Author: ellen

What are the significant books in our lives, the ones that make a difference, the ones we would urge on our friends? I asked three writers to talk about books that have been important to them.

From Peter Jay Shippy, who teaches at Emerson College and whose verse novel, How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic will be published in November by Rose Metal Press, comes this story:

“On August 21st, my wife Charlotte gave birth to beautiful twin girls, Stella and Beatrix. We had each taken travel bags to the hospital, packed from lists provided by our obstetrician. My list was lean—change of clothes, toothbrush, a flask and a book. That last item required weeks of anxious deliberation. Should I bring my bootleg copy of Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson’s new novel, bought on eBay? Or perhaps a book from my fall classes at Emerson? Charles Simic’s Dime-Store Alchemy, our new poet laureate’s prose poems on Joseph Cornell’s magnetic, elusive boxes? Something for my children? Wittgenstein? Beckett? Just kidding? We just moved into a larger home, and for the first time I have a bookcase dedicated to poetry. No more must Robert Desnos rub spines with Don DeLillo! One day as I tried to stare the bookcase into submission, I was struck by the hold James Tate has on my collection. Tate has always meant the cosmos to me. His seminal first collection, The Lost Pilot, was the book that gave me permission to write poetry. These were not grandpa Thomas Stearns’ poems. They were fresh, irreverent, heart-broken, and funny. Poems could be funny? At 20, that was news to me. Life-changing news. So, for the hospital, I grabbed his 1997 collection, Shroud of the Gnome. The first poem? “Where Babies Come From:” “Many are from the Maldives, /southwest of India, and must begin/collecting shells immediately.” He concludes, “In their dreams Mama and Papa/are standing on the shore/for what seems like an eternity, /and it is almost always the wrong shore.” Almost always? Beatrix? Stella!”

Margot Livesey, writer in residence at Emerson, author of novels including The House on Fortune Street, due out next summer, says:

“I’d have to say Jane Eyre was a crucial book for me. I first read it when I was about the same age that Jane is in the opening chapter –10 years old–and I felt immediately less alone in the world. Here was someone who was having an even harder time than I was; the food was terrible at my school but at least we didn’t have a typhus epidemic. And then of course Jane grows up and meets Rochester. The scene of her sitting on the stile at dusk and him riding over the frozen ground and falling at her feet is more vivid to me than many things that have happened in my own life. I knew almost nothing about sex at the time that I first read the novel but I knew a great deal about passion. And I understood at once how Jane feels recognized by Rochester. Just as, later in the novel I understood, instinctively, why Jane shouldn’t marry St. John.

As an adult I have re-read the novel a number of times–most recently last spring–and while I now hugely appreciate the artistry with which Bronte shaped the novel, and see many things in it that I entirely missed when I was 10, the main experience of reading is still an utter immersion in Jane’s life and sensibility, and a passionate desire to see her triumph over adversity.”

Philip Hilts, whose most recent book is RX for Survival: Why We Must Rise to the Global Health Challenge, is struck by a book that finds parallels between 1915 and current world politics

“Muddy subjects can sometimes be made clear as running water by good writers. Globalization is one such subject and Niall Ferguson is the writer who, for me, brought clarity. Ferguson is usually counted as a conservative, and has some cranky attitudes, but he illuminates the big picture wonderfully. In The War of the World he makes it plain that we have been here before on globalization, and the last time we passed this way we botched it-:poor, insular, ignorant leadership led from a moment in 1915 when booming global trade and rising wealth made the future look bright. One terrorist attack, an overblown, misguided reaction, and soon nations that had been partners in progress were at war, in depression, then at war again. What the nations failed to do was cooperate for the common good. After WWII, leaders of several nations determined that cooperation was the better way. The United Nations, World Bank, and World Health Organization were all established and the Marshall Plan set the tone: we’re all in this together, so let’s build a functioning world system together. After some decades of success—though troubled to be sure–we are now slipping back toward that bad moment in 1915 when globalization collapsed. Again it is terrorism, a misguided, overblown reaction, and a broad failure to cooperate that risks all. Ferguson spells out most of this (though not the most recent troubles) in detail in a way I’ve not seen anywhere else. The book is too long so if you’re in a hurry, read the riveting short version in his article “Sinking Globalization” in the March/April 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs. Pair this with the basic ideas in Jeffrey Sachs The End of Poverty, and/or Joseph Stiglitz’s Making Globalization Work, and you’ve got the start of a plan! It would be what George Catlett Marshall would be thinking about if he were the general of the hour now instead of the lesser figures we see on TV now.”

