Massachusetts Communications College in Brookline, Massachusetts. Marc is also an accomplished poet, artist and musician. He has worked as a Ph.D cab driver, bookkeeper, bookstore owner, and librarian. I have known Marc for a short while, but I quickly realized that there was a lot to learn from him, especially about the life of the creative person in America. In spite of personal and professional setbacks, he kept his eye on his seminal vision. Now as a mature artist he describes himself as a student of the word, and retains an aura of energy of a much younger man.

DH: I always ask this question of poets I interview. How did you become one? Was it something that started very early, or did you gradually grow into it? Was there a dramatic defining moment?

MW: I am still not sure. My mother and aunt edited a tabloid called Chai Odom Bulletin (I mentioned this in The Life of All Worlds). I remember the deadlines, the excitement. It reminded me of one those fast talking films you would see in the 1930s where reporters are screaming into telephones. Everyone is running around in circles. These were called "screwball comedies." Sirens blare, a cub reporter rushes in to say there's an elephant loose in Central Park that kind of thing. I felt ignored, but at the same time, drank in that energy. I can still hear those old Royals clicking away like butterflies. That was one incident. In 1961, I was at the Eastman School of Music, studying the violin. I was in low spirits by the middle of December. Mr. Cooper, our English teacher, would play these strange poems on records: "Let us go there you and I..." "The Sea of Faith Too" They helped me define my anguish. It was a catalytic moment. Months later, in a pouring rain, I sat at a table next to the window, felt peaceful, and started to write complete drivel. It was then I started to really read poetry with intensity: anthologies with poems by Keats, Arnold, Auden, Spender. Then I discovered Eliot, then Pound, Stevens, Baudelaire, and so forth.

DH: Explain the germ of the idea of The Life of All Worlds. How did all of this start?

MW: First of all, the book is subtitled, Fragments from an Autobiographical Journey. My father died in 1970, at the age of 64. I was 26, living in San Francisco, and attending San Francisco State. I knew that my father had been ill, but I didn't know how ill. I came home from work one day, and there on my outside steps was a telegram wedged under the door. It was from my mother, informing me of my father's death. I flew back to Boston in the middle of the night. I attended the funeral, and had to be back on the Coast the next day. Back in San Francisco, I mourned my father, but I felt inexplicably angry, as if we had unfinished business. One day, I was in Berkeley, and came across this book by Bishop James Pike, The Other Side. In the book, Pike was talking to his dead son (who had killed himself). I took temporary solace in the fact that there was an "other world." But not long after, I had some kind of a breakdown. There had been an incubation of about three months, and then the universe fell on me. I was out there, and psychically raw. I had to confront my grief and the deeper issues in life. In 1972, I left San Francisco, and finally ended up in New York. I think the book records the inspiration of a young man who in some ways is a very old man. The writing went on for several years.

DH: You told me that in San Francisco, you viewed a most beautiful sunset, and you had what you described as a "vision." Was this sort of a defining moment for yourself as a man and an artist?

MW: The sunset was in my head. You might call it an out-of-body experience. In fact, I remember few sunrises and sunsets in that fog-driven town. As I said, I think my father's death and my grief opened up a level of consciousness that I had never completely experienced. This-mind you-without certain "inducements." The only similar epiphanic moment that was so intense was when I was a four year old boy walking Revere Beach, Massachusetts, just after dawn. That was a sunrise!

DH: How did your background as a working class Jewish kid from Boston shape your artistic sensibility?

MW: Let me say that my experience was common to people of numerous ethnic groups. In certain kinds of literature, one writes about what one knows best. It was as Irving Halperin of San Francisco State once said: "Home sweet home." Dorchester gave me some sense of community, but it was a mixed bag. You had to fight, and I did. My feeling for the arts began, maybe, with my cousin Myron Press who was a fine pianist and an inspiration to us-because he was the oldest. Myron, without knowing it, gave us a great legacy. He died young, of childhood diabetes. From Dorchester, it was on to the Boston Music School where I eventually studied art and music. I also loved to paint, and my mother gave me a steady supply of oils and watercolors. She sacrificed for me in that way. I somehow bridged the gap between blue collar Dorchester, and the Brahmin Back Bay. I also had mentors and role models whom I dearly loved. It was a childhood of great ironies, both joyful and depressing. But I say this: If the past makes you cry, it was worth living-- because it shows reverence. In fact, time itself, is a mental construct. This is not to say we should wallow in that demon nostalgia. The past was not better than the present, just different. Poets are distillers, but they also get drunk on what they distill. At the same time, a person without a past has not lived "authentically." And part of the equation is that artists don't perceive the past as "the past."

DH: You have had a wide variety of jobs and careers. What have these experience brought to your work?

MW: I'm not sure how to answer that question. Work may have instilled in me the habit of writing, whenever, wherever I could sneak it in. You see, these piddle jobs had nothing to do with anything but making a buck. I'd rather make a poem. I've never been to a retreat, yet have always made time for writing. I wrote between the lines of my existence. Poetry is a sneaky business to begin with. Everyday we try to steal fire. Yet poems, for me, are no ordinary occurrences. First you play with the language, then try to make poems out of it all.

DH: Is the struggling artist experience a valuable one? Is suffering necessary, or is this just a cliche?

MW: Poetry is and will forever be a craft. I like to think of myself as a composer rather than a poet, because you need a certain amount of training just to get anything down on paper. Poets hang out their shingles all the time, before they are ready, often concerned more with self than with art. I'm against that. In some ways, poets can be very selfish and insensitive. All people suffer; they are like orange skins. And I've met a lot of thick-skinned writers too. I've seen suffering. You don't have to be an artist to suffer. What you do need to be is a constant observer of life's minutia. You may not see heaven in a grain of sand, but you will see the sand a helluva lot better. That kind of suffering is redemptive. "The wise man learns to enjoy his suffering," a sage once said.

DH: What themes do your poems most often deal with? From my reading of your work, there seems to be a strong spiritual sensibility to them.

MW: Mallarme wrote that all reality is spiritual. He spoke of the willed disappearance of the poet, of le neant. That man understood the creative process. That's my focus, but one must be very careful to make certain that art is more experiential than didactic. I love music and art and poetry. I love dance. Poets need to be aware of man's highest flights of the imagination. It is a process-always. I believe as the Paul Klee wrote: "Be arrows of fulfillment even though you will tire before having reached the goal." I also think that art is embodied in something else he said: "Man's metaphysical freedom contrasted by his physical limitations is the root of all tragedy." What else could a mere mortal like myself add?

DH: Finally, what advice do you have for the novice poet?

MW: Think of everything you do as grist. Talent is vital, but study, experiment, self-discovery through art is indispensable. When a writer is ready, the mentors will come-and they must come if an artist is to grow. Don't worry about imitating other writers. Eventually you will develop a style because "the style is the man himself." (Remy de Gourmont). Do not rush into publishing. That is deadly. Sit on the poem until you get it right. You may have to sit on it for years. And be prepared for the hard knocks of other people not liking your work. I have always agreed with Pound in The ABC of Reading: "Technique is the test of sincerity." Finally, be a servant of the word; it takes a lot of humility to create durable art.

The Old Photograph

The smiling apparition seems never to have lived,
but owes its existence to our own nostalgia.
My father no more than fifteen
wears his drill uniform with pride.
(A Jew In Russia could not wear a uniform.)
It is the grin of a fresh cadet in the new world
of Boston's West End, with cobbles instead of wheel ruts.
I write my epilogue in the sad dust of those generations.

Man on the Earth

L'Homme en terre place a l'homme sur la terre
--Paul Eluard

In the spirits of rain
in the heart's cry
the word is only a provocation.

It is man, wholly man
walking on earth
affirming his dignity,
feeding on a heritage sustained
by and sustaining the dad.

Man in the earth gives way to man
on the earth.

Gloria Mindock: A Doyenne of the Somerville Arts Scene

2008-07-21T16:33:00.000-07:00

Gloria Mindock: A Doyenne of the Somerville Arts Scene.

By Doug Holder

On an early Friday morning a slightly soggy Gloria Mindock came out of a torrential rain to talk to the staff of The Somerville News about her longtime involvement in the Somerville arts scene. Mindock has an impressive literary pedigree in our
artistically endowed city. She moved from a small town in Illinois to the “ville in 1984.
She told the News that it took her 3 years to get used to the relatively fast pace of her new hometown. But after her initial adjustment she was off to the races. She co-founded the Theatre S&S Press Inc., which published books and produced experimental plays. It received grants from such prestigious institutions as the Rockefeller Foundation. Later, after the theatre went “south”, she co founded the Boston Literary Review (BLUR), and was the editor from 1984 to 1994. After a decade of working as an editor of other people’s work she took a creative hiatus to concentrate on her own.

Mindock remerged after a long hibernation to find the Cervena Barva Press a couple of years ago. The press to date has published poetry postcards, chapbooks, and perfect bound editions of poetry by such poets as: Mary Bonina, Harris Gardner, Simon Perchik, George Held, and many others. Upcoming in her impressive lineup of talented bards are: Lo Galluccio, Tim Gager, Chad Parenteau and Steve Glines to name just a few.

But Mindock , who has been a drug counselor with the social service agency Caspar Inc. in Somerville for many years, had even greater ambitions. She recently took over the editorship of the online literary magazine Istanbul Literary Review, and along with her partner Bill Kelle, (who helps Mindock with all aspects of her many enterprises) publishes a newsletter that lists poetry readings around the country, includes interviews with poets and writers, as well as featuring breaking news from the world of the small press.

Mindock, along with her friend the poet Mary Bonina, has also launched a poetry reading series at the upscale Pierre Menard Gallery on Arrow Street in Harvard Square in the Republic of Cambridge. It has become the talk of the town, and “the” place to read along with the “Grolier Poetry Series” at Harvard and the venerable “Blacksmith” poetry series down the block.

Recently Mindock has published a collection of her own poetry through Somerville’s Ibbetson Street Press “ Blood Soaked Dresses.” This book of poetry pays tribute to the El Salvadoran people who suffered greatly during their Civil War in the 1980’s.

Of the Somerville arts scene Mindock said:

“The arts scene here is wonderful. Just look at the great events the Somerville Arts Council organizes each year. Somerville is booming with writers, painters, and actors. “

But she warns:

“If rents continue to rise in the area Somerville will see a mass exodus of artists. Most artists are not rich and struggle to survive. The city should do more for its artists, in terms of affordable housing.”

In spite of these worries Mindock feels lucky to live in this vibrant hub of the arts. She attends Saturday morning meeting of the Bagel Bards, a writers group that meets at the Au Bon Pain Café in Davis Square, and like a energized and colorful butterfly she flits from reading to art opening, supporting her many friends in the community. Somerville has been called the “Paris of New England” and one of its solid citizens is a woman who wears many hats, or as the case may be berets, Gloria Mindock.

To find out more about Gloria Mindock go to http://www.cervenabarvapress.com

TIM GAGER: An Interview with a Dire Reader

2008-07-21T16:31:00.001-07:00

An interview with Timothy Gager: A “Dire” Reader in Somerville, Mass.

Writer Timothy Gager is a man who crosses many literary genres. He has a new poetry collection out from Somerville’s Cervena Barva Press: “ this is where you go when you are gone.” In 2007 alone Gager had 32 works of fiction, as well as poetry published in online and print journals. Gager is the current fiction editor of the “Wilderness House Literary Review,” the coeditor of the “Heat City Literary Review,” and the editor of the fiction and prose anthology “Out of the Blue Writers Unite.” He is the cofounder of the Somerville News Writers Festival, as well as the Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Mass. The series was voted “Best Of” in the Boston Phoenix 2008. I spoke with him on my Somerville Cable Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: Tim you write both poetry and fiction but until recently you were primarily known as a fiction writer. Which do you identify with more strongly: poetry or fiction?

Tim Gager: I don’t define myself as exclusively either of them. I don’t wake up in the morning and say: “ I am a poet, I am going to write a poem.” Or “ Gee, I haven’t written a story for awhile, I’m going to write a story.” If something strikes me at a certain depth or certain level, that is when it is going to become a poem or a story.

DH: Charles Bukowski wrote that wine, classical music, jazz, the horses, and women were essential to his writing life. What’s on your list?

TG: Reading. Food. Love. Disappointment. Achievement.

DH: Any music?

TG: I like calming music. I like folk music. I also like to have baseball on in the background. I’m not really watching it on the TV. I’m not listening to it, but I like it on.

DH: Some writers claim that writing is like an addiction. Your take?

TG: Addiction is sort of a strong word. It can be viewed negatively. I think “passionate” is a better word. With passion-you always want to be in possession of it. If you have a passion for writing you want to spend as much time with your love as you possibly can.

If I wasn’t writing I would miss it. It would be like my best friend went across the country. But I would survive. But I can’t see myself giving it up. If I didn’t write there would be definitely a void.

DH: Baseball comes up in a lot of your writing, as well as other writers we know. What is it about the game that holds such allure?

TG: Baseball is the first reality television show. The drama is each individual’s numbers going up and down: it’s who is hitting better, who’s in first place. It’s a lot like life. Life has a lot of drama. There is also love in the game. When Manny Ramirez makes that great catch you love it.

DH: You co-founded The Somerville News Writers Festival. With the support of the folks at The Somerville News, you managed to book top name talent like Junot Diaz, Tom Perrotta, etc… You spend a lot of time on this. You are in essence making a showcase for other folks, and you are not getting rich. What makes Tim Gager, run?

TG: I promote other people, but, if I didn’t have the Dire Reader Series, The Somerville News Writers Festival, I would be missing out. The fact that I have these venues provokes people to check out my stuff. A lot of excellent writers’ work may never see the light of day. The fact that I founded these series is a big payoff for me personally. When in doubt (because it is subjective to a great degree of what good writing is), editors, etc… when they see that I have read with the likes of Franz Wright, may have second thoughts about my work. It has given me a lot of respect. I even getter better rejection slips…almost apologetic ones.

DH: But of course there is an altruistic reason, right?

TG: I believe writers should be treated like rock stars. It makes me happy to have an event where writers can be seen.

DH: The Norton and Tauro families, the owners of The Somerville News have been very supportive ,right?

TG: It has never been, “Hey, get 250 or 300 people or the festival is over…” I have that internal pressure on myself.

DH: In the poem “2A.M.” from your collection “ this is where you go when you are gone” you write provocatively about sex:

“On me
you push down
the weight on each bent leg,
cures my evils…”

Often you explore the ying and yang of your relationships with women. Is there more ying than yang or vice-a-versa?

TG: That’s a personal question. I use intentional double meanings. People may not get the poems—but it adds an extra layer. For instance: “ Pushing down on someone”—you might think that refers only to the physical aspect of sex. But it also means you are leaning on someone.

DH: You have run the Dire Literary Series for many years now. Recently it was voted of “Best Of…” in the Boston Phoenix. What’s your secret?

TG: It is funny how Dire evolved. I had thought it would be a variety show, like David Letterman, with all the guests as readers. It evolved into a house party, and everybody is involved.

You have to make your series fun—it has to move quickly—you have to be able to relate to people. You have to have “events” not just another reading. The audience should have a chance to schmooze with the writers for instance. Oh yeah, publicize…I am afraid not to.

An interview with Lo Galluccio: "Hot Rain"

2008-07-21T16:26:00.000-07:00

An Interview With Lo Galluccio

Lo Galluccio is a multi-talented artist. Her career includes time in the theatre, as a songwriter and vocalist with Roy Nathanson and The Jazz Passengers, and as a vocal artist who released CDs with the Knitting Factory label in NYC. She also worked with John Zorn, the renowned avant- garde Jazz saxophonist, and had a track on one of his compilations. Most recently Lo has released a collection of poetry with the Ibbetson Street Press (Somerville, MA), titled Hot Rain.

Lo recently recited her poetry at the Toast Lounge in Somerville as part of The Somerville News at Toast series. She has also read at the Warwick Art Museum, Boston University Barnes and Noble, The Out of the Blue Art Gallery, and other venues around the Boston area. I talked with her recently on my show, “Poet To Poet/Writer To Writer.”

Some Other Magazine: Lo, you told me that two major influences on you are the rocker/poet Patti Smith and performance artist Laurie Anderson. In fact, Smith approached you once and told you that you have a beautiful voice. Do you take anything from Smith’s and Anderson’s work, and incorporate and use it in your own alchemy?

Lo Galluccio: Laurie Anderson was someone who influenced me to stop being an actress, and start wanting to have an original voice and speak my own words in a certain way. I studied at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. My acting teacher talked about the performance artist Laurie Anderson, and how she had such a weird, and “right” perspective on things. I became interested in her pieces “Big Science” and “Strange Angels,” and eventually I just fell in love with her. She took the spoken word and made it into music. She is an architect of music and sound. She is also a conceptualist person.

Patti Smith is a totally different animal. To me, she is the saint of rock ‘n’ roll. She is a brilliant lyricist. When I encountered her, I was surprised to see that she was at my show at St. Mark’s church in NYC. But there she was, wearing a ski cap, and she had these blazing black eyes. She looked like a little crazy crow. She came up to me and said, “You have a beautiful voice.” I was just speechless, because she meant that much to me. That record Horses really inspired me, because she does a stream of consciousness that’s mixed in with rock ‘n’ roll riffs. There are expansive piano chords as well. My first record has been compared to hers a bit.

SOM: You have a beautiful, fey voice. I noted that in some ways your singing reminds me of the brilliant but doomed horn player Chet Baker. Is he an influence?

Lo: I was turned on to a Chet Baker documentary Let’s Get Lost. I got into how beautiful Baker was as a young man. Roy Nathanson use to call me the “ethereal girl” in the East Village. Roy is the lead saxophonist and band leader of the Jazz Passengers, and he is tremendous. His voice is so quirky, and his phrasing is so original. I was lucky to have him play on a demo for me. I was stunned by his voice. He said to me, “When you start singing in your own words, you are not going to want it the other way again.”

SOM: You told me you were discovered by Roy when you were watching your underwear revolve in a washing machine at a laundromat.

Lo: I moved to the East Village because someone said that is where the “weed” trees grow. In other words, where the outsiders, where the wild things are. I was in a laundromat on Second Ave. and Roy lived in a dumpy place around the corner. He saw me staring at my laundry and said, “You’ve got to be an artist because no one stares at their underwear as long as you have. Do you have anything to show me?” I said, “Yeah, I do, I have this collection of poems, Hot Rain.” I gave it to him, and he said “Wow...this stuff is really incredible. I want you to write a song with me for the In Love record that the Jazz Passengers are making for Windham Hill. That was my first professional gig as a lyricist. It was a thrill. Roy was old school...that way. If he saw you and read you, he would take a chance on you.

