Author: ellen

We’re seasonal animals, even in our reading habits. When the weather turns sultry, we migrate to the beach with light “summer reading.” But what books do we reach for when we’re cocooning in front of the fire under a cozy throw, red wine or hot chocolate at hand? I asked a few people who’ve appeared before in City Type for their recommendations.

Edith Pearlman: (Most recent book, How To Fall; her story, “Self-Reliance” is in Best American Short Stories 2007) Here is a fine new book, Deerskin, by Robin McKinley. Books written for children and young adults give us much of what books written for adults try to: conflict, betrayal, faithfulness, love, adventure – and they do it without the baggage of realism; they avoid contemporary settings in favor of timeless ones; they dispense with that overvalued element motivation. As the poet Amy Clampitt says: “who knows what makes any of us do what we do?” Deerskin is a powerful example of the genre. There’s an unforgettable heroine and a superb dog.

Joyce Peseroff: (Most recent book, Eastern Mountain Time; teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts at Boston) My recommendation isn’t a book, but a magazine. Ploughshares’ Winter 2006-2007 issue, edited by Rosanna Warren, includes poetry and fiction that reflect the infinite variety of contemporary subjects and styles. There’s something for everyone in this issue, and plenty to muse on before spring beckons.

Fred Marchant: (Director of the Creative Writing Program and Poetry Center at Suffolk University; author of Full Moon Boat and co-translator, with Nguyen Ba Chung, of From a Corner of My Yard, poems by the Vietnamese poet Tran Dang Khoa) Carnets, by George Kalogeris. These poems are based on the journals of the great modern French philosopher Albert Camus, and follow the life of this writer whose thoughts about conscience and art in relation to political life are all the more relevant in these times.

Marcie Hershman: (Author of the novels, Tales of the Master Race and Safe in America, and the memoir Speak to Me; teaches in the writing program at Tufts University) This list of “winter-recommendeds” sounds like a good idea now that the cold winds are blowing. And so: For the thrill of visiting over-heated, exotic locations and the great pleasure of getting there via sentences wrought with intelligence, wit, and mystery, I could hardly do better than to select Peter Carey’s enormously entertaining My Life as a Fake. Set in Australia and Kuala Lumpur, this literary whodunit tosses up questions of what is authentic and what is fake, and what, in the end, our pursuit of the “authentically” poetic may cost us. Another choice is the stories of Isaac Babel, set on the edge of the winter steppes or the summer shore of the sea, against a background sweetness not of birdsong but of clinking of glasses of vodka.

Susan Donnelly: (Most recent book, Transit; contributor to new anthology of Irish American poetry edited by Daniel Tobin; poetry teacher) I am an inveterate re-reader, especially on a cold winter evening. I reread a Jane Austen just about every winter. Emma is my favorite. This holiday season I reread Dicken’s A Christmas Carol and found a lot of tough social commentary beyond the “Bah, Humbug!” Authors reread recently have been the wonderful English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald (The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower) and E.M. Forster (Where Angels Fear to Tread) . I even reread old mysteries, like Dorothy Sayers’ Strong Poison. So many books, so little time . . .

Julia Collins: (My Father’s War ) I always read four or five books simultaneously, because I constantly misplace them. Winter quiet suits such juggling. At the moment, scattered about my house are Jeannette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle, hard to read and hard to put down; Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals about my lifelong hero Abraham Lincoln and his relationships with three rivals he chose for his Cabinet; Jose Saramago’s harrowing Blindness about an epidemic of blindness and how humanity responds; and Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City, a truly astonishing account of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair focusing on two men, the architect who built it and the serial killer who used it for his cover.

I am reading both old and new books, including Tillie Olsen’s sad and wise Tell Me a Riddle, Vikram Seth’s Two Lives, and a beautiful new book of poems, In the Ghost-House Acquainted, by Kevin Goodan.

I recently spent a week in New Orleans helping to rebuild a house. When I got home and people asked about it, all I could say was, “It’s too huge. I don’t know how to talk about it. I’ll e-mail you something I’ve written.”