It can be as hard for new books to find an audience as for readers to find new books they will enjoy. So I’ve asked two poets to introduce City Type readers to their new collections. Happy reading!

Richard Hoffman is the author of the memoir Half the House and the poetry collection Without Paradise. His new collection, Gold Star Road (Barrow Street Press, New York, 2007) is the winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize:

The poems of Gold Star Road were written as the country was preparing for war, after the war began, and then while the war continued. Many of the poems ask how we are to respond to the in-your-face savagery not only of this particular war, but of the increasingly militarized and brutalizing culture of avarice spawned by global capitalism. How do we maintain some kind of faith in humanity when we are daily exposed to examples of depravity, deceit, and barbarity? How do we situate ourselves in relation to that knowledge? What does it take to stay sane and see clearly? These questions seem to me to be unavoidable. Of course the poems do not answer these questions, but they are the questions I struggle with, and so they animate the poems.

The title Gold Star Road refers to a street in my neighborhood in North Cambridge, but also to all the streets so named in towns and cities across the country: Gold Star Road (or Street or Boulevard) is the designation given to that street whose residents have suffered the greatest number of combat fatalities. It seemed a subtle way to indicate, when considered in light of the poems, that we are, in many ways, all on Gold Star Road, all involved in the repeated sacrifice of the young to the inhuman machinery of war.

Though the book’s concerns are serious, I hope the poems give pleasure too, serious pleasure, providing what Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion.”

Here is a poem from Gold Star Road:

Miracle at Bethany

Why? asked Lazarus.
Why come forth?
Is there peace? Are we now
in the time of justice?

I dream of these things
in the dark, in the earth.
It is my work, brother.
Leave me to it.

David McCann, is Korea Foundation Professor of Korean Literature at Harvard University. His new collection of poems is The Way I Wait for You (Codhill Press, New Paltz, NY, 2007):

I grew up in Cambridge. In a very old picture, I am lying in the stroller my mother has pushed up by the statue of John Harvard. No sign of a shiny toe on the statue, back then. I am always amazed, how poems write themselves through me. They are “about” places I’ve been and people I’ve known, books I’ve read, but they always catch me by surprise, first when I am writing them, and then when I read them again. They are about themselves too. The title poem for the book, “The Way I Wait for You,” is about someone else, and waiting to get back to her after a long journey. But I realize it’s also about the poem and its readers, including me. And my father, when he read it he translated it into French.

I won’t try to fool you
into thinking this poem is about
>the way I wait for you to look
out your window and see.

I won’t spend these precious lines
in rueful anticipation
of the moment someone notes
the lift in my voice, my heart.

Were there anyplace else to go
I would go there and wait
like the domestic cat turning
round and round in a place to lie;

or wander the hillsides,
>climbing the cobbled streets
to find the house with the window
where I know you will be.

I won’t try to fool you
into thinking this poem
is about the way I wait for you.
Look out your window and see.

Nicholas Nixon arrived a little late for our meeting. Seems he had stopped to photograph a dog fight that had broken out just as he cycled past a park in Brookline. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with the pictures, but no matter. They would become part of the bank of images he draws on that say, “Look at this. Pay attention to this one moment in time.”

Actually, when I asked Nixon to talk with me for this column—which usually concerns itself with words rather than images–I was thinking of that exact challenge that both poetry and photography lay out for us: to look, to look again, to try to see a little more or a little differently.

Nixon, who lives in Brookline, is a photographer whose work is the the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts as well as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, and the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth. In 2005 he had a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, and he has been the recipient of three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and two from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Nixon has done several series of photographs, of cities, of people in family groups, of patients. And every year since 1975 he has taken a photograph of his wife and her three sisters, a series known as “The Brown Sisters.” They stand, each year, in the same order, fascinating us as they change over time.