SOM: So many artists live hardscrabble lives. It is rare that I meet one who hasn’t suffered the black dogs of depression, drug addiction, or some bout of mental illness. Can you talk about this?

Lo: A friend of mine, a soul singer named Kore, said, “Everyone goes crazy at least once in their life.” Maybe “other” people are afraid to enter the sanctuary that madness provides for some artists. For me, I probably made it tougher on myself than I needed in some ways. I took one hit in New York that was really rough. I broke up with someone who mentored me. He was a partner and a lover, and we had a band together, “Fish Pistol.” We had an alchemy. And when that fell apart, I was devastated. It was tragic because we really loved each other, and we were really good together artistically. I made a mild suicide attempt. I was put in St. Vincent's Hospital psychiatric unit. At the time I fought like hell not to go in there. I really spent three hours in the ER, saying “you cannot put me in the locked ward!” They said, “Yes we can.”

SOM: Do you think meds and hospitalization compromise the creative process?

Lo: Not completely. I think it is good for some people to spend time away from the pressures of the world, whatever is hurting them. Being around other people and being supported by people, when that happens, and medication, when it works, is a good thing. At the time I was a raging bull about it.

SOM: How much of Hot Rain is fictional, and how much is autobiographical?

Lo: It is not fictional. I am a highly subjective person, and I like a high degree of subjectivity in poetry. I like Sexton, Lowell—the “Confessional” poets. Some of my poems play with identity and wild imagery. In those cases, the images take over the place of a rational narrative.

SOM: You told me that you were inspired by a voice you heard while taking a bath?

Lo: After I broke up with my boyfriend, I was in a lot of grief. So I went to a yoga center in New York. I went religiously, because I didn’t know how to heal myself. When I started to do yoga, I heard about the elephant-headed god Ganesha. I really worshipped his shrine. So I think that’s where the voice came from. It was like an echo of my own subconscious. It said, “Pale blue eyes.” “Wow,” I thought, “what is this...is this voice coming from outside of me?” I was enamored with Ganesha. He is a dreamer’s God. I still have this voice with me. When I got to NYC, it is more pronounced because of the energy of the city. I think Gods are protecting all of us, somewhere and somehow, in different cultures and traditions.

For more info about Lo, go to www.logalluccio

HARRIS GARDNER: A Bard who brings the Boston Area A Plethora of Poetry and Poets

2008-07-20T06:51:00.000-07:00

HARRIS GARDNER
A BARD WHO BRINGS THE BOSTON AREA
A PLETHORA OF POETRY AND POETS.

an article by dougholder

Eight years ago, a fairly obscure Boston poet, by the name of Harris Gardner, looked in a current issue of Poets and Writers magazine and noticed that a number of cities were advertising wonderful-sounding poetry festivals during April, National Poetry Month. Gardner, a real estate broker on Beacon Hill, Boston, and a substitute schoolteacher in the area, did his research and found that the city didn’t have a regular annual event of their scope and size. Gardner, 61, a man with an Einstein shock of frizzy hair and a frenetic manner was like a dog on a meat-truck with his brainchild for a Boston festival. He tells me, “My vision for a Boston national poetry event for National Poetry Month has always been to bring together performance poets,
student poets, academic and non-academic poets, as well as emerging poets. For the past seven years, I tried to bring together the brightest and the best talent in Massachusetts.”

Gardner is an admirer of the “spoken word” or poetry recital venues, and believes poetry should be a vehicle for social change and vision. He says that he raises the $10,000 to $ 11,000 dollars he needs to fund the festival by himself. He makes a point of paying each of the 50 plus writers a fee for reading their work at the
Boston Public Library-Copley Square Branch each April. The festival is over a full weekend, and requires a herculean effort to organize. In each festival besides the standard bards, he includes the participation of local schools, involving poets from the Boston Latin as well as choice elementary schools. Poets who have appeared in the festival include: Don Share (editor at Poetry Magazine), Steve Cramer (Lesley University), Afaa Michael Weaver (author of Plum Flower Dance), Sarah Hannah (author of Longing Distance), and many more.

The Boston National Poetry Festival, although a major component under Gardner’s “Tapestry of Voices” organizational umbrella, is far from the only thing this impresario has on his plate. He has two very successful series in the Boston area. One is the “Poetry in the Chapel Series,” at the Forsyth Chapel at the historic Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain. Once a month Gardner has four major regional poets, and sometimes poets of national reputation like: Thomas Lux. The chapel is usually packed, and “The Boston Globe” has lauded it as: “The coolest place to hear poetry.” In the downtown crossing section of Beantown, amidst the buzz of commerce and traffic; Gardner has also made poetic inroads. He hosts a monthly reading (The second Thursday of each month 6:30PM) at Borders Books. The reading includes four featured poets, and an open mike that serves as a sort of talent pool for Gardner to pick future feature readers. Gardner has also hosted venues at the Warwick Art Museum in Warwick Rhode Island, a reading in the wake of 9/11 at the Cathedral of St. Paul in Boston, and he collaborates on an annual reading with the Whittier Association in the northern suburbs.

Gardner, although well-known as an organizer, is a well-published poet with two poetry collections under his belt, including credits in such literary magazines as: Harvard Review, The New Renaissance, Pemican, The Aurorean, Poesy, Midstream, Fulcrum, and Ibbetson Street. Gardner finds it frustrating that his poetry doesn’t get more attention like his other work does. The poet reflects about this paradox: “Being known as an organizer even more than a poet is indeed frustrating. I have to take some responsibility for that. I do not have time to submit poetry to as many journals that I would like to. Partly because of my organizational activities. I am most happy when I am writing a new poem that works, or being involved in a reading of my own or with others. I do get a rush of satisfaction if I get a poem published.”

Gardner first became interested in poetry at the tender age of fifteen. He grew up in the “City of Sin” as it is affectionately called: Lynn, Mass., a coastal city not far from Boston. His first published poem came during his fifteenth year and saw the light of day in a syndicated young folks’ page out of Cleveland Ohio. The poem surfaced in several newspapers shortly after. The budding bard regularly contributed poems to the “Lynn Daily Item” and the editor referred to the young Gardner as the “poet laureate.” His solo book of poetry, “Lest They Become” was published by the Ibbetson Street Press in 2003. A new book is slated to come out with the Cervena Barva Press of Somerville titled: “Among Us,” the theme being, of all things, angels.
Gardner is a dyed-in-the-wool Bostonian, and feels he lives in fertile poetic ground. Gardner opines that, “Boston has been known as the ‘Athens of America’ for all its fine and literary arts. There is a thriving poetic energy throughout the Boston-area that involves ‘town and gown,’ not ‘town versus gown’ I find there is considerable interaction between these two communities. We are in a golden age of poetry and the greater Boston area is abuzz and prolific with the output.”

Gardner was instrumental in the selection of the Boston Poet Laureate, Sam Cornish, and the new Cambridge Poet Laureate, Peter Payack. He feels that these poets will work well with students, have an accessible personality and will be willing take on a legacy project, such as a favorite poem project with submissions from the community-at-large. Gardner says, “They should also be willing to write commerative poems for inaugurations or visiting dignitaries, etc... and they should take the honor as it is intended.”

email harris at: tapestryofvoices@yahoo.com

Interview With Writer Luke Salisbury: An author who explores alternative universes of baseball, literartue, and political intrigue

2008-07-20T06:47:00.001-07:00

Interview With Writer Luke Salisbury: An author who explores alternative universes of baseball, literartue, and political intrigue.

By Doug Holder

Luke Salisbury is a professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. Salisbury, 60, is a man with a gift for gab, and the well-turned phrase. Eclectic in his tastes, Salisbury, with his signature rapid - fire cadence and disarming laugh, regales you with his anecdotes, his impressive knowledge of baseball, and his “alternative” universe of film, books and political intrigue he has spent many years pondering and writing about. He is the author of a number of fiction titles including: “The Answer is Baseball.” (Time Books, 1989), “The Cleveland Indian” (Smith, 1992), and his novel about the great filmmaker D.W. Griffith “Hollywood and Sunset” (2007). His writing has appeared in such publications as “The Boston Globe,” “Ploughshares,” “Cooperstown Review,” "Pulp- smith,” and others. Salisbury received his M.A. in Creative Writing from Boston University and lives in Chelsea, Mass. with his wife Barbara. I interviewed Salisbury on my Somerville Community Access TV show ‘Poet to Poet/ Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: You said the dawn of Elvis, the Beatles, liberated you from the buttoned-down, all boys purgatory, prep school world you grew up in. Who were the writers that liberated you when you were coming of age?

Luke Salisbury: I went away to an all boy’s school when I was fourteen. I hadn’t been a big star with girls in the 7th and 8th grade. I felt I was isolated. I felt that I was never going to get off. There were things that kept my soul together: rock ‘n roll, literature, and baseball. My life was changed—saved or ruined—when I read the “ The Great Gatsby” when I was seventeen. I never wanted to do anything but write a book that good. I never will; maybe no one else will. The book explains even in the first page the whole world. Its pressures, its nuances, its mystery. Faulkner would be another influence. Why? Because there is something about being a teenager reading something you can barely understand, and you know it is over your head—but by God—you know it is worthwhile.

DH: Did you feel liberated by any 60’s era writers?

LS: I got that from rock ‘n roll, not from 60’s literature. I was not a Jack Kerouac person. I was not reading that stuff as it was being done. Later in the 60’s when I really needed to be on an island protected from my own demons and the demons around me, Nabokov became my obsession. I was traveling around Europe in the summer of 1968 buying his paperbacks at kiosks in railroad stations .I was always in an alternative world of baseball, literature and rock ’n roll. I’d love to name some 60’s poets but none of them were important as the “Rolling Stones.” And also what I considered classic literature. In the 60’s I spent a long time reading “Tristan Shandy” and “Tom Jones.”

DH: Did you engage in any of the “excesses” of the era?

LS: As many as I could. But there were three things going on. Political revolution which I thought was bullshit because I didn’t actually see anyone go out and fighting. Then there was the drug revolution. I always thought I was wrapped a little too tight to do the heavy duty stuff. Then there was the sexual revolution. It was a wonderful time to be a young man. I mean the middle and late 60’s, not the stuff that comes to us post “Easy Rider.” Love and peace that stuff was bullshit. It was about resistance. It was about resisting the draft and authority.

DH: You wrote two assasination novels. One was “Blue Eden.” Did you find the elitist intrigue, the possibilities of nefarious cabals behind the Kennedy assassination a source of fascination?

LS: It was. Because in the late 60’s I’d sit around and think about the novels I would like to write. I became obsessed with the Kennedy assassination. This stuff happens in front of your face, you don’t know what it is. There is subtext, there are stories… this is raw material. Everybody was taking a crack at it—the big time writers like like Mailer and DeLillo. But once you get into it you can’t get out.

DH: So who really killed Kennedy?

LS: I have no idea. Maybe Oswald, but he certainly wasn’t alone. It’s fascinating but it is like drugs and then you go home to detox and get out.

DH: In a recent book you penned “Hollywood and Sunset” you write of D.W. Griffith, the famed filmmaker, whose signature work was “The Birth of a Nation.” You refer to Griffith and others of his ilk as “sellers of light.” What are novelist’s sellers of?

LS: Ah… Inner light. All sorts of light. I got interested in Hollywood because it is really the center of power.

Basically D.W. Griffith invented Hollywood. He did everything with the two dimensional movie that could be done. He made the most racist movie ever produced: “The Birth of a Nation.” It made a huge amount of money and it took advantage of a racist sensibility of the time- what could be more American?

You had a frontier of the movies in his time. What happens when America hits the Pacific? We invent a dream-factory Hollywood. So I became very interested.

DH: How does this American sensibility differ from the European?

LS: “We” have to keep moving. We never stop. The past is used up.

DH: Does obsession help a writer?

LS: Yes. Who the hell is willing to sit and write a novel and then another novel, without it getting published? If they finally do get published the only people who read them is an obscure reviewer somewhere. But you keep doing it. It is madness. Poets can write a poem in five minutes or five years. There is no way to do this as a novelist.

Someone has to support you; or you have to support yourself. Many of us teach. So yes obsession helps. But just having obsession doesn’t mean that God will give you success, or that you have much talent. But it makes life worth living.

DH: Many writers work a variety of odd jobs to support themselves. You worked as a security guard for a number of years. How did that help or hinder your writing life?

LS: While I was a security guard I read “Gravity’s Rainbow,” and “Remembrances of Things Past.” I worked at Polaroid during the night shift. You have to survive if you are a writer. Especially if you are not in the generous bosom of a university. Faulkner said the best job for a writer is a piano player at a bordello. The hours are good and there is a lot of interesting company around.

I had many jobs in the 70’s. I worked in the Welfare Dept.. I worked for a school board in the Bronx, etc…

DH: You have taught at Bunker Hill Community College for over twenty years. How has this been?

LS: I have taught for 22 years. And it’s a great job. The average of the students is 30 years old. People come from everywhere, and there are no Yuppies. This isn’t Boston University. The kids and older people don’t think I am an idiot because I don’t make much money. Most of the students at Bunker Hill are there to learn skills, learn English, etc… I don’t think you can do better teaching adults in a public school, in a big city. It’s not the hell-hole that “Goodwill Hunting” characterized it as.

DH: You have been published by Harry Smith the legendary small press figure.

LS: Yes. Harry was basically a poet and published poets. He had a magazine from 1964 to 1998 “The Smith.” He had a policy of publishing unpublished writers. Half the magazine was devoted to their work. I had sent him something in 1970 and he turned it down. Five years later I sent him something and he sent me back an envelope with a “Yes” written across the front. He discovered me, and my friend the poet Jared Smith. He help start COSMEP—the seminal small press organization.

DH: So you have an affinity for the small press?

LS: Oh yes. There would be a lot less literature if it wasn’t for the small press. Where do we go if we are not one of the twenty people writing novels? I thank God for the small press and the internet—we can find each other here.

DH: You have written extensively about baseball. Why?

LS: You get a tremendous amount of respect knowing about sports. Baseball was that ‘alternative” world for me—it saved me.

Doug Holder

Interview with Poet Sarah Hannah: A Poet With Longing Distance.

2008-07-17T16:02:00.001-07:00

Interview with poet Sarah Hannah: A Poet within “Longing Distance”

Sarah Hannah is an educator, a poet with a PhD from Columbia University, and a sometimes rock musician. Her poems have appeared in “Barrow Street,” “Parnassus,” “Gulf Coast,” “Crab Orchard Review,” and others. Her original manuscript which became her first poetry collection “Longing Distance,” was a semi-finalist for the “Yale Younger Poets Prize,” in 2002. Anne Dillard describes her collection as: “…an extremely moving work. I’m struck by her intelligence of emotion and her unmistakable voice…Sarah Hannah is a true original.” She currently resides with her husband in Cambridge and teaches at Emerson College in Boston. She was a guest on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: Can you tell us about the “Yale Younger Poets Prize” which “Longing Distance,” was a semi-finalist for?

Sarah Hannah: That was a sort of near miss. That was in 2002. That was the year Tupelo Press accepted my book. I found out I was a runner up by phoning the editor, (not the judge) who was W.S. Merwin. The editor told me he remembered the book, and it was a semi-finalist, and it was a strong book.

Doug Holder: A lot of folks claim a PhD can ruin a poet. You learn how to write academic papers, but you forget how to write poetry. This does not seem to be the case with you.

Sarah Hannah: It ruined me in the sense that while I was writing my dissertation, I felt that I didn’t have time to write poetry. But I think the PhD made me a better poet. It forced me to really study poetry deeply. You have to grapple with ideas that are foreign to you. You read more than just contemporary poets. You learn to become a better writer.

Some people become sidetracked. They go into a PhD program and they emerge as critics not poets. There are more people around than you think that are poets and scholars.

Doug Holder: How did you come up with the title for your collection “Longing Distance?”

Sarah Hannah: I was writing a series of sonnets about a messed up love affair. You know “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” an all those clichés. So I came up with a line while I was in the country watching my husband scale a rock. I thought of the line: “I keep you at longing distance.” I thought it was just going to be another sonnet in the sequence. I wrote the sonnet, but then wound up expunging it from the book. I kept “Longing Distance,’ as the title.

Doug Holder: From our email exchanges I get the impression you haven’t had an easy life.

Sarah Hannah: I lived a hardscrabble life. I’ve seen life disintegrate . I wanted to put back my experiences in more metaphysical or formal terms.

I grew up in Newton, Mass., in the Waban section. A lot of neurosis going on there. I would say seven out of my eight high school friends were bulimic. I was not. My mother was hospitalized at the same “summer hotel” Anne Sexton visited.

Doug Holder: How does your teaching at Emerson College fit with your poetry?

Sarah Hannah: It’s fitting beautifully because I am teaching poetry, as opposed to composition. I am teaching traditional form to graduate and undergraduate students. I teach a hybrid literature and writing course.

Doug Holder: Why did you move from the bright lights and big city of New York to the more provincial environs of Boston?

Sarah Hannah: I am a lover of the underdog. Boston is the underdog to New York. I felt I had to come back. You know: “My end is my beginning, my beginning my end.” I have always missed Boston. I am a loyal person that way. My husband and I purchased a house in Cambridge. It’s right in the Central Square area. It’s a very diverse city. I often write at the ‘1369” Coffee Shop or ‘Grendel’s Den,” in Harvard Square. I feel rooted here.

Doug Holder: How does the lit scene here compare to the “Big Apple?”

Sarah Hannah: There are a lot of readings here like N.Y. I lived in N.Y. for 17 years. It took me 8 years to get “out” there. It seems much faster out here. I have a book though, that makes a difference. I was worried. It took a long time for me to establish myself in New York City. But I didn’t loose my contacts because I maintained my connection to the journal “Barrow Street,” and now I am an editor there.”