Writers write. It’s how we process experience, how we figure out what we think, especially how we think about enormous events like the post-hurricane devastation in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. When I think about painting over a water mark that came nearly to my shoulders, or of seeing the Lower Ninth Ward’s landscape of foundations where houses used to be, it is too much to talk about. So I am writing.

And I am reading the words of other writers, like Brenda Marie Osbey, the poet laureate of Louisiana. In her poem, Madhouses, she wrote,
journey with me and see what i see

first you hear the leaves
past silence
hitting the ground
moving along the streets
with an undercurrent of rhythm
moving to your bloodbeat
and the sounds of your hands
reaching
reaching up

When Philip C. Kolin , a professor of English at University of Southern Mississippi and Susan Swartwout, associate professor at Southeast Missouri State University, co-edited a collection of poems called Hurricane Blues (2006, Southeast Missouri State University Press), they received more than 10,000 entries to choose from, poems from people who lived through it and those who watched from around the world. One they selected for the book is Everywhere, Water by Somerville’s Georgiana Cohen , who wrote:
It is not water
anymore; it’s a
city’s slow bleeding.
Levees buckle like
collapsed arteries.
The Delta’s heart is
broken, and beaten.

Some Hurricane Blues poems remind us of the disconnect of being where sun warmed our faces as we listened to news about the rising waters. Virginia Ramus watching, horrified, “from this New/ Jersey beach,” wrote of
ocean darkening
beneath fingernail
moon visible from all
over the nation.

Likewise, Thomas R. Smith’s poem, ” In Wisconsin, Hardly a Breeze” asked
How would our
heart beat without the city that birthed Satchmo?

Linda Pastan wrote of Noah preparing the ark: “he had precise instructions from above” while
God went about his usual business

somewhere else.
Who worried about the children.still stranded on their failing rooftops;
the abandoned animals who didn’t
make it to the ark; the way so many deaths seemed an almost incidental
part of the story?
Did anyone give instructions
from above, and when?

Some poems tell how the story unfolded. Jianquing Zheng wrote,
Fingers-crossed, my wife and I
keep praying to the trees:
don’t fall; don’t fall.

From Malaika Favorite,
We awoke to find the river
sitting at table ready to lap up all we had.

And Lee Herrick wrote
You can live by the water and still die of thirst.
I said you can live by the water and still die of thirst….

I don’t know what I should tell you.
But I feel like the saints are marching.
They are singing a slow, deep, and beautiful song,
waiting for us to join in.

One poem, by Katherine Murphy, is titled “A Street Called Humanity.” I passed Humanity each day on my way to the house where I was spackling and sanding. I was there through the Union for Reform Judaism as part of a group of 34 people from across the country. The group worked on two houses. The one I worked on was just off Elysian Fields Avenue, a name more redolent of Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire, which is set in that neighborhood, than of the heavenly resting place in Greek mythology.

The long slow work of rebuilding goes on, and the mountain of written words continues to grow. I am finding that the more I write, the more I am beginning to find ways to start talking about what I saw there. But for each writer who lives in New Orleans, who visits, who thinks about what it would be like to lose everything, the impulse to respond continues. We write to make other people pay attention. Mostly we write as a way to make sense out of the incomprehensible. We have no choice. It’s what we do.

.

She has a soft voice and a disarming manner and we begin our conversation by chatting about the upcoming holiday break and plans for family get-togethers. Still, meeting with Helen Vendler is daunting. She is, after all, “Dame Helen,” the nation’s preeminent poetry critic. The A. Kingsley Porter University Professor of English at Harvard,. Author of 19 books, recipient of 23 honorary degrees, and the owner of a string of other equally impressive academic accomplishments listed on her curriculum vitae–and that’s just the “brief” one. Able to leap tall concepts in a single bound and dismiss others, like “accessible” poetry, with one withering raise of eyebrow.

“You don’t expect to understand quantum physics or an algebraic equation, or even Beethoven’s late quartets without studying,” she says by way of addressing my opening comment about how readers often feel intimidated by poetry. Vendler, whose undergraduate degree was in chemistry, would like to see the whole system of teaching literature overhauled to bring it closer to the structure of teaching sciences.