“It’s all of us,” says Nixon. “Everyone can see themselves in those pictures.”

Part of the reason we can see ourselves more clearly in a photograph than in a mirror is that whole notion of the moment in time. In contrast to those early 19th century photographs whose subjects had to sit unblinking for long minutes in front of the camera, the changes in technology let us see ourselves in the off-moments.

“A photograph usually deals with short ends of time, fractions of seconds,” Nixon says. “If you were sitting there you might not have seen it.”

The result is an image startlingly more “real” than what we see with our eyes. And, even if it’s a picture of someone else, we get the kind of look at ourselves we often find in literature. Truth, after all, does not lie only in facts.

“For you to believe a picture depends on your trusting that it really happened,” Nixon says, explaining that, as in literature, the particular opens out to become universal. When that happens, he tells me, “you can see a woman so clearly that she becomes not ‘Ellen’ but ‘woman’.”

Nixon says he is “waiting for the Alice Munro of photography–someone who can fool around with reality but still leave you feeling you’ve getting something authentic.”

Now, Nixon notes, digital technology has added a new possibility, photography as fiction. Skies can be cleared of dust motes and people can be burnished to the kind of impossible perfection that, not incidentally, helps keep our trainers and plastic surgeons busy and our self-images eternally in catch-up mode. What kind of truth that shows us about ourselves remains to be seen.

A couple of years ago I heard a writer I did not know, Lisa Borders, read from her novel in progress. I was riveted–the characters were fully formed from their introduction, the plot sounded like a page-turner. I couldn’t wait to read the book. I still can’t.

There are literary myths about the manuscript plucked from the slush pile to: (a) shoot to the top of the best-seller list, (b) win the National Book Award. (c) be snapped up by Steven Spielberg, (d–fill in your favorite fantasy here). But more often writing proceeds like gardening: the slow and quiet tending of adverbs, weeding of dialogue, crafting of the work. The way Lisa Borders is doing.

Borders is clearly a writer deserving of attention. All the ingredients are there. She has had short stories published in respected literary journals, has been given awards, grants, and residencies, and teaches fiction writing at Boston independent writing center Grub Street. In selecting her novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, for the Fred Bonnie Memorial Award for Best First Novel, writer Pat Conroy called it, “an absolute original by a fresh new voice in fiction.” The book went on to win a Massachusetts Book Award as well.

But literary fame and fortune have yet to find her. She tends her literary garden out of the limelight, taking pride in the body of work she is steadily producing. That is probably the lot of most writers of literary fiction, and it is one she accepts with grace and equanimity.

“Probably when I was younger I had grander dreams,” she says. “It could still happen, but I’ve gotten past the point where I think I’m going to be famous. And I think if that’s a writer’s goal, they’d better do something else.”

Even when her book was selected for the Bonnie award, it was destined to make a more of a small ripple than a noticeable splash: the announcement came on September 10, 2001.

“After waiting years for this news, I had about 18 hours to celebrate before it looked like the world was coming to an end.”

If she did not become an overnight literary sensation, Borders did find that publication of Cloud Cuckoo Land gave her new respect for herself as a writer and allowed her to protect time and energy for writing. Her writing time now takes precedence over her two part time jobs, teaching fiction writing and working in a lab as a cytotechnologist.

“I had had to fit writing around my jobs and now it’s vice versa,” she says. “It’s a difficult juggling act sometimes.”

She also balances long and short form, switching between work on the novel, Fifty-First State, and short stories. And she is feels Cloud Cuckoo Land will have a second life at some point, possibly because of its unforgettable lead character, Miri.

“I think Miri is too stubborn. She’ll make sure her story gets told.”

While readers might imagine writers lusting after literary stardom, celebrity holds little attraction for Borders. While she wouldn’t turn it away, she is clearly focused, instead, on the satisfaction of creating the work.

“I tell my students if you really don’t need to do this you might want to do something else. This will break your heart. You have to be a little delusional and the odds are not in your favor.”