Eclipse

Every so often I am dilated; the pupilsSwallow everything—a catchall soup,Two cauldrons, stubborn in the bald glare
Of bathroom light. They are hunting sleep—The sea grass, the blue cot rocking;In sleep I am a Spanish dancer,
Awaiting my cue at the velvet curtain,Now and then groping for the sash,Or on horseback, abducted, thumping
Through pampas. I sleep too much;I curl in at midday, sheepish,In strange rooms. Clouds are hurrying by—
The walls, a wash of white; still my eyesAre mazing through their dark gardens,The great lamp shut, the crescents duplicating.
It is only a temporary state of affairs.The sun boils behind the moon

Interview with Poet, and Polymath Hugh Fox: Still a Wunderkind at 76

2008-07-17T15:55:00.000-07:00

Interview with Poet, and Polymath Hugh Fox: Still a Wunderkind at 76

With Doug Holder

At the Sherman Café in Union Square, I met poet, translator, critic, playwright, Hugh Fox and his wife before a taping we were to do at Somerville Community Access TV of my show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.” Fox was visiting his daughter who lives in Somerville and teaches at area universities. Two of my next-door neighbors Kirk and Lucy joined us as Fox held court. At age 76 Fox no signs of slowing down. He regaled us with stories of his extensive travels, all peppered with his vast wealth of knowledge of ancient Aztec culture, mythology, literature, and publishing. Fox talks like a Bronx cabdriver, (decidedly from the side-of-his mouth,) and he is not afraid to use, to put it mildly, unsavory language. My friend described him as “Larger than life.” And so he is.

Fox, who was a tenured professor at the Michigan State for well over 30 years, recently completed a controversial memoir “Way, Way Off the Road” (Ibbetson Street) that dealt with many of the figures from the small press movement, a movement that has produced thousands of small literary magazines and books, and is the lifeblood of poets and writers of all stripes. Fox was a founding member of COSMEP, (a seminal small press organization), he published the well regarded literary magazine “Ghost Dance,”and penned the first critical study of the dirty old man of literature himself, Charles Bukowski. Fox has written and published many books and chapbooks of poetry, and has reviewed countless small press books for Len Fulton’s “Small Press Review.”

Doug Holder: Hugh you wrote critical studies of Henry James and Charles Bukowski, two vastly different writers. Whom did you have the greater affinity for?
.

Hugh Fox: I got my PhD from the University of Illinois and my dissertation was on Edgar Allen Poe. I was raised as an Irish Catholic, and all I read was Irish Catholic literature. I had no idea what was in the outside world. I decided to take on Henry James because it would be an Americanization process and I thought I would learn to write novels. I did like James’ work a lot.

I never intended to get involved with Bukowski. I was totally academic. And then one day I was in this bookstore in Hollywood, the “Pickwick,” (I saw Aldous Huxley at the store that day as well. I was reading him for years. There was this old woman standing next to me, and I said to her: “Look there’s Aldous Huxley!” She said: “ Don’t know what you are saying!” He heard us and then vanished!) So I bought Bukowski’s book: “Crucifix and the Death Hand.” I got a hold of his press LouJon in New Orleans, and they told me to look him up in the phonebook. So I called him up and said: “This is Hugh Fox. I love your work. I want to meet you.” He said OK come over tomorrow. He was living in a motel in Hollywood. I talked with him awhile. He took out these suitcases. There were all his books and magazines in them. He gave me five full suitcases. He told me if I saw doubles to keep them. My entire way of seeing the world changed after this. Bukowski and Henry Miller were big influences of change for me.

DH: You were friends with Harry Smith, the book publisher, and founder of “The Smith” magazine. Smith published such writers as: Duane Locke, Ruth Moon Kempher, John Bennett, Lloyd Van Brunt, Jeff Sorensen, Alan Britt, and Tristram Smith as well as my friends Luke Salisbury and Jared Smith. Can you talk about your relationship with Smith?

Hugh Fox: I’ll tell you what happened. Smith had no money at all. He meets Marian Pechak up in Rhode Island at Brown. So he marries her. Her parents die and she gets millions. So they move to Brooklyn Heights. They had a big Brownstone mansion. So Smith tells her he wants to be a publisher. His wife said:” Hey, we have the money do what you want to do”. So he started to publish. He had an office right by City Hall in New York City. I met Smith through COSMEP. I used to go to Smith’s all the time. I go between semesters, the summer; I’d go for a month a year for twenty years. Smith published everyone who was anyone. I did a lot of reviews for him. He paid me—I stayed at his house—he set up the basement for me. We used to go out for lunch and dinner. His wife told the kids to call me: “Uncle Hugh.” I was closer to Smith than anyone else. Through him I met Menke Katz who was a Yiddish writer.

DH: You edited the groundbreaking anthology “The Living Underground,” that our Boston Poet Laureate Sam Cornish was in. How did you get this collection together?

HF: It was formed due to my connection with COSMEP. This was the “Committee of Small Press Editors and Publishers.” Len Fulton and others formed it in the early 70’s. Len Fulton still runs the magazine “The Small Press Review and “Dustbooks Publishing” in Paradise, California. COSMEP used to have annual conventions around the country: St. Paul, New York, and New Orleans. Every convention had a huge reading. Almost every small press editor in the country was there. I got to meet all the writers and all the publishers. I got to know people in Boston, and of course Sam Cornish was in Boston, and as it happened he was included in “The Living Underground…” He was at the convention in Boston.

DH: What is an “underground poet?”

HF: Someone who is not published by the big New York publishers.

DH: What was “groundbreaking” about the anthology?

HF: We had living, contemporary small press poets. We had folks like Charles Potts, Richard Krech, and many others. We had a reunion almost forty years later in Berkley, Ca.

DH: How did you get involved with the small press literary award the “Pushcart Prize?”

HF: I got involved through a COSMEP conference in New Orleans. The Prize doesn’t have as much impact as it did in the day. I go to a Barnes and Noble today and nobody is
buying anything, everyone is there with his or her computer. Everyone is having coffee with their computers.

DH: Hugh you are the most prolific reviewer I know. How did you get involved with reviewing books, and why do you spend so much time on an activity that doesn’t provide you with monetary compensation?

HF: I became good friends with Len Fulton of the Small Press Review. Now, every four months or so I get a package of books to read. It’s good for me because I get to find out what’s going on with the poets. It influences my style—all these poets I read. It helps me get my name in the Small Press Review all the time. I want to be involved.

DH: Your are the doyen of the short review. How are you able to get to the essence of a book with such few words?

HF: Before I go to bed I always read a few things. Then I just react to it. It’s funny it is like I listen to an inner voice. The inner voice tells me what to write. The reason I got a degree in American Literature was really to learn how to write reviews of books. To react to books. My first draft of my Poe dissertation was horrible. My advisor said as much. He told me that I was going to write his way. He said: “ You are going to react, feel, and so forth. I learned to react. I learned this from academic teaching.

DH: You said you always considered yourself a wunderkind, a boy genius. How about now at 76?

HF: The same at 76. I haven’t aged mentally or psychologically. I’m still 26. I may have cancer of the prostate, arthritis, but my mind is the same. When I was in California recently I wrote 100 poems in two weeks.

DH: What do you want your legacy to be?

HF: I haven’t thought about it. I would like to see other people do the same thing. I want them to react to the world around them.

Interview with New England Poetry Club President: Diana Der-Hovanessian with Doug Holder, July 27, 2004, on Poet To Poet/Writer To Writer, Somerville

2008-07-16T17:55:00.000-07:00

Interview with New England Poetry Club President: Diana Der-Hovanessian with Doug Holder, July 27, 2004, on Poet To Poet/Writer To Writer, Somerville Community Access TV.

Diana Der-Hovanessian is the president of the venerable literary organization: The New England Poetry Club. Based in Cambridge, Mass., it was founded by Amy Lowell, Robert Frost and Conrad Aiken almost ninety years ago. Lowell's vision was to bring well-known poets to large audiences. In the 1960's through the 1980's the club became insular and provincial, with meetings held at the Brahmin enclaves of Beacon Hill and the Harvard Faculty Club. Der-Hovanessian changed this by inviting Russian poets such as: Andrei Voznesenky and Yevtushenko to read at the club. And since then scores of South American and Latin American Poets have visited and read there, as well as prominent American poets such as: Robert Creeley, X.J. Kennedy, Robert Pinsky, and many others. I spoke to Diana Der-Hovanessian on my Somerville Community Access TV show: Poet To Poet/Writer To Writer.

Doug Holder: How did you become involved with the club?

Diana Der-Hovanessian: I joined it when Victor Howes was running things. He asked me to be secretary. I said "I don't do shorthand." (laughs) He said: "No...No. Not that kind of secretary." So for eight years he had me do programming. I became president in 1980. It's been a long time and we are due for another election!

DH: Amy Lowell started the club. She was quite an eccentric character, wasn't she?

DDH: When I first went into the club we had people who actually knew her. They had interesting stories about the early days. She started the club in 1915, when she came back from England. She was under the influence of Imagists, like Ezra Pound. But Robert Frost and a group of Formalist poets took it away from her. Frost, who was the second or third president, got into big fights with the Imagists, in those days.

DH: Lowell's goal was to reach a large audience through poetry and poetry readings. Has this been your goal?

DDH: This vision of expansion had stopped for awhile when I came around. I felt like we should expand. Now we bring in name poets to make it more exciting. We also have our own members read. We also have free workshops for members.

DH: What is the mission of the Club?

DDH: To expand poetry. To bring people into the art. To show off the best. To be a forum for an exchange of ideas.

DH: Can you talk a bit about the poets who have read for you over the years?

DDH: We had an Irish festival some years ago with the help of Seamus Heaney, who is on our board. He brought a lot of poets from Ireland, like: Evan Boland. Some of the Club's other readers over the years have been: Robert Lowell, Robert Creeley Stanley Kunitz, James Merrill, to name just a few.

DH: Did you have a relationship with the Beat poets?

DDH: We did sponsor a reading by Allen Ginsberg. Once I went to the airport to meet a visiting poet, and Ginsberg was there with him. Ginsberg was wearing a tie. He told me that he was dressed up for the Club. I told him that he didn't have to do it. He turned his tie over and said, "Brooks Brothers. I got it at Good Will."

DH: What do you think of the Slam poets and the Hip-Hoppers?

DDH: We had a program for them at the Boston Globe Book Festival. There was someone on the Globe who wanted it: Patricia Smith. I thought it was fun. I love the fact that they memorize their poems. I envy them. I could do that when I was young.

DH: You are a respected poet in your own right. I believe you are a Fulbright Scholar, and have written extensively about the Armenian Holocaust. Can you talk about your education, and early influences?

DDH: I've been a Fulbright Scholar twice. I went to Boston University as an undergraduate. I studied with Robert Lowell at Harvard. I took his last workshop. It was really great. They said he wouldn't show up. But he did. He was there every single week. It was one hour of teaching poetry, and one hour of going over student poems.

I completed nine volumes of translations from the Armenian. I have always been interested in the Armenian Holocaust. When the Turks started the genocide against the Armenians in 1915, they started by murdering the leaders. You wouldn't think that poets were the leaders. But they started out by killing two hundred poets.

DH: How did you start the Longfellow House readings in Cambridge?

DDH: Erica Mumford was a board member. She and I were walking down Brattle St. We looked over at the Longfellow House and said, "Wouldn't this be a perfect place for a reading." We walked in and said, "Don't you want poetry too?" (They had concerts.) And they replied, “Sure, if you want to do it." And that's how it started. It's been going on for almost twenty five years now.

DH: Any plans for the 90th anniversary?

DDH: Depends on the funding. We want to bring our Golden Rose prize winners together for a big celebration. We are the oldest reading series in the country.

Interview with Tom Perrotta

2008-07-16T17:52:00.000-07:00

Interview with Tom Perrotta

Tom Perrotta is an American novelist and screenwriter best known for his novels “Election” and “Little Children” both of which were made into critically acclaimed, Golden Globe-nominated films. Perrotta co-wrote the 2006 film adaptation of his book “Little Children” for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Perrotta will be the headline featured reader at the Somerville News Writers Festival on Nov. 11. I interviewed Perrotta recently for “The Somerville News.” For information about the festival go to www.somervillenewswritersfestival.com.

Doug Holder: Tom for the last twenty-five years I have worked at the psychiatric hospital McLean Hospital in your hometown of Belmont so I am aware of what the town is like. In your book “Little Children” you seem to fashion the setting after a town much like Belmont. The Boston Globe once opined that Belmont was the most “boring” town in the state. How is it for a writer?
Tom Perrotta: I live about ten minutes from Harvard Square, so my cultural life isn’t limited to Belmont.

DH: From some of your novels that I read I get a sense of contempt for the ‘burbs. Are you of the mindset that the suburbs are the home of “broad lawns and narrow minds” as Hemingway once wrote?
TP: I have no contempt for the suburbs whatsoever, and am puzzled when people observe that about the books. I grew up in the suburbs and live there now. “Little Children” isn’t so much about a place as it is about a time of life — the period around age 30 when adulthood sets in for good — and about the ambivalence a lot of people of my generation feel about parenthood. Any of the dysfunction found in the suburbs can be found in the city and in the country, too.

DH: Were you influenced by any of the “chroniclers” of the suburbs such as: Cheever, Richard Yates, or Updike?
TP: Updike’s Rabbit books are a huge influence. I particularly love “Rabbit Redux,” the novel in which Updike creates a microcosm of the 60s in one house. I tried, in my own modest way, to achieve something similar in “The Abstinence Teacher.”

DH: Any favorite Somerville-based writers?
TP: Steve Almond, Pagan Kennedy.

DH: Did you ever dabble in poetry?
TP: Nope.

DH:This will be your second appearance in the Somerville News Writers’ Festival. We are quite grateful. I am aware that you will be on tour and will be reading at larger venues across the country. Do you have a commitment to the local literary community?
TP: I love the local writing community—I think it rivals any in the country—and I enjoy my hometown events way more than I enjoy being on the road.

DH: Are you a frequent visitor to Porter Square Books and McIntyre and Moore?
TP: They’re both excellent stores, though for some reason I don’t get to them as often as I’d like. I end up doing a lot of my book shopping in Harvard Square.

DH: Can you tell us briefly about your new book: “Abstinence Teacher?”
TP: “The Abstinence Teacher” is a novel inspired by the culture war that’s been going on for the past twenty years or so. It has two main characters, one a liberal sex education teacher, the other a born-again Christian, who live in the same community, and whose daughters play on the same youth soccer team. The novel explores the separate worlds that they live in, and also tries to shed some light on the things they have in common as well as on the things that divide them.

DH: It is a popular notion in literary circles that Hollywood can ruin a writer. William Faulkner said that if you are going to be ruined, you can be ruined anywhere—or words to that affect. What’s your take?
TP: Faulkner spent some time in Hollywood, and it didn’t seem to ruin him. I like movies, and I like writing for them. I just don’t see any downside to it, as long as I can set aside the time to keep writing fiction.

Somerville poets host Ed Sanders and his “Tales of Beatnik Glory”

2008-07-16T17:45:00.000-07:00

Somerville poets host Ed Sanders and his “Tales of Beatnik Glory”
Off The Shelf by Doug Holder

The Squawk Coffeehouse is a throwback to the bohemian coffeehouses of yore, with ample doses of off-key, off-the-wall, outside-of-the box poetry and song. Presided over by resident Somerville bohemes Lee Kidd and Jessa Piaia, Squawk located at the Harvard Epworth Church, 1555 Mass Ave., Cambridge (just outside Harvard Square), is a refuge for those of us who are still beatniks and hippies at heart. The doors for the readings open at 9 p.m. on Thursdays, and the readings usually last till 12 a.m. or so.

On Thursday, March 27, “Squawk” is going to host the poet, historian, and musician Ed Sanders, (opening for Sanders will be the musical group Dagmar2). Sanders is the doyen of the sensibility that “Squawk” embodies. Sanders is the founder of the FUGS ( a variation on a popular four letter word coined by Norman Mailer in his groundbreaking novel “The Naked and the Dead”) an influential 60's avant-garde folk/rock band, as well as the publisher of the much sought after “F--k You: A Magazine of the Arts.” He cut his teeth in the Lower East Side of NYC from around 1960 to 1970 and in his introduction to his autobiographical novel “Tales of Beatnik Glory” he writes of this once in a lifetime milieu:

“Many of the stories are set in the Lower East Side of New York City, where I lived from 1960 to 1970. The 60's were particularly intense in the Lower East Side, and I was in the middle of it as a publisher of numberless mimeographed tracts and literary magazines, and as the operator of the Peace Eye Bookstore, a cultural center and the location for some of the stories… It was at the Peace Eye Bookstore in late 1964 that Tuli Kupferberg and I founded the satiric anarcho-poetic folk ensemble known as the Fugs.”

Besides “Tales of Beatnik Glory,” Sanders is the author of “America, A History in Verse,” “1968, A History in Verse,” “The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg,” and others. He currently lives in Woodstock, NY where he publishes “The Woodstock Journal.” I conducted an interview with Sanders recently:

Doug Holder: What made you drop out of the University of Missouri and head to Greenwich Village?
Ed Sanders: I headed for New York University, at first to study math and rocket science; but switched to classics after a few semesters of the glory of Greek. I had many good times at the University of Missouri, but, since I was already steeped in current poetry movements, I wanted to be close to where I perceived the glowing nexus resided, and that was New York City.

DH: You wrote your first poem (a long one) on toilet paper. You sent it to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the founder of City Lights, and he published your first book. Can you tell me about the poem-- and what brand of toilet paper?
ES: Jail paper. I wrote Poem from Jail in two formats: on the backs of the insides of cigarette packs, and on toilet paper, which I kept hidden in my cell, since writing was forbidden. The poem is a long meditation on the Demeter-Persephone myth, plus material on Herman Kahn's Doomsday Machine, and from I.F. Stone's "Hidden History of the Korean War."
When I was released, I managed to smuggle out one copy of the Poem from Jail in my tennis shoe, all wadded up under my foot; then typed it, and mailed it to Lawrence Ferlinghetti who, to my everlasting gratitude, published it in 1963.

DH: Your book "Tales of Beatnik Glory" deals with your times in the Lower East Side of NYC in the late 50s and 60s. It seemed possible then to live the "Bohemian" life on the cheap. Can kids "afford" to live that way in today's climate?
ES: No rent control now. A person of youth needs three jobs: one for the rent, one for the art, and one for the fun.

DH: Ginsberg's " Howl" was a great liberating influence on you when you were a kid. Did it break you out of the corseted 1950's Midwestern sensibility?
ES: It seemed to liberate my consciousness in a way that many of the strictures of my upbringing had prevented, although I was raised by literature-encouraging, liberal parents. It helped me became an "American Bard," that is, a poet who takes public stances.

DH: Everything is high tech these days. You were part of the "Mimeograph Revolution" You put out a magazine "F--k You: A Magazine of the Arts." Can you tell me about the nuts and bolts of putting out a small press magazine back then. What did “F--k You” offer its readers?
ES: We were on the cutting edge, as they say, of the then-current poetry scene: published Ginsberg, DiPrima, Robert Duncan, Creeley, Olson's 'Maximus,' William Burroughs, Auden, Snyder, Dorn, and many, many others. It was given away free, and was much sought out during its three year run.
The actual mechanics of typing stencils and operating a small hand-cranked mimeo machine can be found, say, in my story, in “Tales of Beatnik Glory, Volume 1, "An Editorial Conference."