“There used to be things that prepared people for poetry–choral singing at school, study of syntactic forms and rhythmic language with and without rhyme. Today we lack all those things people used to know. They used to memorize poems in school, so they had a template for understanding what a ballad is, a sonnet. They had experience with rhyme and meter.”

She also faults what she says is America’s distrust and dismissal of the arts.

“The arts have been deeply suspect here. From the Puritans the educational system was geared to “useful’ learning, preparing for business, not “wasted’ in “leisure activities’ like the arts. But art is about life, not something marginal.”

Her words remind me of a recent feature I heard on National Public Radio in which Lloyd Schwartz talked about a program of music education in Venezuela that has produced a generation of world class musicians as well as a nation of people who take pleasure in listening to great music.

“Most of the human race is equipped to respond to art,” Vendler continues. “Every tribe in the world has produced an esthetic sense that supports and enriches its people and brings the whole person into play, the whole soul. It’s the only way to make a well-rounded person, to develop human sympathy.”

She points to the poems of Seamus Heaney, winner of the 1995 Nobel prize in literature, as examples of art that can elicit that kind of deep response.

“Something in the power of his work gets through to people. We sense the power. If the poem is good enough, people will be willing to work to understand it.”

And work they should, according to Vendler, since the best poetry does not offer itself easily. Our conversation circles back to the idea of accessibility and how readers can approach poetry.

“They need to do the work themselves,” says Vendler. “You need to read anthologies because in an anthology each poem tells you about all the others; it’s related to all the others. You need to read all the work of a poet, and see the ambition, the topics of intense interest.”

This is a fierce protector of the art and no one is going to take it casually if she can help it. She wants us to bring ourselves fully to poetry. She prods us to ask more of ourselves, to be ambitious readers, unafraid, demanding, and inquisitive. That’s the way Helen Vendler wants us to read poetry–the way she believes it demands to be read.

“Nobody tells fibs in Boston” says one of Henry James’s characters in The Bostonians. It’s a throwaway line, but the underlying assumption remains today: “Bostonian” means something specific, maybe to those of us who live here, but certainly to the outside world. a throwaway line, but the underlying assumption remains today: “Bostonian” means something specific, maybe to those of us who live here, but certainly to the outside world.

I talked about that Boston image with William Vance, a Boston University professor emeritus and the author of America’s Rome. He also contributed a chapter called “Redefining “Bostonian'” to the book The Bostonians: Painters of an Elegant Age, 1870-1930, by Trevor Fairbrother. In it, he quotes a saying popular in James’s time that “Boston folks are full of notions,” adding that jokes about “entrance examinations at the city limits and a race of people who wore spectacles even in their cradles were sufficiently numerous to indicate that other Americans knew what made “Bostonians’ different.”

And different we still are if what’s written by us and about us are to be believed. In a country where cities blur into a generic landscape, Boston stands out for its sense of place and identity, as well as a larger-than-city-limits sense of self.

“We have a symphony, we have museums beyond what another city this size might have,” says Vance. Boston also leans on its outsized academic presence and literary tradition. Its image even has a physical component, from its compact and contiguous geography to its 18th and 19th century architecture. There Vance believes Boston benefitted from its mid-20th-century economic slumber, which preserved its old buildings out of necessity until they came to be appreciated esthetically and historically. Vance, who spends part of each year in Rome, sees how Boston’s identity crosses the Atlantic, where Europeans admire it as city of intellectual activity, of ideas, universities, and the arts.

But, as James’s contemporaries knew, Boston’s seriousness and particularity make it ripe fodder for caricature. James mockingly portrayed it as a place of strict rules, down to the “right” private dancing classes which only the “right” people knew about. Even if it wasn’t, it somehow seemed as if it could have been.

“James was consciously using local color,” says Vance. Today, the emphasis has shifted to the intersections of a wider population, flattening out old class hierarchies to include a fresh assessment of who the Bostonians are now. In the work of writers like Dennis Lehane and Michael Patrick MacDonald, the local color is more likely to mirror the city’s grittiness, with its streets and crime scenes, its courtrooms rather than its drawing rooms.