Would Borders herself ever consider giving up writing?

“No, I can’t stop doing it,” she says. “I’m a writer. This is what I do.”

The other day as I finished reading Zadie Smith’s novel, On Beauty, I could feel one of the main characters, Kiki, take up residence in my head. She’s in there right next to Elizabeth Bennett, Scarlett O’Hara, the Wife of Bath, and Charlotte (yes, the writer and web-spinner).

Certainly one of the greatest pleasures of reading is meeting people who are memorable, despite being fictional. What makes them so real for us? I asked novelist Margot Livesey, herself the creator of people who tend to live with readers long after the final page of Banishing Verona, Eva moves the Furniture, The Missing World, or her other novels or short stories.

“I think a lot about character,” says Livesey, who recalls growing up under the spell of the great 19th century characters like Heathcliff and Jane Eyre. “One of the reasons I love to write fiction is that it gives me a different way of looking at the world. I might find myself thinking, ‘Verona wouldn’t like that.’

This day, as we sit in her living room, surrounded by paintings by her husband, artist Eric Garnick, we talk about how a story’s characters can be so real that a reader can identify across lines of gender, race, age, and other details.

Livesey says, “It’s a mixture of craft and luck. I know things I can do, the telling detail, to put a character on the page.”

We talk, too, about how part of the “real-ness” has to be the all too human presence of flaws. Livesey points to Chekhov’s The Lady with the Dog as such a story.

“The fact that Chekhov describes his two characters with such confidence, presenting their strengths and weaknesses, their virtues and vices so openly–there is something very persuasive about that. We don’t want our characters to be so saintly. We respond to characters that have flaws. We empathize with their struggle. Many of the great memorable characters are on some kind of journey, large or small. That seems to elicit our sympathy.

“With that kind of well-drawn character, we feel their physical presence, we get a sense of their voice, their language. We watch our own lives and our friends’ lives unfold and we see how people talk in real life. It’s a slow process. Fiction changes the nature of time.”

According to Livesey, watching fictional characters over time gives us a chance to learn about them, get to know them, understand them, even develop expectations about how they will behave.

Livesey’s own stories tend to start with an occasion–someone finding an abandoned baby, as in Criminals, or sustaining a memory-erasing accident, as in The Missing World. Next, she says, she needs to look for a character to inhabit that situation and to figure out where the story is going. -then what she calls a period of negotiation: maybe a character has become too likable or too unlikable.

“I usually have a destination in mind,” she says. With Criminals, for example, she wanted the story to end with a Solomon-like judgment; with Banishing Verona, she was interested in exploring an unlikely love story.

Talking with Livesey, I am glad to learn it is not only readers who miss the characters when the last page is finished. She tells me about procrastinating a little before writing the final chapter of Banishing Verona
.
“I loved being in (the characters’) company and I knew that when I was done, my relationship with them would change.”

As surely as the swans return to the Public Garden it’s time for summer reading recommendations. Summer is somehow never long enough to do all the wonderful things we’ve planned. But it brings at least the illusion of leisure hours and the intention to take time to sit on a park bench or beach chair and lose ourselves in the pages of a good book. This year I’ve asked for picks from area independent bookstores.

Ellen Jarrett, marketing manager for Porter Square Books in Cambridge:
“I would recommend Mameve Medwed’s latest, now in paperback, How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life. Told with wit and humor, this is the story of a single woman who finds out she is in possession of a valuable family heirloom. Skirmishes ensue which lead to the resolution of long-standing family feuds and romance.”

Amanda Darling, marketing manager of Harvard Book Store:
“One novel I’ve really enjoyed is The Birthdays, by local author Heidi Pitlor; it just came out in paperback. It’s a superbly graceful book. The action takes place over a long weekend as a family–an aging mother and father, the two sons and their wives, and a daughter–gather at a summer house in Maine to celebrate the father’s 75th birthday. Pitlor moves between the point of views of differing family members in a way that illuminates their interactions and makes you incredibly aware of what is said, and not said, to the people they love. It made me think about the challenges and joys of interconnectedness, and how small graces (the sound of the surf, the softness of a bed, the pressure of a loved one’s hand) can help us get through the inevitable sorrows of life.