DH: You wrote a book "1968: A History in Verse." Is '68 the most pivotal year in that decade?
ES: 1968 showed the best and worst of a great nation. With its assassinations and broken dreams, riots and rebellion; but also its music and poetry, it's awful war that went on for another 7 years; but also the Prague Spring, Columbia, Paris, the riots of Chicago and the rise of Nixon, the break-down of the Democratic Party just three years after Johnson's Great Society.

DH: You were influenced by the Beats. Do you pick up "On the Road" with the same enthusiasm now as you did when you were a young writer?
ES: "On the Road" is not quite as good as many other novels of the century. I was more of a "Howl" fan than a Kerouacian.

DH: Can you describe how you became associated with SQUAWK, and what keeps you coming back?
ES: Well, I love that beautiful church. Its vibes are so powerful and historic. And Lee and Jessa have been friends since the time of the 1995 Beat Conference at New York University. They embody the best of the Community Spirit-helping all enjoy the fruits of poesy and center-left political power: the joy of freedom, and the strength of community action.

Off The Shelf by Doug Holder

The Squawk Coffeehouse is a throwback to the bohemian coffeehouses of yore, with ample doses of off-key, off-the-wall, outside-of-the box poetry and song. Presided over by resident Somerville bohemes Lee Kidd and Jessa Piaia, Squawk located at the Harvard Epworth Church, 1555 Mass Ave., Cambridge (just outside Harvard Square), is a refuge for those of us who are still beatniks and hippies at heart. The doors for the readings open at 9 p.m. on Thursdays, and the readings usually last till 12 a.m. or so.

On Thursday, March 27, “Squawk” is going to host the poet, historian, and musician Ed Sanders, (opening for Sanders will be the musical group Dagmar2). Sanders is the doyen of the sensibility that “Squawk” embodies. Sanders is the founder of the FUGS ( a variation on a popular four letter word coined by Norman Mailer in his groundbreaking novel “The Naked and the Dead”) an influential 60's avant-garde folk/rock band, as well as the publisher of the much sought after “F--k You: A Magazine of the Arts.” He cut his teeth in the Lower East Side of NYC from around 1960 to 1970 and in his introduction to his autobiographical novel “Tales of Beatnik Glory” he writes of this once in a lifetime milieu:

“Many of the stories are set in the Lower East Side of New York City, where I lived from 1960 to 1970. The 60's were particularly intense in the Lower East Side, and I was in the middle of it as a publisher of numberless mimeographed tracts and literary magazines, and as the operator of the Peace Eye Bookstore, a cultural center and the location for some of the stories… It was at the Peace Eye Bookstore in late 1964 that Tuli Kupferberg and I founded the satiric anarcho-poetic folk ensemble known as the Fugs.”

Besides “Tales of Beatnik Glory,” Sanders is the author of “America, A History in Verse,” “1968, A History in Verse,” “The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg,” and others. He currently lives in Woodstock, NY where he publishes “The Woodstock Journal.” I conducted an interview with Sanders recently:

Doug Holder: What made you drop out of the University of Missouri and head to Greenwich Village?
Ed Sanders: I headed for New York University, at first to study math and rocket science; but switched to classics after a few semesters of the glory of Greek. I had many good times at the University of Missouri, but, since I was already steeped in current poetry movements, I wanted to be close to where I perceived the glowing nexus resided, and that was New York City.

DH: You wrote your first poem (a long one) on toilet paper. You sent it to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the founder of City Lights, and he published your first book. Can you tell me about the poem-- and what brand of toilet paper?
ES: Jail paper. I wrote Poem from Jail in two formats: on the backs of the insides of cigarette packs, and on toilet paper, which I kept hidden in my cell, since writing was forbidden. The poem is a long meditation on the Demeter-Persephone myth, plus material on Herman Kahn's Doomsday Machine, and from I.F. Stone's "Hidden History of the Korean War."
When I was released, I managed to smuggle out one copy of the Poem from Jail in my tennis shoe, all wadded up under my foot; then typed it, and mailed it to Lawrence Ferlinghetti who, to my everlasting gratitude, published it in 1963.

DH: Your book "Tales of Beatnik Glory" deals with your times in the Lower East Side of NYC in the late 50s and 60s. It seemed possible then to live the "Bohemian" life on the cheap. Can kids "afford" to live that way in today's climate?
ES: No rent control now. A person of youth needs three jobs: one for the rent, one for the art, and one for the fun.

DH: Ginsberg's " Howl" was a great liberating influence on you when you were a kid. Did it break you out of the corseted 1950's Midwestern sensibility?
ES: It seemed to liberate my consciousness in a way that many of the strictures of my upbringing had prevented, although I was raised by literature-encouraging, liberal parents. It helped me became an "American Bard," that is, a poet who takes public stances.

DH: Everything is high tech these days. You were part of the "Mimeograph Revolution" You put out a magazine "F--k You: A Magazine of the Arts." Can you tell me about the nuts and bolts of putting out a small press magazine back then. What did “F--k You” offer its readers?
ES: We were on the cutting edge, as they say, of the then-current poetry scene: published Ginsberg, DiPrima, Robert Duncan, Creeley, Olson's 'Maximus,' William Burroughs, Auden, Snyder, Dorn, and many, many others. It was given away free, and was much sought out during its three year run.
The actual mechanics of typing stencils and operating a small hand-cranked mimeo machine can be found, say, in my story, in “Tales of Beatnik Glory, Volume 1, "An Editorial Conference."

DH: You wrote a book "1968: A History in Verse." Is '68 the most pivotal year in that decade?
ES: 1968 showed the best and worst of a great nation. With its assassinations and broken dreams, riots and rebellion; but also its music and poetry, it's awful war that went on for another 7 years; but also the Prague Spring, Columbia, Paris, the riots of Chicago and the rise of Nixon, the break-down of the Democratic Party just three years after Johnson's Great Society.

DH: You were influenced by the Beats. Do you pick up "On the Road" with the same enthusiasm now as you did when you were a young writer?
ES: "On the Road" is not quite as good as many other novels of the century. I was more of a "Howl" fan than a Kerouacian.

DH: Can you describe how you became associated with SQUAWK, and what keeps you coming back?
ES: Well, I love that beautiful church. Its vibes are so powerful and historic. And Lee and Jessa have been friends since the time of the 1995 Beat Conference at New York University. They embody the best of the Community Spirit-helping all enjoy the fruits of poesy and center-left political power: the joy of freedom, and the strength of community action.

Jack Powers Interviewed By Doug Holder: A Conversation On the late Gregory Corso

2008-07-16T16:31:00.000-07:00

Jack Powers Interviewed By Doug Holder:
A Conversation On the Late Gregory Corso
Lucid Moon Interview #9:

Gregory Corso, was a poet and a central figure in the BEAT poetry movement. He was considered the most "shocking' of the Beat poets. Corso, expertly played the role of the wise guy hipster, thumbing his nose at the powers that be,and " busting the chops" of the self- proclaimed mandarins of the literary world.
Corso was born March 26, 1930 in New York. His early history was marked by a litany of bad luck, orphanages and prison. While in prison he immersed himself in the classics, devouring the works of Dostoevsky, Stendhal and Shelly, to name a few. His education was furthered when he met Allen Ginsberg in a Greenwich Village bar in 1950. Ginsberg, later to be doyen of the Beat movement, broadened the scope of Corso's writing. Until this time Corso wrote in a very conventional style. Ginsberg expanded his horizons, introducing him to eccentric word play and Surrealism. In 1956, Corso moved to San Francisco, and eventually became part of this legendary literary movement. With Ginsberg, he wrote the seminal Beat manifesto, THE LITERARY REVOLUTION IN AMERICA. Over the years, Corso has written or contributed to more than 20 books of poetry, including : GASOLINE, BOMB and other works.
On January 19, 20001, Corso died in the town of Robbinsdale, Minnesota. He lived there with his daughter. I talked with Boston Beat poet Jack Powers, ( founder of the Stone Soup Poets ), about his recollections and perceptions of the man and his passing.

DH: How did you first come into contact with Corso? What were your impressions?

JP: I had Corso read for Stone Soup Poetry in the mid-70's in Boston. There was a great deal of interest in the BEATS then, and the audience was packed. It was two decades since the "pot started to boil," and some of the hip people were anxious to see him as well as the older poets from that era. I loved the natural music he had when reading his poetry, as well as his irreverence, which he expressed liberally on the page and in person. There is an old story of a reading Ginsberg gave with Robert Lowell. Corso was in the audience, and he interrupted the poets in midstream, yelling to the tune of, " What are you doing Allen!...Lowell is a murderer of Poetry!" He was to say the least, prone to public outbursts. Corso stayed at my home on a couple of occasions. The first time he stayed, he shared a room and a bed with his girlfriend. My partner at the time was sleeping in the adjoining room. After I left for work, he lifted up the sheet where he and this woman lay nude and beckoned her...the guy was always on! I remember once before a reading Corso wanted his money up front. I never had much money. I used a credit card to send him a 100 bucks as a retainer. He wanted 400 when he got in Boston. When he arrived in Boston, he told me he wanted the 400 before the reading. I was counting on using the proceeds from the gate, but I managed to come up with it. My bell rings, there is Corso. I hand him the 4 spot.He hands the money to a guy behind him. The guy gives him a package. Corso then asked, " Where is the bathroom?" He was wearing black pants, and low black shoes.When he came out there was a dime sized blood stain on his white socks...need I say more? He went on to do the reading that night. He pretended to be Corso. What I mean is, in spite of being wasted, high, he was able to go through the motions and put it over. He had an edge to his voice that was arresting. Of course I was from the projects like Corso, so I found it appealing. He was authentic. I saw his "authentic madness."

DH: In Corso's poem, ELEGIAC FEELINGS AMERICA, he writes of his deceased friend Jack Kerouac,...O and when it's asked of you,/ What happened to America/has happened to him/ the two were inseparable/like the wind to the sky/is the voice to the word./ How do you think Corso linked Kerouac's fate with America, and the notions connected with it?

JP: Corso was writing that Kerouac was coming from the working class, with a "Joe six-pack mentality." Like many Blue Collars, he was essentially patriotic. He was buying into the life that America offered. The American dream of reinvention, limitless possibilities, hitting the road and starting all over again, died along with Kerouac. Kerouac died in his mother's house, a broken man. You can't marry your mother. What he believed America was, proved to be an illusion. Kerouac sought the geographical cure instead of the vertical one. Ginsberg told me if Kerouac learned to sit and meditate he would of still been alive. Kerouac bought into the material culture. He wore the badge of Eastern religion, but it didn't mean anything. In this poem Corso saw Kerouac tragically barking up the wrong tree.

DH: In 1954 , Corso lived in Cambridge,Ma. At the Harvard Library he poured over all the great works of poetry. In fact, his first published poems appeared in the Harvard Advocate. He even wrote a play that was produced by Harvard students, " In This Hung Up Age" Did your paths cross at this time? Was Cambridge and Boston a nurturing place for the struggling artist, in the 50's?

JP: It was not. That's why I started STONE SOUP, in reaction to this reality. I remember going into the Grolier Bookstore in Cambridge, and being treated like I literally stunk. The 50's were nuturing to the Yale Younger Poets, the academics, certainly not the struggling artist. I did not know that Corso was living in Cambridge at the time. This was a pre-HOWL, and not many folks heard of him and the others.

DH: Can you tell me about the Beat Manifesto Corso and Ginsberg wrote, THE LITERARY REVOLUTION IN AMERICA?

JP: Its purpose was to shake the cage. America needed a blaze of raw energy . We were getting too complacent, fat and comfortable. When Eisenhower became president, we were saying, "this can't be our future." We were called around the camp fire, outside the castle, the government, and the academy. Eventually, one by one people joined us and that's how the 50's lead to the 60's. The manifesto's purpose was to drive a spike through complacency. Personally, as a project rat it effected me. I quit my job and I jumped a bus to San Francisco. It was a great experience. It was liberating. I didn't care where the parachute let me down. It was the key to unlock my own cage.

DH: You told me the other day, that CORSO outlived his expectations, and became a caricature. Can you explain this?

JP: I really meant the whole BEAT movement. The BEAT movement has become ritualized, rather than spontaneous. Nothing remains original.

DH: What was Corso's most notable contribution to the BEAT movement?

JP: He brought us honesty, irony and satire. He was a great clown. The poet, Leo Connellan, called him the best of the bunch. I don't agree, but Corso was far less inhibited with a sense of form...you didn't know where he was coming from, or going to go. What he was saying was there is no rules with poetry. Just as long as you are using as much of your total self as possibe.

Doug Holder, copyright: 2001, all rights reserved.

INterview with Somerville Poet Afaa Michael Weaver

2008-07-16T16:28:00.001-07:00

Interview with Somerville Poet Afaa Michael Weaver

Afaa M. Weaver is a Somerville poet, playwright and educator. He is a veteran of 15 years as a blue collar worker in the city of his birth Baltimore, Maryland. He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for poetry while working in factories. He eventually got his MFA degree from Brown University. He is a member of the inaugural faculty of the first workshop retreat for African American poets, and is currently a professor of Literature at Simmons College in Boston. He recently edited These Hands I Know: African-American Writers on Family, finished the poetry collection Multitudes, Plum Flower Dance, as well as writing plays and journalistic pieces. Weaver won the 2008 Pushcart Prize for poetry. I talked with Afaa on my show Poet To Poet: Writer To Writer on Somerville’s Cable Access TV.

Doug Holder: Who influenced you, and what spurred you on to write poetry?

Afaa M. Weaver: Oh, the usual adolescent turbulence I suppose. In 1974 I met Lucille Clifton. She lived in Baltimore. She and Dr. Valerie Sedlack from Morgan University were my mentors. Our relationship continues today.

My influences were Langston Hughes, Conrad Aiken, who edited "Poetry of the Negro"

for the Library of American Poetry series.

DH: Do you label yourself as an African-American writer?

AMW: I do consider myself an African-American writer. My particular take on that is if I embrace that, I also embrace my chances of freedom. If I spend time dancing around it, in a very ironic way, it will capture me.

DH: You edited an anthology These Hands I Know… How does this differ from other anthologies of this type?

AMW: It is the first anthology of its kind. The first anthology of poetry and prose writers, primarily fiction writers, to deal with the subject of the Black family. African-American culture is very insular and closed because of the history of racism and slavery. We could not afford to reveal our private self to the world due to physical danger…even to this day. We’ve had to hold back because of the precarious position that we are now in as a culture. Some of us are not doing well. We can affirm our own humanity for ourselves and the rest of the world by letting some of our self loose on the rest of the world. We can let them know we do see ourselves as human beings contrary to opinion of other people. We do have a very human life.

The media for a very long time would not take stories of romance involving black people because of the misconception they didn’t have a romantic life. It was viewed as purely carnal. I am looking at the early development of musicals in this country. Today,

choices are still made along color lines. I am addressing a unbalanced system.

DH: Personally, do you experience racism in this so-called "Athens of America"

AMW: Yes. When I go to Harvard Square I just sense the way people respond to me.

Some times it is too much, and I don’t even go there. I don’t like walking into stores and see people respond in thinly veiled dread and panic when I walk through the door. This happens in HARVARD SQUARE, the center of liberalism and privilege.

I enjoy Somerville. It has the eclectic and diverse nature that makes it for me. I like have a Peruvian cafe down the block, or a Asian grocery store around the corner.

DH: In your poetry collection Multitudes your poetry deals with the ying and yang of your relationship with your father. Can you talk about this?

AMW: My father passed away this Spring. The poems I have written about him, gave me a way to talk with him. My father and I had the same challenges in our relationship as any father and son have when they deal with the old world of doing things and the new world of doings. It made it difficult to talk with my father.

It was a loving relationship. My father was not a communicator of feelings. I couldn’t say: " You know pop, let’s sit down and process this."

DH: Can you trace your development as a writer?

AMW: I say poet. I was a freelance journalist while I worked in factories. I wrote for the Baltimore Sun. I started a small press magazine called " Blind Alleys" with Melvin Brown, a Baltimore poet. It was eight and a half by eleven--fold over with staples. We were pretty productive. We had book reviews of our work, etc… But by 1985 I couldn’t sustain it, while making the transition from the factory to academia. I signed a contract for my first book while I was in the factory, and I applied to brown University. I was working in the factory for ten years, and I told my fellow workers: " you know I am getting out of here." They said: "No, you are going to die here with the rest of us." I said: No, I am not." When I got my NEA Grant--I left the factory for good. So I guess poetry is what did it for me.

DH: Do you think teaching is a hindrance e to your work?

AMW: I think it helps. There is nothing like the exchange that goes on in the classroom. I really enjoy helping someone find their voice, or appreciate poetry. Committee meetings and academic stuff doesn’t help me. Hey, it still beats the factory!

DH: What is it about Somerville that attracts so many writers?

AMW: You have the space to be eccentric.

2008-07-16T16:28:00.000-07:00

Robert Creeley at the Wilderness House in Littleton, Mass.

2008-07-16T16:17:00.001-07:00

Robert Creeley at the Wilderness House in Littleton, Mass.

It is always exciting to help start a new literary venture. Steve Glines, the founder of the “Wilderness House Literary Retreat” in Littleton, Mass. asked me to be a founding board member last Summer, and finally on Dec. 11 2004 we had our first event. We managed to get the renowned poet Robert Creeley as our first guest. Lo Galluccio, a poet and a friend of mine, joined me and we caught a train out of Porter Square, Cambridge to the hinterlands of Littleton, Mass. Steve Glines met us there and ferried us up to the “New England Forestry Foundation” lodge where the first event was to be held. The actual hunting lodge, where the retreat will be housed hopefully by the late Summer of 2005, is currently being renovated. Later, we inspected the premises, and found it full of promise, not to mention a spectacular view of the nature preserve below.

Lo and I sat down in a spacious room in the NEFF lodge, and enjoyed the crackling fireplace. Creeley was the first to arrive and looked amazingly hale and hearty, and much younger than his 78 years.

The event was advertised as a “chat” with Creeley, and that’s exactly what it was, a “chat,” not a formal lecture. Creeley was free to ramble on about his fascinating career as a literary legend. He talked about the many poets he knew; his years at the experimental “Black Mountain College,” to his experience with Jazz greats such as Miles Davis, to name one illustrious figure.