Is “Bostonian” more than simply a geographic label? Even as the original plain gave way to nouveau plush more than a century ago, Vance notes, Boston remained somehow identifiably Boston. We know it wasn’t monolithic then and is certainly even less so now, but it does have a specific image. Like most such images, this one is concocted from a pinch of truth–or maybe truthiness–and a cupful of misconceptions and assumptions.

Vance recalls that, not long ago, he was having a conversation in an elevator in Rome and one of the other passengers perked up at the sound of her native tongue. “You’re Americans, too! We’re from Dallas. Where are y’all from?”

“I told her we were from Boston,” Vance recalls, “and she said, “Oh,’ and we rode the rest of the way in silence.”

Remember that new-book ritual, splaying the crisp spine and gently smoothing down, front and back, a few pages at a time? Remember the feel, the smell of those pristine pages? What is it about books? Why do we like not only to read them, but also to look at them, feel them, yes even smell them? We build public monuments and private altars to them and, as a current exhibit shows, we translate them into visual art.

“It’s another way to have a conversation about books, ” says Ronni Komarow, who organized “Beyond the Book: An Exhibit of Book Art and Collage,” at the Honan-Allston branch of the Boston Public Library. “And what better place than in a library?”

Komarow, herself a book artist who lives near the library, proposed the idea of a juried show as a way to draw attention to Allston’s growing arts community that will soon include Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, temporarily relocating a few blocks away during its building renovation. Branch librarian, Sarah Markell, was immediately enthusiastic.

Some of the exhibit’s works are recognizable as books, like Komarow’s own accordion book, “She Was Very Smart,” which gives voice to unheard family legend. Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord crafts “Spirit Books” of fabric, paper, and wood that open like large, wise dictionaries or hide in twig nests and embellished seed pods. In Tricia Jones’s “Trees Have Always Been My Friends,” a tiny book rests in a curl of bark, reminding us that early books were written on the natural materials at hand. Letters spelling out “mea culpa” reach from the pages of “Remorse” by Annie Zeybekoglu.

Other works have a freer take on the idea of books, like Tricia Neumyer’s “Self Portrait as Action Figure Trading Cards,” in which she appears as, among others, Naomi Armitage, “former police officer on Mars.” Squiggly shapes that cavort through Keith Maddy’s “Roll Over” remind me of the grasshopper that jumps through E.E. Cummings’s poem, “rpophessagr.” A secret message hides in the sole of a shoe in “How They Brought the Word from Dailytown” by M. L. Van Nice. Jennifer Flores references the Day of the Dead tradition in “She’s Always Among Us.”

Many pieces are collages that incorporate text, like Ruth Segaloff’s idyllic and unsettling “Lost Boys” and Michal Rebibo’s enigmatic “Silent Heart” and “Silent Soul.” As a visual artist and writer, Betsy Showstack acknowledges the possibilities and limitations of the written word in her collage, “Words Cannot Say.” Likewise, Veronica Morgan, who describes herself as “torn between the two worlds,” is represented by “Hearth Goddess,” with its burnt offering of words, and “Homemaking,” in which words unseen in this exhibit underlie images of construction.

Though book art has a long history, it has become even more visible in the past decade. It’s possible all the discussion about the decline of the hard copy in favor of online reading has inspired this new proof that the iconic form still endures. At the very least, it is a way of seeing that something old can be new again and again.

“When one creates a work of (visual) art, the object becomes a crossroads for the artist and the public, a place for minds to connect,” says Maria Vitagliano, director of the Chamberlayne School of Design at Mt. Ida College, who, with her colleague Judith Veronesi, was a juror for the exhibit. “It’s just a little leap from there to treat a book as an art object and also push the boundaries of people’s common notion of what books are.”

I was across from Back Bay Station when I saw a granite column with writing carved into it. It was a short story–a whole story right there on the column. Counterpoint, by Jane Barnes, tells of Kate, quarreling with Tom about a late bill payment wil she practices Bach and thinks, “So this is what it was like…to take all that external irritation and put it into the music.”