“I’m a sucker for mysteries — a trait I inherited from my librarian mom. Last summer, I was delighted to discover the Homer Kelly mysteries by local author Jane Langton. Set in and around Boston, the novels are well-written, smart and funny. I especially enjoyed Murder at the Gardner and The Transcendental Murder.”

Lori Kauffman book buyer, Brookline Booksmith:
“Laurie Horowitz was raised in the Boston area and her book, The Family Fortune , about a Brahmin family is set in and around the city. Horowitz knows to borrow from the best; her story is based loosely on Jane Austen’s Persuasion. I’m not going to pretend that this is a similar classic for the centuries, but it is just right for reading in the shade with a cold raspberry lime rickey. It is the story of Jane Fortune, editor of the literary Euphemia Review, who was persuaded when she was young to give up on her love for a promising (now best-selling) author. Single and 38, she has lived with her father and older sister in their Beacon Hill home until living beyond their means forces the family to rent it out. As Jane attempts to help her family regain their equilibrium she is both reunited with her first love and enthralled by a new promising young writer. In a blurb I wrote for a staff recommendation I noted that, unlike so many chick-lit (shall we call it popular fiction?) characters who are notable primarily for their shopping skills and dumb luck, it is truly refreshing to find someone like Jane, a character worthy of being called a heroine.”

Happy reading!

“I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library,” the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges famously said. And even in these times of immediate online gratification, readers and writers of poetry might feel they had landed in paradise when they walk into the Woodberry Poetry Room.

Although it is located in Harvard’s Lamont Library, the Poetry Room is open to the public with just the flash of a photo ID and a signing of the register. I think of it as a secret garden of poetry: sunlight from Harvard Yard gleaming on mellow burnished wood, history settling around you as you walk in the door. A small display case beside the door contains a changing selection. On a day I visited the exhibited items included a Library Journal article from 1950 on the Woodberry’s audio collection and a notebook with, among other entries, a reminder to change three burned-out light bulbs in the overhead brass fixtures.

Don Share tells me the Poetry Room was named for George Edward Woodberry, an 1877 Harvard graduate and Columbia University professor who wanted to establish a “place for living poetry.” Share has been Curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room since 2000 ; he leaves at the end of July for Chicago and a new position as senior editor of the prestigious literary magazine Poetry. He is currently also the poetry editor of the Harvard Review and author, most recently, of the poetry collection Squandermania.

While the term Curator seems designed to emphasize the Room’s importance as an archive, the original intent was the enjoyment, rather than the serious study, of poetry.

The rotating collection out on open shelves invites reading on the blue sofas or on chairs that slide noiselessly on cork floors. Two reading tables have centerpieces that lift open to record turntables that are surely state of the art circa mid-20th century. There are also outlets for plugging in to 21st-century listening. The room was originally designed by the legendary Finnish architect and designer Alvar Aalto, though a renovation was recently completed to markedly mixed reviews.

One of the room’s most treasures is its audio archive of poets reading their own work, including a series under the label Harvard Vocarium, that began in 1931 with T.S. Eliot’s reading of “The Hollow Men” and “Gerontion.” The collection now includes nearly every major poet from Yeats, Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop to contemporary additions like Seamus Heaney, Adrienne Rich, and Jorie Graham. Several pieces from the archive were part of a four-disc set nominated for a 2006 Grammy award in the Best Historical Album category and a clip of Vladimir Nabokov reading from Lolita accompanied a 2005 National Public Radio feature on that novel.

When I went to the Poetry Room’s web site, I heard , from March 20, 1946, a soft-spoken Robert Lowell reading “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket”; a sonorous Ezra Pound rolling his r’s in a 1939 reading of “The Seafarer”; Wallace Stevens’ deliberate reading of “The Auroras of Autumn” in 1954.