Creeley who grew up in Acton, Mass. has strong connections to Littleton, the home of the retreat. As a kid he swam at Long Lake which is just down the road from the retreat. Creeley was surprised that the natural beauty of the area has been preserved. Creeley felt that he could now thumb his nose at neighboring Concord that always had a better literary pedigree than Acton and Littleton. Creeley, tongue firmly in his cheek stated; “ I am glad to thumb my nose at Concord.”

Creeley, who taught at the “ Black Mountain College“, which in the 1940’s and 50’s was an innovative avant-garde institution located in North Carolina. Folks like Merce Cunnigham, John Wieners, Robert Motherwell, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Olsen, and others taught there or were students.

Creeley, who attended Harvard, was less than enthusiastic about the years he spent there. He stated: “ Harvard makes everyone feel like an outsider.” He said there was not a welcoming feeling there, and he felt inhibited to approach the formidable and often aloof professors. He said his literature professor at the time excluded the works of Hart Crane, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, much to his dismay.

Creeley told the audience that at first he wanted to be a prose writer. He laughed: “ I had a naïve sense of supporting a family writing a novel.” However, a publisher told him his novel was all about transitions; nothing ever happened. So Creeley decided to concentrate on Poetry.

Creeley had a plethora of anecdotes about poets he knew like: Allen Ginsberg and Anne Sexton. He recalled Sexton demanding a six-pack of beer before a reading she was to do in Buffalo, NY, that he organized. Ginsberg, commenting on the brevity of Creeley’s poems told him:” What a big book you wrote with such little poems.”

Creeley talked a bit bout his own poetry and process. Surprisingly he said he doesn’t make drafts of poems. If the poem doesn’t work he simply throws it away. He reminded the audience that writing poetry should be fun--not some solemn, painful process. He remembers William Carlos Williams saying “ Maybe we should tell them it’s fun.”

Creeley feels that poetry should be more about the act of “making,” than the final product. He rails against proponents of strict dogma regarding poetic form. He feels there can not be “set” rules for an art form we can not define.

The afternoon went quickly, as Creeley was as an engaging presence. The author Lois Ames was in the audience, and she and Creeley had a fascinating back and forth about Plath and Sexton, both of whom Ames has written extensively about.

Lo and I shook hands with the great man, and of course gave him a few “Ibbetson” books on our way out. We both thanked our lucky charms for this unique experience.

Doug Holder

Getting to know Dick Lourie

2008-07-14T13:49:00.000-07:00

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.

POET MARTHA COLLINS PUTS UP A “BLUE FRONT”

2008-07-14T13:45:00.001-07:00

Friday, January 26, 2007

POET MARTHA COLLINS PUTS UP A “BLUE FRONT”

Interview with Doug Holder

Martha Collins, the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection “Blue Front” ( Graywolf, 2006) walks into a room and exudes energy, intelligence and warmth. Collins who established the Creative Writing Program at U/Mass Boston, and currently holds the Pauline Delaney Chair in Creative Writing at Oberlin College, seems to have abounding enthusiasm for her work and an infectious curiosity about the world-at-large. Born in Omaha Nebraska in 1940, she earned a B.A. at Stanford University and holds a PhD from the University of Iowa. Collins is the author of five books of poetry, a chapbook “Gone So Far,” and two co-translated poetry collections from the Vietnamese. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation and others.

In her most recent collection “Blue Front,” Collins dissects a lynching her father experienced when he was a child in Cairo, Illinois. I spoke with Collins on my Somerville Community Access TV Show “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: The poet Richard Wollman told me he lives the “poetic life.” What would that be for you- and do you live it?

Martha Collins: I do. I write it. I’m not sure what it is. I think being a poet shapes the way you look at the world. I don’t write all the time. I don’t worry about it. There are periods when what I am doing is figuring out what I am going to do next.

It is work. It is natural work. It is work that engages me on every level. Both on the intellectual and emotional level.

So I don’t really know what the “poetic life” is. I am a poet, and my life gets filtered through that fact in ways I don’t even know.

DH: In your most recent poetry collection “ Blue Front” you dissect a horrible lynching that occurred in your father’s hometown of Cairo, Illinois. How much in detail did you father go into about this event?

MC: He didn’t say much at all. And when I was much younger I wasn’t asking a lot of questions. Once when I was a child we were driving through Cairo and my father told me that he saw someone hanged there. I had an image of a grizzly, public execution. Later I saw an exhibit of lynching postcards in New York City in 2001. The images were shocking. (This collection is now available online.) There were messages on the back of these cards. People kept them as souvenirs. I came across a series of postcards about the Cairo lynching. And for the first time I realized that this “hanging” that my father saw was a public lynching. By-the-time I came to this awareness my father had passed away—so I couldn’t ask him of course.

The point-of-view in this book is one of wonder. I did a tremendous amount of research, and used the Illinois State Archives extensively.
I visited Cairo several times.

DH: Is there a Southern sensibility down there?

MC. It is very Southern. Cairo is at the very tip of the state, where the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers come together. On one side of one river is Kentucky and the other side Missouri.

DH: How were you received down there when you were doing your research?

MC: People down there were terrific. The librarian was extremely helpful. I got into the vault and was able to look at the city directories. I talked to the city treasurer down there who was involved in the short and unsuccessful civil rights movement in Cairo from 1967 to 1973.

DH: Were you a Civil Rights activist?

MC: I was not much of an activist. I wasn’t unconcerned but I wasn’t an activist. I really became an activist during the Vietnam War.

DH: In the poem “Hung” from “Blue Front” you use stripped down language, short staccato bursts of language with great effect:

“ as a mirror on a wall, or the fall of a dress. A dress, a shirt on a line, to fasten to dry… with rope, like a swing, from a tree… from a pole, like a flag,… in the night, in the air, like a shirt, without, or without, or without only a shirt, without, like an empty sleeve.”

Was this approach used to convey the shock of the event?

MC: People asked about the style. I wrote it as I was finding out things. I didn’t know a lot when I started writing. I could not leave the subject alone. I was in Santa Fe on a residency, and I started playing around on the internet. I typed in “lynching,” etc.. The point of view of the book is “wondering.” What happened? I kept approaching it from different angels.

I obsessed about several aspects of the lynching. I just took a word: hang, shoot, burn, and sort of played with the various meanings of the words. It is a way of trying to get into the subject matter.

DH: You are known for your translations of Vietnamese poetry. How did you become involved with the language?

MC: Through a specific poet. This began at the William Joiner Center at U/Mass Boston. The center started as a veterans group in the late 80s’. Later they opened the workshop. From the very beginning they brought Vietnamese to the workshops. One of the amazing things was to see veterans from both sides reading together. I met Nguyen Tang Shih there and wound up translating him.

DH: Did you actually learn the language?

MC: I did. Kevin Bowen ( the director of William Joiner) called me up and said there is a course at Harvard and did I want to take it? I said sure. I took Vietnamese for most of a year.

DH: You are an editor of a literary magazine—right?

MC: I am the editor of Field magazine. It is published at Oberlin College in Ohio.

DH: You started the creative writing program at U/Mass Boston. Can you tell me about this?

MC: I started it in 1979. There were creative writing courses before. What I did was to give it structure.

DH: Dana Goodyear wrote in the New York Times Book Review of your book “Blue Front” that in least in regard to your syntax you are a language poet.

MC: I never considered myself in any school. There is an experimental quality in my poetry.

---Doug Holder

Poet Lisa Beatman: A Poet for the unsung workers of the Ames Safety Envelope Factory.

2008-07-14T13:37:00.001-07:00

Poet Lisa Beatman: A Poet for the unsung workers of the Ames Safety Envelope Factory.

Poet Lisa Beatman: A Poet for the unsung workers of the Ames Safety Envelope Factory.

Lisa Beatman has penned a new poetry collection “Manufacturing America: Poems from the Factory Floor ( Ibbetson Press) that was inspired by her stint as an Adult Literacy teacher at the Ames Paper Factory in Somerville, Mass. Beatman, after being outsourced from the factory, now manages the adult literacy program at the Harriet Tubman House in Boston. Beatman has won honorable mention for the 2004 Miriam Landberg International Poetry Peace Prize, and was awarded a Mass. Cultural Council Grant, as well as a fellowship to Sacatar Institute in Brazil. Her work has appeared in Lonely Planet, Lilith, Harvard Pacific Review, Rhino, Ibbetson Street and others. Her first collection of poetry was titled “Ladies Night at the Blue Hill Spa.” I spoke with Beatman on my Somerville Community Access TV show “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: What was it about the immigrant workers in a factory that made you want to write about them?

Lisa Beatman: There are so many different ways to answer that question. I’ll start by saying that I found so, so many stories compelling while I was at this manufacturing plant. The individual workers’ lives, the stories of immigration, and also the story of manufacturing. In the book there is a piece about my own family working in manufacturing in my hometown of New Britain Connecticut. It used to be called “Hardware City,” when it was in its heyday as a manufacturing center. Although most of the people in my family at this point are working in teaching, psychology, etc… I still have a great reverence for people working with their hands and produce things. I wish, at the end of the day I can hold something that I produced. Something very tangible.

DH: Has there been a reaction from the workers who were a subject of this book?

LB: On thing about teaching is that you develop a very close relationship with many students. This is especially true when adults are teaching adults. Some of the poems were inspired by individual employees, and I did show them individually. I was hired to teach English as a Second Language to line workers whose English wasn’t very good. Poetry is not always easy to get even for native speakers. Even though I tried to explain the poems to them they weren’t in a position to really tell their own stories. So I tried my best.

DH: How did they feel about someone who took the time to write the stories?

LB: It was very mixed. They tried to understand it. They always appreciated the time I took with them.

I worked with a wide variety of immigrants from many different countries. Some of them were very literate and some of them were not. Somebody who is not literate even in their own language and does not read at all, well, it is just a different orientation they have.

DH: You are a graduate of the Harvard School of Government. Does this explain the “social mission” in your work?
LB: I have spent my whole life both working in Adult Literacy, and also working inter-culturally. I spent several years working in various Latin American countries and in Spain. I do have a sense of mission in terms of communication, in terms of bringing people together, in terms of having as many people as possible from different walks of life communicate with each other.

DH: When you were in school did you ever think of poetry as a way of reaching people; as a cohesive force?

LB: I was not as much a poet then. Really it wasn’t until I was in my mid-30’s that I started writing. So it was after the Kennedy School.

DH: In your first collection “Ladies’ Night at the Blue Hill Spa” you write about a group of woman in a steam room in Norwood, Mass. In fact you did a reading there only adorned in a towel. Tell us a bit about this.

LB: I love reading theme poetry. I love linking ideas together. I like to link tangible ideas. “Ladies Night…” was inspired by an old fashioned steam room. Women would come together and let it all “hang out” so to speak. The spa in essence was the inner lives of these women, and the community of women. I realized in some ways I was writing about my mother. My mother, and the generation of women in her circle, would go to a beauty salon every Friday. In fact my mother had one of the last beehive hairdos. She was a small woman and I think she felt it gave her stature. I was rebelling against all that in the 70’s. But I have come to realize that my mother’s generation had these rituals to get away from the kids, husband, from being a mother, wife, etc… They could get pampered for once.

DH: What is your view of industrial America? You have worked both in academia and industry.

LB: Magic really happens when you bring sections together. Each of these sections has their strengths. I had the good fortune of being in this manufacturing plant that was part of the backbone of the American economy. To be in that milieu when the factory is dying in America, well, I felt compelled to document it.

DH: Characterize these workers you wrote about?

LB: I worked with line worker. Everyone is hard working. They worked overtime, moonlighted, most worked Saturdays, etc… The managers were not “Fat Cats” They were lean physically and worked very hard. Everyone had a strong work ethic.

DH: You run the Adult Literacy program at the Harriet Tubman House in Boston. Tell us about this?

LB: It is one of the oldest settlement house in the United States. We have programs for youth, adults, and seniors. And we have many other programs also. I run the Adult Literacy program. We are very practical. We help people to learn to read and write, get their GED’s etc…

To order book go to http://www.ibbetsonpress.com or order through http://www.lulu.com

Claire Messud: A Somerville Writer Who Loves Her Characters.

2008-07-14T13:34:00.000-07:00

Claire Messud: A Somerville Writer Who Loves Her Characters.

by Doug Holder

When I read in that other newspaper “The New York Times,” that Somerville-based writer Claire Messud has a new book out “The Emperor’s Children,” (Knopf) I was like a dog on a meat truck … I was hungry for an interview. Messud’s book made number five on the New York Times hardcover fiction list. I emailed her and she graciously agreed to answer a few questions I threw her way.

“The Emperor’s Children,” is about three Brown University post-grads, and their attempts to make it in New York City. 9/11 hangs ominously in the background, but Messud doesn’t define it as a 9/11 novel. Her most recent and past work has been favorably reviewed in many prominent publications Messud is just one of the many fine writers that live, write and thrive in Somerville’s rich literary soil.

Did it come as a complete surprise that your book would be a lead review in the New York Times Book Review, and in general--that it would get this much attention?

The NY Times Book Review was a great -- & wonderful -- surprise. In the past, I've written novels that have been well reviewed, but somewhere deep inside the newspaper, and I expected nothing different this time. In my wildest dreams, I could not have anticipated the lovely reviews and attention the book has received. I feel very fortunate indeed.

From what I have been reading about your book the characters seem rather self-absorbed. 9/11 is viewed as “How does this affect me?” Do you view your characters sympathetically?

My characters are like family to me -- after all, I've lived with them for years! I've always liked what Chekhov said: "It's not my job to tell you whether horse thieves are bad people. It's my job to tell you what horse thieves are like." I have great sympathy -- even love -- for my characters, who seem to me no better or worse than most people. They're self-absorbed, and limited, and self-indulgent, but they have positive qualities, too. I don't believe in idealizing characters, anymore than I believe in pretending that real people are perfect. None of us is without flaws.

Do you think we have developed a genre of “Post 9/11" fiction?”

Gosh. I don't know what that would mean. I do think that every fiction writer who is writing contemporary fiction has to take our times into consideration, and this means that 9/11 will be lurking there somewhere, however obliquely. Even if you set a novel on a fishing boat in Alaska, at least someone on that boat -- and probably everyone -- will have been changed, however subtly, by the global events of the past years. You can't escape it, unless you write historical fiction, or perhaps science fiction.

How do you like living in Somerville? How is it for a writer? Why did you choose to live here?

We moved here in 2003, from Washington DC, and we love it. It's a vibrant, complex, interesting place -- I love its diversity, and I love our neighborhood. On our block, there are people who were born in their houses and who know Somerville, past and present, intimately; and there are people, like ourselves, who are relative newcomers. Everybody gets along. I love that it's a place in which you know your neighbors, and kids play in the street, and everyone has an interesting story to tell. As a writer, you can't ask for more than that.

And how about advice for our aspiring young writers out there.

A tall order! I think the best advice I can give is to stick with it. If you love to write, you'll find a way to do it. That said, it's important to live life, too: I think it's wrong to think there's only one way to become a writer. You don't have to go to a writing program, and hide away from the wider world, although that can work for some people. If you really want to write, you'll make the time somehow. But it helps to find a community of other writers – whether through a writing group, or by taking classes, or just by finding like-minded people to have coffee or dinner with. Writing can be a lonely business, otherwise.

LIVING IN STORMS. Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic Depression. Edited by Thom Schramm.

2008-07-12T19:52:00.001-07:00

LIVING IN STORMS. Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic Depression. Edited by Thom Schramm. (Eastern Washington University Press Spokane, Washington 2008) $24.

The “black dogs” of depression are never far outside our gate, as Winston Churchill once wrote. The euphoria of mania and the freefall of depression are known in the field as “manic depression.” This rapid cycling tornado of mental illness has affected (according to recent studies) poets and writers to a greater degree than the general population. In fact in the New York Times awhile back it was reported that poets and writers, and particularly poets, have a shorter lifespan than the rest of the masses. Could it be we are more prone to suicide or have we just forgotten to take our daily dose of statins?

Having worked at the renowned Boston-area psychiatric hospital: McLean Hospital for the past twenty-five years, I have witnessed mental illness in all its infinite variety, from the locked ward to the outpatient milieu. McLean Hospital itself has a history of “thoroughbred mental cases” as Robert Lowell put it in his poem: “Waking In The Blue.” (A poem that is set at Bowditch Hall at McLean where I worked for a number of years.) Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and I am told John Berryman have been hospitalized at McLean. Anne Sexton ran her famed poetry workshops on grounds and later was treated on the locked ward for a short period. A friend of mine who was a counselor on the ward she was housed on asked Sexton why she always wore sunglasses indoors. She replied, “ Because I am a poet of course.” I have also interviewed the social worker to Plath and Sexton: Lois Ames. Ames is a poet in her own right and wrote the introduction to Plath’s novel “The Bell Jar.” And more than this, I have been treated for depression myself. And as a poet, I can tell you there is nothing romantic or poetic about depression and mental illness. And if you have been through it, even if it has given you some good material, you wish that it never would rear its ugly head again. Unfortunately, especially among some younger poets, the “Mad” poet has been lionized, and drug and alcohol abuse viewed as necessary as a laptop or pen or pencil in the writers’ life. I say it ain’t so..

So when the distinguished Boston University professor and poet Tino Villanueva handed me “Living In Storms”, (at a meeting of the Boston-area writers’ group the “Bagel Bards,”) a collection of poetry having to do with contemporary poets whose lives have been some way touched by manic depression, I was intrigued.

And perhaps there is something about our dark natures that lends itself to art. In the foreword to the collection David Wojan quotes one of my favorite poets Philip Larkin:

“Happiness writes white. It’s very difficult to write about being happy. Very easy to write about being miserable. And I think writing about unhappiness is the source of my popularity, if I have any—after all, most people are unhappy, don’t you think?”

I was happy to find in this collection that there were many poets I have read with, booked for events, interviewed, etc… over the years like: Lyn Lifshin, Daniel Hoffman, Robert Pinsky, Steve Cramer, and of course Tino Villanueva.

I think the poems in this collection capture the true tragedy of the illness through art not clinical reportage. The poems here capture the maw of the depression; with the poets’ struggle with his or her self, the world-at-large; the claustrophobic tunnel vision, with no light in sight. And it also covers the sizzle and no steak that takes the poet racing to the heights, only to drop like a dead weight.