What? I had passed this spot many times, but never seen this, or a nearby column where a poem by Ruth Whitman was carved. A third column explained a 1987 project, “Boston Contemporary Writers,”that had placed poetry and prose reflecting “the experience of living or working in an urban environment” along the Southwest Corridor. Listed were works located, one poetry one prose, at nine T stops along the Orange Line as a sort of meandering urban Stonehenge. Did I have a choice? I got on the Orange Line.

It was easy to spot the column set in the middle of the Ruggles station. Even the coffee cup brazenly perched on top could not detract from Samuel Allen’s poem, “Harriet Tubman aka Moses,” with its powerful ending:
for a moment
in the long journey
came the first faint glimpses
of the stars, the everlasting stars, shining clear
over the free
cold
land.

Finding the second piece, “Four Letters Home,” by Will Holton, proved harder. I’ve been a fan of art on the T, both official, like Mags Harries’ bronze gloves “dropped” at Porter Square, and unofficial, like the clarinetist at Copley. But I had completely missed this series–and apparently I wasn’t the only one. When I asked a T employee where the other column was, he had no idea what I was talking about. I pointed out the poem I had just read. “I’ve never seen that,” he said. “I’ll have to read it.”

Another thing I had missed, having arrived in Boston in 1990, was the difficult history that this project grew out of. Pamela Worden, then president and CEO of the nonprofit group Urban Arts, Inc., had proposed it as an “opportunity for healing” from deep wounds made in the mid-1960s when a massive highway project was planned that would have sliced through neighborhoods and effectively isolated Roxbury and Jamaica Plain from the rest of the city. The plan was dropped, but only after a decade of public outrage. Instead, in the swath cleared for the highway, a new Orange Line was built to replace the old elevated rail line.

“There was a lot of hurt in the neighborhoods,” explains Worden, “and this was an opportunity to leave a legacy where the scars had been. We wanted to use words because we are surrounded by words. We have advertising screaming at us. We felt there ought to be words in the public environment that speak to us more deeply.”
The pieces chosen in a blind competition includes work by unpublished writers and those with major reputations. Eileen Meny, who was the project director, says,“We wanted the writing to reflect the neighborhoods. We hoped that when people came out of the subway they would find a sense of place.”

Outside the Ruggles station I recognized four familiar-looking columns. Holton’s piece is a series of imagined letters home from people who had settled in Roxbury: Winslow, writes in 1834 to his parents in Maine about his small farm; in 1886 Patrick tells his Irish family the neighborhood is filling with Italians and Russian Jews “and their strange ways”; Morris from Poland, is selling hardware in 1926; and Charlie writes his family in Georgia in 1960 that he works hard as a custodian, though “people don’t really appreciate what I do.”

As I reenter the station, I see the T worker I talked to earlier reading the Samuel Allen poem, and pointing it out to a passerby.
Continuing riding and reading, at Jackson Square I find Christine Palamidessi Moore’s “Grandmothers,” about her Italian “Nonna” and Slovak “Baba,” along with Christopher Gilbert’s poem, “Any Good Throat.” At Stony Brook Rosario Morales and Martin Espada write about newcomers who brought their languages and customs along with their hopes and dreams for the future, and at Green Street Mary Bonina and Daria MonDesire evoke a world that, though geographically close, is miles from Copley Square.

Delightful as these pieces are, it’s clear that time, weather, and initial concept have not always been kind, and reading the words on these polished stones can be a challenge. At Roxbury Crossing, Jeanette DeLello Winthrop’s poem, “Roxbury Crossing,” is all but illegible. So, too, is the prose piece “Hometown” by Luix Virgil Overbea, a narrative that covers all four sides of its column. Its subject and its placement warrant attention, but it is, unfortunately, one of the less successful pieces.

At Forest Hills, the columns (which a T staffer insisted weren’t there) are up at the bus stop. I read a poem by Thomas Hurley (cq) called The Subway Collector, then went inside the station to join the people trying to figure out the new toll card vending machines.

Merry Christmas? Happy holidays? Christmas tree? Holiday tree? The opinions and arguments have been flying thicker than snowflakes. And, like a snowstorm, they have a way of making it hard to see, in this case the difference between sacred and commercial. Over tea and scones I talked with Frannie Lindsay, whose book, Where She Always Was, won the 2004 May Swenson Poetry Award. Together we—one celebrator of Christmas and one not—discussed the annual December conundrum.