Share shows me some of the room’s other gems–a silver tea service, not as highly polished as it probably was in the 1930s; a lithograph of a Ted Hughes poem; artwork by James Merrill; photographs of E. E., Cummings, Robert Frost. A large colorful portrait of Seamus Heaney watches mildly over the room. A framed letter from Frost politely declines the position of Curator (“the more I think of it the less I see myself as a possibility for your Poetry Room.”)

“This is the weirdest thing we have,” says Share, showing me a cigar that belonged to Amy Lowell. Another cigar, this one from Robert Lowell (to the Lowell clan a cigar was apparently not just a cigar), sports a pink band reading “It’s a Girl” to celebrate the birth of his daughter Harriet.

Below a photograph of John Lincoln Sweeney, a former Curator, this quote from Yeats’s poem “At Galway Races” speaks to the room’s history and hopefully continuing appeal: “We, too, had good attendance once,/Hearers and hearteners of the work.”

How does a reader find a good book? And how does a writer find an audience? Once, at neighborhood bookstores, knowledgeable salespeople would press their favorites into your hand and say, “You should read this.” Now, though both the stores and the salesclerks still exist, they are in shrinking supply. It’s harder for writer and reader to connect. So I’ve invited three poets to introduce you to their new books. Two are first collections; the third is an anthology that includes work by area poets past (John Boyle O’Reilly) and present (Fred Marchant, Susan Donnelly, Kevin Bowen).

Molly Lynn Watt, Shadow People (Ibbetson Street Press, 2007)
Would we were sitting at the oak table in my parents’ farmhouse kitchen drinking tea from mint gathered in the yard, using redware mugs made by my brother. My parents died years ago. We sold the farm. I live in the city. Life wasn’t tranquil.

The poems in Shadow People spring from that homeplace of hospitality, onion-skinned-dyed Easter eggs, and discussions of Jim Crow. I have worked alongside Yup’ik elders in Alaska, seen the “juicy dance” of aurora borealis, touched glaciers, survived incest, heard Billie Holiday sing “Strange Fruit,” failed at one marriage, succeeded at another, watched turtles lay eggs in sand, “glistened and grinned in a partner swing,” commuted on the Red Line, picketed for peace. I have been unable to answer grandchildren at seder, asking “Why is government lying…when will Elijah bring promised peace?” My poems are a gift of optimism and witness for a future.

I listen for the rainstorm and its thunder
laugh out loud renewed with wonder
then thrust another banner up that wars will cease.

Daniel Tobin, ed., The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007)

This is the first major anthology of Irish American Poetry. It breaks new ground in the field of Irish American literary scholarship by collecting for the first time the work of over 200 Irish American poets, as well as other American poets whose works enjoins Irish American themes. It brings together exemplary poets from the “populist period” of Irish American verse with the work of those Irish Americans who have made an indelible imprint on American poetry. The collection cuts across the broad spectrum of American poetry, and also includes distinctive poems by contemporary poets whose work is likely to survive. It is, according to Professor Charles Fanning, an “indispensable collection,” and the equivalent in poet Eamonn Wall’s words to “the invention of a whole new field.”

Kim Garcia, Madonna Magdalene (Turning Point Books, 2006)

Place here the virgin in her Easter petals,
the ladder of green leaves, the open throat.
I was reading; my lamp was full. A bird
entered the room, and knocked the walls
with bright wings, drunk on sky-mindedness.

Any picture I have of paradise includes a book. This poem is drawn from an illuminated manuscript, a portrait of the virgin just as her life is blown open. She is reading. She is ready.

This is a book of desire, both the bliss of longing which is its own answer, and sweet regret—sexual, maternal, spiritual—which is a species of balm.

The madonnas and magdalenes of this book unmade me as I made them. I am grateful to them, grateful to be in a body one more day, and grateful for the stories that change us.

Water to wine, we were stained
and intoxicated. Do as Love tells you.
Praise virginity lost, slow and conscious
as a strip tease. Layer by layer,
let it be done unto us. Again and again

I often think of this quote from Henry James: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have.” I think of it especially when I see artists organizing exhibits, playing concerts, giving readings to benefit those who need help. IÕve done it myself–been in readings after 9/11, after the 2004 tsunami; helped organize a reading after Hurricane Katrina. This Thursday “Got DivaÕtude?” a concert and poetry slam will be held to raise money for women artists in New Orleans.