Hayden Carruth in his poem “ Depression,” captures the relentless cycles of nature, and depression itself:

“ We have tried hard, have labored against the seasons/ like the geese, year after year, against mania, fear, / depression, death in the heart/ the endless mockery/of the children in our minds, we have hurled fat insults/ at each other/ have hurled silence, the same/occult and cloudy words over and over in the wet/ wind, we have persisted, tattered and worn out/ and sorry. / Thank God we love each other and can hold/ our tongues and go to bed, otherwise this/would be intolerable, traveling so far, so long, and never/
Arriving anywhere. Nor do the geese. / Nor the seasons.”

And in Tino Villanueva’s poem “Shaking Off the Dark” Villanueva, like a dyed-in-the-wool pugilist fights through the tight wrap of darkness.

“Distraught,
mad-eyed from told formulas
bound to rule my easy ways,
I look, I see,
but fail once more to know.
Such rites of life
can waste the wit;
can be like strictures
rushing to the head.
Mine is a palpable body
that cannot stand itself.

Yet, a rebellion overtakes the mind
the kind that breaks the shadow’s hold:
I ram a fist into the howl of the wind,
shake off the dark locked
within the hell of these rare depths.
The common street
and shifting sky become a song.”

Also in this collection are poems by William Matthews, Jane Kenyon, Liz Rosenberg, C.K. Williams, Leo Connellan, and many others.

Highly Recommended.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Jan. 2008

Close those goddamn doors: An Afternoon With Louisa Solano

2008-07-12T19:47:00.000-07:00

" Close those goddamn doors!: An Afternoon with Louisa Solano: Memories of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop"

By Doug Holder

On Aug 6 2006 at the Wilderness House Literary Retreat Louisa Solano, former owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop held court for a few hours of casual conversation concerning her experiences running the famed Harvard Square bookshop for over 30 years. It seems that almost every major contemporary poet passed through these doors at one time. Here is a sampler of what Solano had to say about the times and poets she knew:

Gordon Cairnie: (the founder of the store)

“These goddamn browsers, close those goddamn, doors!” This was a declaration often heard by Solano. Cairnie was “quirky,” and did have a temper according to Solano. Solano said, “After I bought the store I had a whole line of people who told me that Gordon ruined them emotionally. It was the way he talked to them.” Cairnie in part was reacting to the browsers who never bought a book, and the ones who shoplifted. Obviously keeping people out of the store was not good business sense. But Solano felt there was a prevailing attitude at the time that poets were abused by society, so poetry and commerce were viewed as totally separate entities. After he died Solano recalled that many folks thought it was a “sin” that she took over the store.

Solano on shoplifting:

“According to a study 98% of people steal. People steal because it is an adventure, a high. It’s like shooting up; you have to do more and more. You become an expert on justification.” Solano said that studies indicate that shoplifting is highest among people in religious orders. She recalled that a monk with a flowing robe ripped her off. She said, “His robe was a little less flowing when he went out."

Solano on Harvard Square:

"Whatever part of the country people come from, the suburbs or little working communities, they come to the square and reality diminishes. She continued:"People are walking in a state of grandeur. I remember being accompanied down the street by someone who said he was going to kill me because I was a Harvard capitalist!”

Solano on Robert Lowell:

“I met him twice. I thought he was homeless. He was carrying two bags full of newspapers, and he was disheveled. The first time he said to me: “Young lady. I want you to know that Gordon talked too much, and you should never do that.” He walked out of the store. A week later he came and said, “Young lady. You are not following Gordon. You don’t talk to customers.” I found out later that this was Robert Lowell.”

Solano’s favorite poet:

“Philip Levine. He has always been my favorite. I think his approach to poetry is wide open. He loved an audience. He was a great standup comic. I loved the love he had for the Jewish community. I really love him.”

Solano on the small press:

“I always thought the small press was the most interesting part of poetry. When I took over the store there was a big small press movement going on. This was the 70’s. Some magazines were printed on colored tissue papers, different sizes, etc… Most of the bigger presses were publishing Lowell, Sexton and Plath. They were not particularly democratic. Diana Di Prima was first published by a small press and then started her own, and it is still going strong. She has done translations, and poetry publishing.The University of Texas/Austin was wild about the small press. They probably now (besides the University of Buffalo) have the best small press collection.’“Black Sparrow Press’ started out selling books with three or four poems for a dollar. Most of the bookstores today would not accept these.”Even if you were published just in the small press; the fact was you were in a book on a public shelf. Then if things went well you would do another small press book. If things continued to go well, you would get known.

Solano on Charles Bukowski:

"He sent his poems out virtually everyday to every small press magazine out there. This totally demolished the myth of him as a disorganized drunk. He wouldn’t be able to do this if he was."

Solano on Ed Hogan founder of “Aspect” magazine and “Zephyr Press”:

“Ed was brilliant. He had a lot of energy. He talked endlessly and rapidly. He got a great group of local poets together, and got the magazine out.”

Solano on Allen Ginsberg.

“I loved Allen. When he died I thought the world would cave in. He visited the store when he was quite ill. He looked yellowish and diminished. I was shocked. I thought of him as immortal. He brought poetry in the open from a very closed 1950’s America."

On Jack Kerouac:

“When I first met him he was sitting down at Lowell House. (Harvard University.) He was wearing a checkered shirt, and sloppy chinos, partly because he was so fat. The audience loved him because he was what they expected. He was the crazy writer. At the end of the reading, Desmond O’Grady, a wild Irish poet (I was madly in love with him), and I escorted him to a bar in Cambridge. There was a young woman who announced to Kerouac and all the guys around him that she wanted a “multiple lay.” Kerouac didn’t do anything and just waddled off to the bar. We got him back to where he was staying and he passed out. The next day we met him at the Oxford Grill on Church St. in Harvard Square. The news came out that Plath committed suicide. Desmond threw his arms around Jack and very dramatically said “We are the only ones left.” Jack said,” Stay away from me.” He was homophobic. The last we saw of him he was walking down Church St. with two Harvard undergraduates looking for the perfect “Gold,” --
marijuana. "

Poet Miriam Levine makes the dark open

2008-07-12T19:45:00.000-07:00

Poet Miriam Levine makes the dark open

Miriam Levine is the winner of the 2007 Autumn House Poetry Prize for her collection “The Dark Opens.” She is also the author of “In Paterson,” a novel, “Devotion,” a memoir, three poetry collections, and “A Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England.” Her work has appeared in the Harvard Review, the Kenyon Review, the Paris Review, and Ploughshares, as well as others. She was a guest on my program “ Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer” on Somerville Community Access TV.

Doug Holder: I read your essay “Food, Sex and Betrayal” Do you often use food in your poems? Can you judge a person by the food he eats?

Miriam Levine: I’m not sure I want to judge anybody. Poets who call themselves “Poets of the Body” certainly would include food. They deal with the whole notion of the “Love Feast”: the meal you have with a lover, either literally or in the imagination. It is the food you would prepare for your lover, the food you would prepare for yourself, the food you would take from the lover’s body, and the lover from yours. We see this all the time. The Honeymoon has a special meal. There is the food that increases desire—the French are very good at that. I think food is entwined with the whole notion of pleasure. If you think of poetry as the spoken word, you can see the entwinement, —the sound of the word in the mouth—certainly. Whitman was known for that. He had some wonderfully delicious lines like: “Beautifully dripping fragments.” These words come from the mouth. So for me poetry is connected, sometimes connected to food.

Doug Holder: In your memoir “Devotion” you air a lot of your family skeletons. Philip Roth once said you have to be willing to insult your mother if need be to be a good writer. A good writer isn’t a “polite” writer. What’s your take?

Miriam Levine: Well I think you have to be honest to some extent. There are many ways to go about it. If you have the bird of judgment sitting on your shoulder saying: “Don’t, Don’t, you mustn’t say this!” then you might have a problem. If you muzzle subjects that are really central to your material (what Henry James called the “germs” or “seed’) you really are not going to write. In some way if you are writing good memoir you will betray.

Doug Holder: Did you alienate your family?

Miriam Levine: No. Not in the least. When the memoir came out I did a couple of readings in New Jersey, and I changed the names. When I was reading at one venue, my aunt yelled out from the audience “That’s me!” There was nothing in the material that identified her. So for some members of the family this was validating. My mother experienced a great sense of release when she told me these family secrets. So it was something that we shared. She said, “ Everybody’s got something.” I grew up with secrets and it was very important to release the shame.

Doug Holder: Again in your essay you write: “Metaphor gives my life meaning. I can also stuff myself with words and not get fat. Words are a pleasure in the mouth. My mouth is moist when I write.” So in a way you align writing with eating; a sort of satisfying mastication?

Miriam Levine: I do ally it with a satisfying mastication. But that’s not all there is. There is the music and the mind working at the same time. For some poets, and I hope I have this in my work, the held note, the music note, the pleasure of words. I view art as it was said in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” as “flaming amazement.”

Doug Holder: The poet Mark Doty was the judge of the Autumn House Prize that you won. Have you read his work? His recent collection “Fire to Fire?” Is your work similar?

Miriam Levine: I haven’t read “Fire to Fire” yet. I have read some of the poems that are in it. My knowledge of his work is spotty. I don’t know Mark Doty. I admire his taste and I admire his poems, and I feel very lucky that he chose this manuscript.

We do have similarities. I thought that never in a million years that Mark Doty would pick my manuscript. I was in awe. His work is elegiac—he likes to write of the dead. We share that. He love music and so do I. He wrote a wonderful poem about “Chet Baker” His work has a wonderful sense of music. The music that continues and the music that is lost. Lorca describes something that translates into “deep song.” The music escapes along the horizon to a point of common longing. And what we do long for we have often lost.

Doug Holder: In your collection “The Dark Opens” you have a poems that centers around the Winslow Homer painting “Summer Evening” In the painting there are two woman dancing with the backdrop of a vast ocean. You write:

“He got it right, the proportions
our place is as small as the woman dancing
in each other’s arms near the ocean.”

Do you think in these days, when we are out of touch with nature, we become centers of our universe, and forget the scale of things?

Miriam Levine: Absolutely. Absolutely. Particularly now where the star, the picture of the star, the cult of personality, abounds. In one of the Greek tragedies our lives are described as sparks escaping from the fire. I am not sure about the Old Testament idea that the whole universe was given to us. I am not sure we figure that big.

Doug Holder: You wrote a book “A Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England. Is there any communality in writers’ home that you discovered?

Miriam Levine: What got me going was going out to The Old Manse and seeing Hawthorne’s little room. The desk that he used is very small. It is about the size of the seat of a child’s door. The theme in the 19th Century was the privacy of a room where the writer could go and be “private.” Edith Wharton would write in bed, Hawthorne wrote on what was in essence a tiny shelf. Mark Twain certainly had a grand desk. I was very interested in the interplay between family life and private life of the writers of this era. In the case of Melville his sisters and his wife were his copyists. His, was a home industry. Thoreau walked daily from his cabin to visit his mother daily. I was interested in these writers who presented themselves as the “imperial self” Their domestic life said something entirely different.

--Doug Holder

Interview with poet Mark Doty: A poet who goes from “Fire to Fire.”

2008-07-12T19:39:00.001-07:00

Interview with poet Mark Doty: A poet who goes from “Fire to Fire.”

When a publicist from Harper Collins in New York City emailed to see if I wanted to review Mark Doty’s new poetry collection: “Fire to Fire,” I was on it like the proverbial hornet. Doty is high on the top shelf of American poets, a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers Award and the U.K’s T.S. Eliot Prize. His poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshare, Prairie Schooner, and many other well-regarded literary journals. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment of the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, as well as the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In his new collection Doty peppers his work with beautiful studied images, and haunting apparitions he spies in the most unlikely of places. Doty has an astute ear for music, he can smell death’s most subtle odor, and he can explain to you what you have been just dying to articulate. To be honest, few of the poetry books I get to review are dyed-in-the-wool page turners. But Doty’s is hands down. I interviewed Doty recently for The Somerville News.

Doug Holder: You were an army brat moving from one place to the other. Did that transience early on make you want to get that image on the permanent page?

Mark Doty: I really had transience drummed into me -- by my grandparents' apocalyptic Protestantism, and the hymns we used to sing on the porch, and what seems to have been a built-in obsession with mortality. And because we moved all the time, it's true that people and places were always being left behind.

DH: Ghosts are a presence in your poems. Do you feel that you are haunted? Is that a good thing for a poet?

MD: I do want my poems to hold conversation with the dead -- both my own and the great dead whose poems I love.
It's an inescapable thing for a poet, because how can you not speak back to the poets who've mattered most to you, who've taught you to see and to speak?

DH: Saul Bellow considered himself a writer who happened to be Jewish. Do you consider yourself a poet who happens to be Gay?

MD: I like to steal a line from Lucille Clifton, who says, "I do not happen to be black, I AM black." Same-sex desire lives right near the core of me. But what that has to do with being a poet is complex. It doesn't mean that my poems must always focus on
sexual life, or on the cultural conditions in which gay men live. But it does mean that my sexuality is part of my subjectivity, and inescapably shapes how I see.

DH: Your partner Wally Roberts died of AIDS. Many of your poems address this. Do you view “Illness as a metaphor?

MD: Other people made it so -- AIDS as a token of sexual shame, or punishment for transgression. HIV's a virus, and we surround it, as we do a select group of diseases, with meanings. I have yet to find any of the ways we try to make HIV disease "mean" to be helpful. But I've wanted to at least give form to my experience with Wally, and with our friends and neighbors, during the terrible crisis years of the late 80s and early 90s. That's part of what you described above as being haunted. What can you do for the dead but keep their stories, or name them?

DH: I noticed your second volume of poems was “Bethlehem in Broad Daylight” was published by David R. Godine, Inc., a fine small press here in Boston. I awarded Godine an Ibbetson Street Press Life Time Achievement Award a few years back for his contributions to poetry and the small press. How was it working with Godine? Do you think the small press plays an important role in the development of poetic talent?

MD: Godine published my first two books, and I'm forever grateful for that. The press took a chance on an unknown poet and produced beautiful volumes. I don't think poets need think about smaller presses as just places to start out. A trade house isn't necessarily the best place to wind up; books can get lost in the shuffle, and frequently do not remain in print. The loyalty and resources of a more specialized literary press often serve our art better than the big houses do -- though I have been very fortunate in this regard.

DH: Your poetry is accessible. I don’t think you need an academic bent to get something out of your work. Obviously this has not hurt you in the poetry biz. Do you think a lot of poetry being written today is deliberately obtuse?

MD: It’s a very large and capacious house, American poetry. I have no desire for everyone to work in the same way. What interests me most is the individuality and vivacity of a voice, a way of seeing and speaking the world. So there are poets I love who are very plain-spoken (like Marie Howe) and poets I love whose work makes a different set of demands on the reader (Brenda Hillman or Jean Valentine). I don't think either transparency or opacity are virtues in themselves. They're just ways of speaking. What matters is what you do with them.

DH: In the poem “Almost Blue” in your new collection “Fire to Fire” (Harper Collins) you write of the beautiful and doomed jazz musician Chet Baker. In the poem you imagine Baker’s swan song which is composed of nodding out and falling out a hotel window in Amsterdam:

“ and you leaning into that warm
haze from the window, Amsterdam,
late afternoon glimmer
a blur of buds.

Breathing in the lindens
And you let go and why not.”

Is this acceptance of things as they are, what is, is; something you try to get across in your work?

MD: Baker was a heroin addict for something like 28 years, so you could see that as a very long slow letting go. He fell from a hotel window in Amsterdam, maybe nodded out, maybe jumped. I wanted, in this poem; to try to lean into the feeling of addiction, into that state of mind that just says Oh, let me go, let it all go. What I want to admire, you know, is the Chet Baker who made all that incredible art, who kept producing that stunning music. But there's something about the toxic pull of addiction, of the poison -- you know, the deep allure of that. Acceptance? I don't know. Sometimes yes. Then sometimes I think you should resist with all your might.

At the Gym

This salt-stain spot

marks the place where men

lay down their heads,

back to the bench,

and hoist nothing

that need be lifted

but some burden they've chosen

this time: more reps,

more weight, the upward shove

of it leaving, collectively,

this sign of where we've been:

shroud-stain, negative

flashed onto the vinyl

where we push something

unyielding skyward,

gaining some power

at least over flesh,

which goads with desire,

and terrifies with frailty.

Who could say who's

added his heat to the nimbus

of our intent, here where

we make ourselves:

something difficult

lifted, pressed or curled,

Power over beauty,

power over power!

Though there's something more

tender, beneath our vanity,

our will to become objects

of desire: we sweat the mark

of our presence onto the cloth.

Here is some halo

the living made together.

--Mark Doty

“Somerville writer to become Iowa Writers Workshop director.”

2008-07-09T16:36:00.000-07:00

“Somerville writer to become Iowa Writers Workshop director.”

I remember leafing through the “other” paper: “The New York Times,” when I came across a story that reported a Somerville writer by the name of Lan Samantha Chang was appointed to head the noted “Iowa Writers Workshop,” at the University of Iowa. Chang, 40, is a resident of Davis Square, a lecturer at Harvard University, as well as a well-regarded short-story writer and novelist. Her own work often deals with the Chinese immigrant experience, and the problems assimilation into American society presents.

Chang, who first took writing courses at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education and later attended the workshop in Iowa, will be replacing Frank Conroy as director. The “Iowa Writers Workshop” is probably the most prestigious in the country, and has trained writers like: T.C. Boyle, Jane Smiley and others of that pedigree. I spoke with Ms. Chang in the offices of “The Somerville News” in the heart of Davis Square.

Doug Holder: Were you surprised that you were selected to be director?

Lan Samantha Chang: I certainly did not go into the process expecting to get the job. There were so many qualified people. The finalists were all quite good. I did know going into it that I care enormously about the program; having been a fairly recent graduate.

DH: Is 40 a young age to head this workshop?

LSC: I think it is. I’m not sure who was the youngest. I know 40 is relatively young. I think Frank Conroy began when he was fifty.

DH: How do you find the Somerville writing community?

LSC: A lot of writers live in Somerville. It is very rich. Elizabeth McCracken lived here for years and years. At this moment James Wood and Claire Messud live in Somerville. There is a sense of community here. There is a sense of laissez-faire that every writer needs in order to feel productive. In Somerville I don’t get the feeling that I am being bugged. I can walk down the streets of Davis Square and nobody will bother me. In that way it is like a big city. I have many friends who live around here, so I feel at home. I live right down the street from a bowling alley and for some reason it is a real pleasure to know that many people go there on a regular basis.

My sister visited last summer and we stopped in the Square for ice cream. There was a festival going on. Tons of people were in Davis Square; they were relaxed and having a good time. Everyone seemed alert, smart and happy. My sister said:’ I can see why you want to live here.” It’s similar to Iowa City. It’s a relaxed, literary community.