“Especially this year,” said Lindsay, “I see such a dissonance between what we as people need from each other and what’s being thrown in our faces at this season. When I think of myself and Jesus/God, I think of an almost overwhelming intimacy. It’s humbling.”

But sometimes drowning out the holiday’s meaning is the flood of commerce it elicits as stores do their best to encourage all possible shoppers. As Lindsay said, “‘Christ is born—time to go buy yourself a Lexus.’ It hurts me to see the distance we have put between the meaning of the holy days and what we do. It’s almost as if that much love, that much unconditional sacrifice is too much for us. So we go out and have a party.”

Lindsay’s solution would be to let everyone observe the holidays that come at this time of year free from distraction. Then later, maybe sometime in March when winter is hanging on too long and we all need a lift, we could have a national consumer day. We’d all go shopping, buy presents, decorate our homes, and enjoy a big family meal unencumbered by the need to attend to any larger meaning.

As for December, well, I’m thinking the current debates seem a little silly when you look at the actual words. In a country where people celebrate various holidays at this time of year, including one—the beginning of the new year—that we all share, why would “happy holidays” not be an appropriate greeting? And, of those several holidays, how many involve a lighted tree? Just one, by my count, making it unmistakably a “Christmas tree.”

Lindsay and I both live and work with words, and so we talked about the ones we think of at this season. The dominant words in the air around us are buy and present and shop. But what she thinks of are words like humility, compassion, awe, and burden, while mine include light and miracle.

There is a poem by Richard Wilbur, set to music and sung as a Christmas hymn: “A stable lamp is lighted whose glow shall wake the sky,/ The stars shall bend their voices, and every stone shall cry/…Yet He shall be forsaken, and yielded up to die;/The sky shall groan and darken, and every stone shall cry.”

“That makes me cry every year,” Lindsay said. “Especially the part that talks about the little baby who is going to die for us. In 33 years he is going to die a horrible death to save us. Why does this not literally bring us to our knees? What I think about at Christmas is that the choices I make have the potential of drawing me closer to God or not. For me it is a time for taking measure. What does God need of me? What if I can’t do it? What if I can do it? What if I don’t do it? What if I don’t know how to do it?”

And for me, it is a time to wonder what we need from each other, what we are called on to do for each other, and how our words can help draw us closer together instead of pulling us farther apart. Happy holidays to you and may our world know the blessing of peace.

“Thank you for coming to listen.”

It’s a sentence that takes on special significance at an open mike, where readers often outnumber listeners. And on a recent night in Roslindale, emcee Marc Widershien is making a special point of thanking by name half a dozen regulars who come out to encourage the readers, support the reading series, and listen to poetry.

You can find an open mike–or open mic if you prefer–going on just about any night of the week. Each one is its own little universe, with its regulars and host, its unspoken rules, and its personality. In Roslindale, where the open takes place on the last Thursday of each month, the prevailing atmosphere is mellow. It helps that the venue is Emack and Bolio’s, on Belgrade Avenue and the courtesy purchase is not a latte or a draft, but maybe a vanilla bean speck with hot fudge sauce. The open is scheduled to start at 7, but people are still drifting in, ordering their ice cream at 7:15 and the reading doesn’t get started much before 7:30.

This particular night there’s a problem. It’s the first night since Emack and Bolio’s was taken over by a new owner, and Widershien has only just discovered that the former owner took the sound system with him. All that’s left is the mike stand, but Widershien holds it like a talisman as he welcomes the crowd and urges the readers to speak loudly. There is background noise, an easy hum of neighborhood people coming in for ice cream on an unseasonably mild November evening. Widershien calls the new owner, Ron Foley, out of the back for us to greet with cheers. Everyone is hoping he’ll agree to keep the venue going through winter’s months of low ice cream consumption, but it’s not yet clear what he has decided. A few people make announcements of upcoming readings and arts events, and then the lineup of readers begins.

Most open mikes include a featured reader or two. Featured poets generally read for about 20 minutes. Each open mike reader gets about three minutes, though some push the limit, and sometimes the audience’s tolerance, to the breaking point. The time limit is actually what makes an open mike possible. keeping it short gives everyone a chance without having the whole evening gone on interminably.

