Marc Widershien interviewed by Doug Holder

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.