DH: You were the managing editor of the “Yale Daily News.” I know that Hemingway, Crane, and others started out as journalists. Do you think this is valuable experience for a budding writer?

LSC: One great thing about being a journalist is that it makes you aware that much of the struggle of writing is sitting down and producing words. That can be comforting and enlightening to a beginning writer.

DH: There was a documentary out recently titled “The Stone Reader,” that concerned an Iowa Writers Workshop graduate, who wrote a great first book, had a breakdown, and disappeared. How hard is it to be a writer? How hard is it to be a writer in America?

LSC: You know what I thought the movie revealed? It is the amount of heart it takes to write a really serious book, and how it can drain a person. I don’t think people realize this. I think people think writers sit around and words flow out of them in some sort of inspired process.

DH: It is felt by some people that in Europe the government supports the artists to a greater extent than the States. What’s your take on this?

LSC: Government could do a lot more. The government underestimates the importance of the arts in our society.

DSH: Detractors of writing programs often say it produces technically proficient, but uninspired writers. How do you answer that?

LSC: Going for my MFA was the best thing I ever did. I came into Iowa and I was immersed into this rich and inspired literary culture. I learned enormous amounts about writing and reading. I had wonderful peers, many of whom are still my readers. I was given time-- seemingly endless time, in which to think and dream about what I wanted to do. It was really great.

It’s easy to criticize any sincere endeavor. Writers give up their lives for two years to devote themselves to art.

DH: Any Favorite Somerville writers.

TSC: Steve Almond. I think he is great actually. I saw him read at the “New England Art Institute.” Poet Peter Richards, and D.A. Powell, are others who I admire.

Doug Holder

Luke Salisbury "Hollywood and Sunset"

2008-07-09T16:29:00.000-07:00

Hollywood and Sunset:

The Whole World Is A Stage - In Luke Salisbury’s Novel

Doug Holder

It is often very hard to read people, not to mention to decode the chaos of the world. It can be challenging to decide when someone is putting on a maudlin act, or when he or she is the authentic goods. Luke Salisbury, brings the reader into the La La Land of Los Angeles around the time of World War I, and throws us into a celluloid dream, in his novel, Hollywood and Sunset. This fourth novel by Salisbury was well-received by critics and won The Benjamin Franklin Award from the Publishers Marketing Association. This is a world where illusion and reality merge, making us question the very nature of the two.

The novel concerns a down-at-the heels Atlantic Monthly writer and minor league baseball club owner Henry Harrison and his attempt to interview the great filmmaker D.W. Griffith. D.W. Griffith produced the seminal silent film Birth of a Nation. This lauded and much denounced film concerned the Reconstructionist South after the Civil War, and was viewed by many camps as portraying the Negro in a racist light. The fictional Harrison, an East Coast liberal with a Harvard pedigree, wants to expose and denounce Griffith; in essence ruin Griffith’s career and thus his life. Harrison, not a pillar of stability himself, is in a midst of a divorce and not far from a complete nervous breakdown. In a brilliant conceit by Salisbury, his character Harrison is led around town by a less-than-pious British actor dressed like Jesus Christ. This Jesus has a hankering for the ladies, a world-weary and biting sarcastic tongue, but at the same time tries to save his flock, in this case being a hapless and downtrodden Harrison. Harrison has quite a journey which includes a one night unconsummated fling with the silent actress icon Lillian Gish. This of course angers the possessive and married D. W. Griffith who wants to wed his star. Eventually this course of events leads to a life-changing confrontation between the two men.

Salisbury a tall, distinguished man in his late 50’s, initially has a patrician air about him, but soon proves to be unaffected and engaging. Although his own past hints of prep school and privilege, he has taught at Bunker Hill Community College in Charlestown, for the past twenty years. He enjoys teaching immigrants, students who clearly have to work hard to get their education, and others who make up the diverse student body. Salisbury told me: “The students here are serious about learning. They don’t look at me like I am an idiot for not making $300, 000 a year. People pass through here for every imaginable reason. We are a democratic community college, and teach anyone who can walk through the door.”

Hollywood and Sunset takes place in Los Angeles, a location where the physical possibilities end with the Pacific Ocean. Against this backdrop the imagination thrives. Men like Griffith sell images, illusions; they constantly reinvent themselves and others through the medium of film, or as Salisbury succinctly puts it: “They sell light.”

The book is written in a cinematic style, with in-depth detail of the set Griffith constructed for the film he thought would be his masterpiece: Intolerance.” The milieu that Harrison and D.W. Griffith habituate is almost surreal, with the denizens acting on and off the movie set. Salisbury keeps the reader guessing as to what is real and what is simply for show.

Salisbury said of Griffith: “In the book and in real life D.W. Griffith was his greatest contribution or invention. He created himself as a Southern gentleman, tried and became a great artist, and tried to live down the stigma of racism Birth… brought him. Griffith couldn’t stop creating. That was what was real for him.”

Salisbury said that Griffith was a source of fascination for him because the man was obsessed with the new “universal language”: silent films. A virtual Babel of people could understand them, and relate to them; there was no language barrier. Salisbury points out that Griffith was: “A master of symbols, the culture, and the great collective memory.”

This world of images; the freedom they created from the confines of convention, often proved to be the downfall of people who chased the dream. Youth, and unapologetic self-absorption was and is at a premium on Hollywood and Sunset, and as one of Salisbury’s character says: “There is no place for old women in Hollywood.” And as anyone knows Sunset Boulevard is littered with broken people and their dreams.

Salisbury also teaches film courses in addition to English, and feels that films are an important artistic medium that should be part of the curriculum. Although his favorite movie, Vertigo, is not as complicated as, say, Hamlet, Salisbury feels a great deal of valuable things can be gleaned from Hitchcock’s masterwork. Salisbury finds that his current crop of students is bombarded with images from TV, the internet, and film. Therefore the “selling of light” will increasingly take precedent over books. This was something Griffith realized even way back in 1916.

For more information about Luke Salisbury go to http://wwwlukesalisbury.com

Mike Basinski: A poet. A curator. A dishwasher.

2008-07-07T19:13:00.000-07:00

Mike Basinski: A poet. A curator. A dishwasher.

As an editor of the small press, I find myself spending much of my time pushing my journal and the chapbooks we produce to (for the most part) an apathetic public. So it was a pleasure when I received a letter from Mike Basinski, poet and assistant curator at the University At Buffalo Poetry/Rare Books Collection, requesting the complete line of Ibbetson St. Press books and journals. I can't tell you the thrill it was for me and my group of poets to see our work archived and on their on-line catalogue. Basinski and the library seem to have an insatiable appetite for the small press. At a poetry conference in Boston he told me, "Send us more, whatever you have." That's the first time I ever heard that line, and probably the last.
The Poetry/Rare Books Collection at Buffalo is as rare as the poetry it includes in its diverse archives. Rivaled only by Brown University, it contains 90,000 volumes by every major and more importantly (to this editor), minor poets working in English. The collection includes recordings of poets reading their work, notebooks, letters, manuscripts, and a huge assortment of literary magazines.
About 60 years ago, Charles Abbot, the head of the Library, began collecting "little" magazines. He knew, (and scholarship has proven this), that poets start in the minor leagues of the small press and sometimes advance to bigger and better things. Currently the Library has 3,500 titles of magazines, 1,100 subscriptions, and about 6,000 broadsides.
When I asked Basinski what he considers himself, a poet/curator or a curator/poet, he answered in his characteristic tongue-in-cheek manner, "Labels, again. I am a dishwasher." Basinski probably was at one time and I can only assume he used the experience in his poetry. He is a poet from a working class background, in the once-thriving industrial city of Buffalo, NY. In 1973 he was a night student at the University of Buffalo, working a shift job at Buffalo China, a factory that made cups. Indifferent to his poetry, his imagination was jump-started by a reading with Robert Creeley. He writes that he now viewed the cups that he made as being sipped all over the world, participants in conversations, dramas that make up the theater of life. In other words the banal took on a lyrical, transcendent quality. He was hooked, hook, line and sinker. He involved himself in the poetry scene, made religious pilgrimages to the poetic holyland of North Beach and Charles Olson's Gloucester, MA. He wrote poetry that stretched the boundaries , full of fragmentary word play, odd topography of text, poetry for music or music for poetry, a host of innovative offbeat styles and modes. I arranged to do an interview with him, via the internet. I found the answers were often unconventional, and as irreverent as his poetry.

Q: Mike, you are not only a curator, but a poet in your own right. I must say I find your work as a poet, "challenging". That is, it does not follow a traditional narrative format. Do you define the body of your work as "experimental"? What is "experimental poetry"?

A: I don't think my poems are experimental at all. I know what I'm doing and am not screwing around at all. My notion has been to expand the material a poet can use in a poem. The alphabet limits. The dictionary limits (Webster is the anti-christ). TV limits. Above all these: other poets limit the potential of poetry. I hear a lot about my "new" work, and then I look and it is not new at all. Is that sad? My fear is that I am setting limits. Poetry is a revolutionary tool if it breaks the mundane of its own existence. Of course, if you make something new, most poets won't like it. We are all, after all, in the business of FAME. My favorite poems are those that come back rejected. I have a picnic basket full of these. Each is an apple that will cause poetry to be flung from the sofa of Eden. It is great to be uncomfortable. This entire notion of poems meaning something or even having meaning of any form is suspect, isn't it? If all writing/words etc. in any form is poetry then there is not experimental poetry--all is and has been and will be already invented. Utilize.

Q: You have written that domesticity is important for a poet to be "centered". This runs counter to the popular notion of the poet as the free living Bohemian, footloose and fancy free. If the poet has the "ball and chain" of family responsibility around his neck, is his work bound to suffer?

A: No, the free-living, Bohemian, footloose and fancy free poets are the most mundane. Did you ever watch hamsters on exercise wheels? Like all immaturity, dressing in personality is a limit. Domesticity, I say, is Nature. Capital N.

Q: You mention Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski as seminal influences on you. You write you didn't want to write like Jack, but that you wanted to be him. Bukowski made you feel that your experience as a working class kid was valid and worthy material for poetry. Can you expand on this?

A: I think social class is important to recognize. Both K and B are not rich kids. Therefore, they represent voices other than those in control of everything. I wouldn't want to be anything like these two writers.. I liked Kerouac . I like Kerouac. I don't hitchhike or etc. He is very romantic. Me-not. He did have a purity. I think this is the Zen of it. Bukowski also. Essentially it makes me tired. Like thinking about the impact of the WEB. Does this have meaning in my life?

Q: Please talk about how you became Assistant Curator at the University Of Buffalo Poetry/Rare Books Collection?

A: I know something about the poem. I come to work on time. I have the form of my mind that remembers where certain objects are. In the middle of all the poetry published in English, even if it is catalogued, alphabetized etc. a lot of things still have a place in mind. All of this is pretty much like a warehouse. I worked in warehouses before I got here. This isn't a lot different than Walmart or Goodyear Tire. It's a warehouse of the imagination. Any imaginary spice you need--we got!

Q: What is your personal mission, and or the mission of the archive?

A: The collection is above the personal. Our charge is: To collect first editions of all poetry published in English. That simple.

Q: What is the criteria for accepting a book, chapbook, or journal into the collection?

A: A book/chapbook has to be a first edition in English. A magazine has to be more than fifty percent poetry. We don't generally collect University, English Department published magazines. Wisconsin does that. They are great at it.

Q: What projects are you working on?

A: I am working on more collage mailing tubes so I can do more instrumental poems with scores. I am making this poetry cartoon called Tarzan Movie. I am fully involved in the performance and propagation of early FLUXUX and new FLUXUS with ensemble called THE BUFF/FLUXUS PROJECT. I'm working on multi-voiced and choral poems, visual and score poems. I am attempting at times to stay away, but working on not being dead. Also I am going to paint the bathroom and insulate the attic. I am also shopping for new rugs. Can't decide if we want green or beige. What do you think? This week I was deciding to get some concord grapes. They are in season and my daughter likes them.

Q: Any parting shots?

A: In the end, I deal with the horrible beauty of poetry. I always was reminded of Acteon sneaking a peak at Diana. He of course was transformed by that act and was torn to shards because of it. This then is the tension of poetry. Can you get a peek without killing yourself? Can you get a way from the dogs or will they tear you up? What will you see? Not what is given on a plate. What do you see when you peer into the pine grotto? And why is Diana so pissed off? Why does Acteon want to peek? Essentially then, this is my poem. All of them. It is a moment when both Diana and Acteon realize the future of their situation. Romance and sorrow. Beauty and destruction. Love and yearning. Lust and fury. Well, it seems the poem is not beauty and the beast, but beauty is the creature. It is so marvelous.

* Mike Basinski is now the Curator of the Rare Books and Poetry Collection at Buffalo University

Errol Lincoln Uys: From James Michener to Brazil

2008-07-07T19:00:00.000-07:00

Errol Lincoln Uys is the author of the novel “Brazil,” “Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move in the Great Depression”, and many other works. Born in South Africa, Uys has been a journalist, International Editor for Reader’s Digest, as well as a salesman, law school dropout, and youthful vagabond. Uys, who was a featured reader in The Somerville News Writers Festival last November (2007), worked with the renowned writer James Michener on his novel about South Africa: “The Covenant.” I talked with Uys on my Somerville Community Access TV Show: “Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer.”

Doug Holder: The English poet Philip Larkin wrote: “It’s very difficult to write about being happy. Very easy to write about being miserable.” Yes, despite your hardscrabble background you wrote your first article in the Johannesburg Star: “ Happiness Is An Unprejudiced Mind.”

Was this hard to write in light of your early life?

Errol Uys: It was fairly difficult growing up in South Africa. I was the only child of divorced parents. I dropped out of law school. I tried to start a business that was a total catastrophe. I was going to make cane furniture of all things. Don’t ask why! I used to sell things early on. I sold Hula-Hoops in the streets of Johannesburg. I also sold Teddy Bears. Throughout this time I had always been writing. By this point I had written two unpublished novels. I was living in an apartment that was infested with roaches. So here I was with absolutely nothing. I saw a small ad in the Johannesburg Star that read: “ Apply for a job as a journalist.” I gave the Star a manuscript I had written. In those days you didn’t need a M.A. in Journalism. I was lucky. I got a job at the Star. They sent me to a “cadet” school. This was a fantastic way to learn to be a reporter. While I was waiting to go to school I wrote this article” Happiness Is An Unprejudiced Mind.” And I got it published on the editorial page. So that’s the way to get started through happiness! But I always have had a real feeling for the underdog.

When I worked for the Star it was during the 1960’s, and it was a very volatile time in Johannesburg. It was an exciting time to be writing.

DH: When you were very young you “hit the road” and hitchhiked around South Africa. Did Kerouac influence you?

EU: No, not really. Later when I wrote, “Riding the Rails,” I had obviously read Kerouac. In those days I was just a 15-year-old kid out to see his country. I have been lucky since then. I have traveled all over the world professionally and personally.

DH: So many writers from Crane to Hemingway have gotten their start as journalists. Is working as a journalist a good training ground to be a writer of fiction and nonfiction?

EU: It is and it isn’t. There are two schools of thought. From journalism to nonfiction there should be no drawback. To go to fiction there is something of the muse that might be affected. What you have to keep alive in that transition is spirit. That magic and enthusiasm.

DH: You worked closely with James Michener on one of his sprawling historical novels “The Covenant” You did a huge amount of work: research, editing, and writing. Yet you say he failed to acknowledge you as a coauthor. Why?

EU: I remember I said to Michener when we were working on ‘The Covenant,” “ Hey look, you might want to take a look at this and possibly use it.” He took what I gave him, closed the door, and I heard him type it up.

Someone said he really couldn’t acknowledge me on a collaborative level. Publishers back then would not put up with it. On the front page of the book there is an acknowledgement that I read the manuscript over seven times with him for errors. Today there would be no question about a full acknowledgement.

DH: Michener was obviously prolific and famous. Do you think he was a good writer?

EU: He was a brilliant researcher. He was great at blending fact and fiction. He criticized my work as being too “novelistic.” To me this is great praise. It is hard to criticize his work. His characters are very different from literary-driven ones. His is a huge tapestry. I feel the characters in my historical novel “Brazil” are more fully fleshed than his.

He has an enormous following. Especially amongst the older generation. Books like “The Source” were highly respected. Today the idea of these huge novels is combated by the Internet, and the byte world. Whether he stands among the literary greats is questionable. Remember though he won the Pulitzer for “South Pacific.” That is a work apart from the rest of his writing.

DH: You authored a book “Brazil” that spawned five centuries and two fictional families. Why would a South African take up a country like Brazil?

EU: After working with Michener I had to do my own historical novel. Having come from South Africa to the United States in the 1970’s when the whole racial thing was exploding, I became interested in comparing the two countries. I wondered how did these two countries develop? How did the racial climate in Brazil become so different from South Africa? Coming to live in America I realized how little people new about Brazil. It was amazing. They are our neighbors to the South.

DH: Tell me how you came to write, “Riding the Rails,” your book about the Great Depression, and the teenagers who hopped boxcars traveling the country looking for work. Was it partially due to your wanderlust as a kid?

EU: Partially. I was doing research on the Great Depression era, when I came across this book by Thomas Minehan. Minehan was a sociologist. Minehan rode the rails with the kids who rode the boxcars. My son and daughter-in-law had just finished film school at N.Y.U. I said the subject would make a great documentary. The essentially filmed the documentary for “The American Experience” on PBS. I wrote the companion volume.

DH: What are you working on now?

EU: I am going to write a book about Boston. It is going to be about Irish immigration in the 1840’s. The population of Boston during this period went from 100,000 to 135,000. 35,000 were Irish. Can you imagine what Boston was like? What the waterfront where the Irish lived was like? Thousands and thousands of penniless immigrants came here. Yet writers like Emerson and Thoreau and the rest have barely mentioned them. And when they did in the most stereotypical way. This will be a much smaller and compact novel than “Brazil.” I want to examine the relationships between the Irish and the Beacon Hill Protestant elites.

DH: Can you tell me about your trove of Michener papers?

EU: I put all the Michener papers on my website. I want to make sure the papers get to the right places. I kept everything. For some reason something told me to keep all those drafts of the Michener book. They are all in binders.

--Doug Holder

Somerville poets host Dylan Thomas' daughter

2008-07-02T18:24:00.001-07:00

Somerville poets host Dylan Thomas' daughter

Off The Shelf by Doug Holder

I found myself on a cool evening in April walking to Dunkin Donuts in Harvard Square with Aeronwy Thomas, daughter of the late great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. Aeronwy Thomas, a well-regarded educator and poet in her own right, is on a national tour talking about her father Dylan, who wrote some of the most revered verse in the 20th Century, as well as a critically acclaimed play “Under Milk Wood.”