Def Poetry Jam artist Stacyann Chinn, slam poets Sunni Patterson and Asali Devan, and the eight-piece music ensemble Zili Misik will use their talents on behalf of the New Orleans Women Artist Collective (NOWAC). Tye Waller, NOWACÕs cofounder tells me about the need–musicians and writers whose homes were destroyed, visual artists who lost studios filled with work. Now, more than a year and a half later, many members of one of the countryÕs most vibrant arts communities are still trying to find a way to return home. Because Waller is executive director of the Architectural Woodworking Institute (cq) and has a special affinity for what is made by hand, NOWAC has a strong connection to the building trades. The groupÕs first fund-raiser, in fact, was co-sponsored by the New England Belt Sander Racing Association. (cq) (Who knew?) NOWACÕs ongoing $1 Restore-A-Home campaign sends construction volunteers and materials to New Orleans.

This excerpt from a poem by Gail Burton is a sample of what you might hear at “Got DivaÕtude?”

she might be light bright damned near blue calm
she whipped by winds into a gale

she wail her sorrow songs
crying dying screaming sighing
crying dying screaming sighing

crying dying screaming sighing her saving psalms
psalms so spiritual psalms oh so sensual
sometimes she got to punctuate and punctuate
punctuate with a razor’s slash slash slash

Sister girl didn’t Momma used to say:
Even the leaves turn their
asses up to God Himself
sometimes when it rains

Ever since Councillor John Tobin proposed the idea of a Boston poet laureate, I’ve been wondering why the idea of a poet laureate exists at all. Don’t get me wrong—I’m glad it does. It’s just that I’m curious about the concept: why a poet laureate rather, say, than a teacher laureate, a lawyer laureate, a hedge fund manager laureate? Or, staying with the arts, why not a novelist or sculptor laureate? Why is poetry the way we articulate our civic life? As I guess I’m often asking, what is it about poetry?

I asked Dagan Coppock about that. Coppock is a resident at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is also co-editor of Body Language: Poems of the Medical Training Experience, a collection written by people who clearly were busy doing other things. And yet they turned to poetry.

“We live in a country, in a society that is pretty driven by technological progress,” he says. “In the end, poets are society’s last vestige of the shamans, the keepers of words for everyone. ”

I think he’s on to something. There is a spiritual quality to poetry, an ability to aim itself straight to the deepest part of our beings. That’s why we turned to it in droves to exorcise the terrible power of 9/11 or, as this column talked about recently, the devastation of the Gulf Coast that followed Hurricane Katrina.

Tobin’s proposal, written in slightly tongue-in-cheek verse by Joe Bergin, a member of the Carpenter Poets of Jamaica Plain, noted that “only poetry can give voice to the profound.” It also quoted John F. Kennedy’s words: “When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence.”

Tobin envisions a poet laureate whose words would commemorate public occasions. But, he told me, a city poet could also provide another way to talk about the city and its life. I like that. Someone who could mark a mayoral inauguration or public building dedication, sure. But maybe also someone who could ponder blinking lights under the Longfellow Bridge or voice the public anguish over young people shot to death on our streets.

Pointing to the rhymes and rhythms of rap and hip hop they already enjoy, Tobin says he’d like to see schoolchildren recognize that poetry holds something for them. He wants them to aspire to write, to take pleasure in reading. He wants to offer kids a different kind of role model, not just the sports heroes. And he hopes that poetry will give them a new way to hear their community stories.

As Coppock notes, it is the stories we live by that tell us who we are. “All societies have had holy people at their spiritual center who were the keepers of their stories just the way that, in our own families there are always the patriarchs and matriarchs who know the family stories.”

Telling those stories in words, the currency of our everyday interactions, delivers them in a way that, perhaps visual art or music could not.

“There is something about words and story—narrative—that is important to collective society, that gives written word power over society that other arts may not have,” says Coppock, adding, “Poetry has moved in recent decades to the personal and away from more narrative forms. But sometimes the personal can mirror what’s going on in society.”