Somerville resident, Wellesley College professor, and owner of the famed Grolier Poetry Book Shop, Ifeanyi Menkiti hosted a reading with Aeronwy Thomas, her husband Trevor Ellis, and Peter Thabit Jones, a respected Welsh poet and editor of the Swansea Poet Magazine. I asked Menkiti why he decided to host this event organized by publisher Stanley Barkan of Cross-Cultural Communications. Menkiti said:” I Love Dylan Thomas' sense of community. His work releases a poetic impulse across the world. It travels across borders.

In the publication “Wellesley Week” Menkiti adds: “Whether one reads his poems alone, by oneself, or hears them read aloud by him or others, or perhaps hears read aloud the captivating words of “A Child's Christmas in Wales,” one always comes away with a sense of ineffable magic in the air-a sense that words are potent things.”

Dylan Thomas (who died at 39 in 1953) first gained significant praise for his poetry collection: “18 Poems.” He is also well known for his poem to his dying father “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” as well as many other works. He died in New York City at St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village from suspected chronic alcohol poisoning.

Thomas' daughter Aeronwy first read the poems of her famous father 20 years after his death in 1973. She was sheltered from his “wild public” lifestyle. Now she is the midst of a whirlwind national tour: “Dylan Thomas Tribute,” where she and Jones read from Thomas' poetry, their own poetry, and discuss Thomas' body of work and his life.

The evening started out on Plympton Street in Harvard Square at the Grolier, but the actual reading took place at Harvard's Adams House several doors down the block. In addition to the reading by Jones and Thomas, Tino Villanueva, Aldo Tambellini, Kristine Doll, Pavel Grushko, and Aled Llion Jones read translations of Dylan Thomas' work.

Jones' read a poem of his own during the evening that concerned of all things: a rat: (Rats do make appearances in Dylan's work as well.)

“Rats swam the canal of my childhood fears…/ a rat's meal is my thought/ it eats in my sleep.”
Aeronwy Thomas read her own poem that harked back to her childhood memories of the great poet titled: “Later Than Laugharne:”

“…The memories race back-
… And the thrill of peeping through
the keyhole (I was always the most naughty)
to see my father writing his poems about
gulls, hills, cormorants on estuaries
which he saw through his wide-vista window,
as he sat, bent, writing in crabbed letters,
pressing against the hard surface of the
kitchen table that was his desk…”

Aeronwy's husband Trevor sang traditional Welsh folksongs that were a welcomed addition to the reading.

After the event I managed to interview Thomas about her late father. As for Dylan Thomas' ill-fated love affair with alcohol, Aeronwy said his trips to the United States did him no good. When he was in his native Wales he was surrounded by family and friends and drank the weak beer of the local pubs. He wrote in his “shed” every day. In the United States he was offered hard liquor like whiskey and Martinis, etc… He was unmoored, away from home and structure, and this lead to his downfall.

As for Bob Dylan, who lifted Dylan Thomas' first name for his last, Aeronwy Thomas admires his song lyrics. But she did say that Bob Dylan did admit to lifting Thomas' name, though now he states that he has done more for Thomas than Thomas did for him.

I asked Thomas about the movie adaptation of “Under Milk Wood” that starred Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. She said that she was grateful someone made a movie of her father's play. She feels Burton was a classic narrator. She did have some reservations about what she characterized as “additions” to the work, but overall she was happy with the movie.

The evening ended with a small wine and cheese buffet. Thomas signed books and was surrounded by admirers and well wishers. After this long evening no one would blame Aeronwy Thomas if she did “go gently into that good night” to get a well-earned sleep.

Wisdom comes from strange places in Hoffman’s poetry

2008-07-02T18:22:00.001-07:00

Wisdom comes from strange places in Hoffman’s poetry
Gold Star Road by Richard Hoffman. (Barrow Street PO BOX 1831 Murray Hill Station NY 10156) $25.

Review by Doug Holder

There damn well should be a poem for a doorman, a poem that celebrates in-your-face blue-collar wisdom, and a poem that sings for the many unsung Gold Star Roads.

(designated roads where soldiers killed in the line of duty lived and are memorialized), in far flung communities across the country.

And poet Richard Hoffman is just the man for the job. If you read Hoffman’s acclaimed memoir “Half the House…” you would know that he sprung from a hardscrabble working class background, and has had more than his share of sorrows over the years. This is not some freshly scrubbed MFA churning out another unearned angst-laden collection. Hoffman has walked the walk, and has been around the block several times. But unlike these tired clichés his work is original and evocative.

I’m no scholar and I respond to poetry on a very gut and emotional level. So a poem like “Summer Job” speaks to me. It brings out my sense of longing: for my youth, and that no-nonsense type of guy who befriended me and cut through all the crap and posturing we all engage in, in this hyperactive society. In this poem “Summer Job” Hoffman remembers a grizzled boss from his early years who proved to be an unexpected font of wisdom. The poem is so tight and cohesive it would be a disservice not to quote it in full:

Summer Job

“The trouble with intellectuals,” Manny, my boss
once told me, “is that they don’t know nothing
till they can explain it to themselves. A guy like that,”
he said, “he gets to middle age;--and by the way,
he gets there late; he’s trying to be a boy until
he’s forty, forty-five, and then give him five
more years till that craziness peters out, and now
he’s almost fifty—a guy like that at last explains
to himself that life is made of time, that time
is what’s all about. Aha! he says. And then
he either blows his brains out, gets religion,
or settles down to some major-league depression.
Make yourself useful. Hand me that three –eights
torque wrench—no, you moron, the other one.”

There is a lot of other great work to recommend this collection of course. “Airfare” deals with a chance encounter the poet had at an airport with a man he knew when he was young. The encounter consists of a “brittle conversation,” but the memories the meeting evokes releases a flood of perceptions about the confusion and continuum of life:

“I wondered at how we change,
inhibit, inhabit one another;
friends, enemies, teachers, lovers,
neighbors, students…

…I
was trying to find, through layers
of scratched Plexiglass and drifting
clouds, a sign of where we were
and how much farther we had to go…”

Golden Star Road is a five star collection in my book. And Hoffman is a star of a poet.

Somerville writer explores legacy of racism

2008-07-02T18:19:00.000-07:00

Somerville writer explores legacy of racism

Off The Shelf By Doug Holder

Way Opens: A Spiritual Journey. Patricia Wild. (Warwick House Publishers 72 Court St. Lynchburg, Virginia 24504) $15.

Some people live with blinders on. They are afflicted with tunnel vision. They block out the light of the plight of others and are members of the cult of “me” or their immediate circle of friends and family. Now these are not necessarily bad people. It is hard enough to keep one’s own head above water in these troubled times. And, if one is living in the envious environs of middleclass white America, then it is easy to be blinded to what’s happening behind their sheltered gates.

Well, Somerville journalist, novelist and playwright Patricia Wild to some extent, counted herself among these people. But for years something bothered her, nagged her, and goaded her. She wondered what happened to two African Americans who desegregated her high school in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1962. Wild, spurred on by her questioning nature and the activism of her Quaker faith found these two people: Dr. Lynda Woodruff (a college professor) and the Rev. Owen Cardwell, a Baptist preacher. Wild takes a good hard look at not only these people, their trials and travails, but also takes an unflinching critical look at herself.

Wild starts the book off with a posh family vacation in the isle of Jamaica. This effectively sets the tone of the book; lighting up the large divide between black and white. Here Wild thinks about the inequity while being served a gourmet meal by ironically white-uniformed Jamaicans bustling in the kitchen:

“I remembered that white men and women eat and laugh, lit by soft candlelight, while dark-skinned people cook white people’s food and serve them wine…I remembered that every day, faceless and nameless dark-skinned people labor for me and my family, as dark-skinned people have been doing for generations.”

Wild did the hard work of research, tracking people down, the flights back and forth from Lynchburg to Boston, and the endless interviews. She examines the incredible pressure on these two young people in 1962, who were labeled with the kudos; “You’re a credit to your race.” Imagine, if you will, Woodruff and Cardwell, as two young, green sapling, adolescents integrating an all white high school. Woodruff tells Wild:

“My whole race was being judged by my success or failure. That’s too much of a burden for anybody.”

Wild explores the grating texture of life for these kids: the taunts from their white peers, the angry indifference of their teachers, and throws a metaphorical Molotov Cocktail at the notion of Southern gentility.

What really surprised me was the resentment that Woodruff and others felt towards certain aspects of Martin Luther King. In some respects they felt manipulated by King, and coerced to be less than honest about the difficulties they endured. Woodruff says:

“We were trained, we were dictated to. We were told, ‘You will not respond, if the media asks you anything, it’s ‘No comment or everything is fine,’ and we did exactly that. Whenever we were asked by anybody how things went, the answer according to Martin Luther King was: ‘Everything went well. It is fine.’”

Years later the approach had its repercussions. Woodruff explains:

“That was published in the media. And twenty years later, the idiots who are now leaders instead of asking either one of us, as if we were dead, for the truth, they read the paper and were known to take national stands, and be on television, discussing civil rights and the desegregation of the schools, and how wonderful and nonviolent it was. They didn’t ask me if it was nonviolent.”

In the process of her research and travels, Wild had to confront herself. She had to put the breaks on her own ego, her impatience, her need to insert herself in the story to the detriment of the true story she was after. In this book Wild is not afraid to expose her own warts, which gives this accomplished memoir an air of authenticity. In this passage of enlightened self-criticism Wild questions the hunger of her own agenda when she encounters unexpected resistance from Woodruff around an interview:

“Did I try to understand why this handsome woman was so incredibly busy? Did I wonder what kind of experiences Lynda Woodruff might have had in the past with writers and journalists?”

Wild, to use a cliché, comes away from all of this as a “better person” She realized she had to confront the complacency of her past, and her comfortable and privileged background that excluded black people. This whole process spurred Wild on to new heights of activism back home, and perhaps, and I am sure this is her hope, that it will lead you, dear reader, down a new road.

Examining The South From Somerville

2008-07-02T16:03:00.000-07:00

Examining the South from Somerville

Off The Shelf By Doug Holder

Blue Land by C.D. Collins (Polyho Press 10 Howard St. Somerville, Mass http://www.polyho.com).

In Somerville C.D. Collins, lives amidst the east coast literary establishment. The fiction that is produced in these parts is often first rate. It often deals with the young, the disaffected, the urbane and privileged. The characters often are jaded, over-educated, underemployed, and, in short, not reflective of the hinterlands south, west and even north of the Brahmin waters of the Charles River.
But in the west of Somerville, Collins writes about the folks who habituated the bygone tobacco farms of rural Kentucky, and other gone-to-seed burgs. Like William Faulkner or Flannery O'Connor she writes with a gothic and highly emotional acumen that is at times striking. Collins who moved to Somerville from Kentucky some years ago, is an accomplished singer/songwriter as well as poet, who now has written a collection of short stories titled “Blue Land.” It examines the lives of mostly agrarian, poor white folks in an unsentimental, authentic, and even spiritual style.

One of the most harrowing stories in this collection “Sin Verquenza” deals with a cocaine addict who works the line at a Delmonte Plant. The first paragraph of the story grabs the reader immediately in a chokehold, as the female protagonist describes the difference between a “Coke Head,” and a “Junkie.”
“A Coke Head and a Junkie are two different things. With Junk you hit up and just drop out. You feel very benevolent, but all you can do is sit there trembling and nauseated, your eyes slamming shut. With cocaine you are fascinated by your own mind, you feel smart and interesting and full of energy. Your life is suddenly ideal. Then the high is tainted by craving for more and you rev and rev till you climb the fucking walls. I do coke, but I am not in the gutter, you understand. I'm a worker. I save all my money past rent and food, for my Friday night date with the snowman.”

And here, in the same story, Collins exhibits her talent for the telling detail. In this passage she describes the evolving physical traits of a dysfunctional couple:

“Same stiff dinners, same exact fights on Saturday night. My mother drew more and more inside, her head sinking into her shoulders like a turtle, her shoulders rolling forward. My father did the opposite, his chest popped out more and more, and his back began to sway, like a bad horse.”

In the story “Hiroshima” a young woman ponders the simple twist of fate that prevented one young man from courting her, and the consequence it may have had for the unborn child:

“Would it have been different if Mr. Greenway had not been walking this way to the dairy, if the other young man's step had not quickened as the image of her eyes surfaced in his mind? For it was not much time, just a moment, between the arrival of one and the arrival of the other, leaving with one, and leaving the other with the grandparents or an empty porch. Would the child that comes later have been the same soul destined to pass through this woman? Or is there a child whose soul still waits?”

In the best tradition of the small press, the Polyho Press has published a veteran writer who is hopefully on the cusp of the literary limelight.

Poet Eva Salzman: From Brooklyn to Britain with a side trip to Somerville

2008-07-02T13:50:00.001-07:00

Poet Eva Salzman: From Brooklyn to Britain with a side trip to Somerville

Off The Shelf By Doug Holder

Over 20 years ago Poet Eva Salzman popped over the pond to England after spending her early years in Brooklyn and Long Island. Salzman was a friend of the late poet Sarah Hannah who was interviewed on my show “ Poet to Poet” on Somerville Community Access Television shortly before Hannah took her own life.

Salzman was in town visiting with Hannah's parents, and gave a reading of her own and Hannah's work at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge (hosted by Fulcrum Magazine). Salzman traveled in a drenching rainstorm to the hinterlands of Union Square to be interviewed by yours truly.

Salzman is an accomplished poet, living in London, who grew up in Brooklyn and attended Columbia University where she got her MFA. Her latest poetry collection is “Double Crossing” (Bloodaxe Books). She has also co-edited an anthology of modern women poets “Women's Work…” that is scheduled to be released soon from the Seren Press. She has taught at such British institutions of higher learning as Warwick University and Ruskin College in Oxford, England. She has also collaborated on a number of operas, and her work has been frequently broadcasted on the BBC. Salzman has been published widely and has read from her work at festivals around the world.

Doug Holder: First off, why did you move to England in 1985?
Eva Salzman: That's easy. A man. It's the old story. He was in Brooklyn with me, and then we moved to England. It was a pretty major move for me. I thought that I would never leave New York. He was born in South East Wales. It was a huge culture shock for a Brooklyn Jewish girl.

DH: Why didn't you leave England after your breakup?
ES: Well we moved to Brighton. And I started to make friends and get published there. When we split up, he said: “Well I guess you'll move back to New York.” I said to myself: “ Damn him…I have a life here. I'm going to stay here!”

DH: You have had a lot of offbeat jobs…I suppose a lot of writers do. Another Brooklyn writer Paul Auster comes to mind. You worked as an out-of-print book searcher, an Exercise Director at a Brooklyn orthodox Jewish diet center, a cleaner of rich ladies houses, all of which informs your work. In a sense did these jobs have more value for your writing then say your MFA?
ES: I love studying…but I had a fear of missing more. In a way I was trying out different lives. The out-of-print book search service I did for many years was to support my writing habit in Britain. It was a continuation of a business my grandmother ran for many years from her house in Brooklyn.

DH: You studied at Stuyvesant High in Brooklyn in the 70s. One of your teachers was Frank McCourt, the author of “Angela's Ashes” Did you know at the time that he would be such an acclaimed writer?
ES: He always seemed world- weary. I had a romantic sense of him. I felt he was not fated to last long. He would tell us wonderful stories about his impoverished Irish childhood. I realize now he was rehearsing for his great memoir “Angela's Ashes.” We were the last class he came to-he had taught in many tough schools in the city. He did not teach a strict English class, expecting us to write a lot, etc… I thought learning English was learning stories. Maybe it is. He was just fascinating. I eventually met up with him in England. I interviewed him for the Guardian.

DH: You have also studied with the likes of Derek Walcott, Jorie Graham, Stanley Kunitz, and Joesph Brodsky to name a few. Was it hard to find your “voice?” Do we really have a truly original voice?
ES: I was very intimidated at the Columbia MFA program because I was a lot younger than most of the students there. But I still loved the program. I remember taking a workshop with Stanley Kunitz. He would pick out pieces of my poems and say: “ This is your voice.” I wondered what that meant. Was there a voice I was supposed to slip into already? It made me think about what would trigger my voice.

DH: Can you talk about the new CD “Secret Life of a Girl” by singer/songwriter Christine Tobin in which a poem of yours is set to music?
ES: She is actually from Dublin, but now lives in London. She is well known in both places. She makes a point of collaborating with poets, and in her new CD she used a poem of mine, and a poem of Paul Muldoon.

DH: You have also collaborated on operas. In fact one has been with your father, the composer Eric Salzman. Good poetry should have a strong sense of musicality, no? Has you work as a poet helped you with your work with opera?
ES: I see it as a two way street. Language and music are interactive. I believe the music of language leads you to ideas or poems. But yes, I do believe poetry has to have a sense of music to it. Most of the poets I know who write in form or meter, don't do it for ideology. You write in free verse or you write in form. You write what you want to write.

DH: I use food in a lot of my poetry. I notice you do too. What would you say to critics who say food as a theme or focus is too trivial?
ES: I am a sensualist. I am about everything to do with the senses. I don't see this split between matters of the body and matters of the spirit. I see it as all parts of the same. Coming from a large Jewish family you can guess how I feel about food. There is a ritualistic quality about eating and meals.

DH: You were a friend and mentor to the late poet Sarah Hannah. Hannah taught at Emerson College in Boston, appeared on this show, was the author of two critically acclaimed poetry collections “Longing Distance,” and “Inflorescence” (Tupelo Press).
Can you tell me how you met and became fast friends?
ES: We met at the Wesleyan Writers Conference where I taught. I was interested in the sonnet form and so was she. She had read my poems. She was passionate about the sonnet. She brought me her work that had wit and formal dexterity. Like Plath, she coupled the vernacular with a more elevated poem.

DH: Her poetry is accessible. Yours is too. Your take?
ES: I never personally think about accessible or inaccessible. Some of the poems I write are accessible, some are not. Sarah had that ability to travel to different worlds. I have a review of her two collections in “Contemporary Poetry Review.,” extracted from article in “Dark Horses” magazine.

DH: You have co-edited a new anthology of women's poetry titled “ Women's Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English”
ES: “Women's Work…” will be out within months. It will basically be modern women poets from 1920 on… Women poets who write in English. Jorie Graham is in it, English, American, and Irish poets….you name it. It is published by SEREN.

* The Somerville News