An open is always the luck of the draw. I’ve been to some where you hear one astounding poem after another and a few where you wonder how unobtrusively you could cover the distance to the door. Most are somewhere in between where you hear some interesting poems, maybe some wonderful ones, and also ones that make you realize you can stand just about anything for three minutes. At some readings, the features are first and at some the open mikes are first. Here the features are snadwiched between two open mike segments.

The lead-off poet is Sandra Storey, who, by day, is editor and publisher of The Jamaica Plain and Mission Hill Gazettes. She and the poets who follow raise their voices to the challenge of no microphone and manage to be heard by an audience that applauds appreciatively.

There are two featured poets this night, Michael Sherlock and Edward Abrahamson. We’ve all turned off our cell phones but as Sherlock begins, he is interrupted by the ringing–of his own phone. His poems look back to his native Ireland and he reads in a deep, winning brogue about poverty, famine, and injustice. Abrahamson’s poems include wry commentaries on the health care system; biting reminiscences of Viet Nam; and imagined conversations between Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes and Robert Frost.

The evening concludes with another open mike segment. The last few poets try to hurry. The ice cream scoopers are just about finished, the last customers are being served, and it’s closing time. Next month, Widershien promises, there will be a microphone.

The Bush Administration says we are a nation at war. And of course men and women are fighting and dying in our name in a faraway country. But “a nation at war”?

“For those who are fighting, and for their families, of course, there is a war,” says poet Fred Marchant. “But all the rest of us go on about our business as if nothing has changed.”

He’s right: for most of us, even as the war creeps closer to our consciousness, it still seems distant as we drive to work, take out trash, do holiday shopping. We’re not like the World War II homefront Americans who collected scrap metal and planted “victory gardens.” Nor are we consumed with thinking and talking and arguing about the war as we were with Vietnam.

Marchant, who is a professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Suffolk University and is the author of Tipping Point; Full Moon Boat; and House on Water, House in Air, has spent much of his life thinking about war. In another time, another war, Marchant was a Marine. It was 1968 and, although he was not a supporter of the war in Vietnam, he was interested in writing about it. So, as he explains, “I gave myself an artistic exemption” and enlisted. Two years later, after we all learned about the massacre at My Lai, he knew he could not stay and he became possibly the first officer to be honorably discharged from the Marine Corps as a conscientious objector.

Now he and I meet over coffee and discuss our bewilderment at how detached Americans seem to be from events in Iraq. (Later, as I page through his books, lines from his poems weave themselves into my notes from our conversation: “The eyes of the many no longer here./ And the living eyes of friends who are.”) While no one would want to return to the Vietnam-era days of rioting in the streets, the silence we both notice is eerie, what he describes as ” a sense of hollowness, of emptiness.”

And so every Wednesday at noon Marchant joins what he describes as “a handful” of Suffolk students, faculty, and staff members for a peace walk. They walk in silence around the university ‘s Beacon Hill. campus, carrying a banner that reads, “Suffolk University Peace Walk,” stopping at several buildings to recite names of the fallen. (Another Marchant line:”War…disfigures everyone.”)

“Aside from the memorial aspect,” says Marchant, “it feels like a terrifically valuable thing to do, to walk through the city with our banner and integrate this into the life of the city at noontime. Invariably a stranger will pause and stand with us awhile. People smile, they say. ‘thank you,’ they beep their horns and wave. One woman told us her son had been sent to Iraq that day. (“The cicadas sound like a cry for help, a plea for life,/a life I have just begun to love,/only more so.”)

“It’s not a big demonstration. It’s not threatening to anyone. It’s just a little reminder.” (“The history that could not be changed,/ and locusts crying out everywhere.”)

Marchant and I talk about those “support our troops” stickers slapped on gas guzzlers on every road and how simplistic slogans stop people from thinking and from talking meaningfully about the war. (“The commanding general said,/ ‘Every man has a tipping point,/ a place where his principles give way.'”)

We talk with anger, but, much more with sadness. (“A poetry of the day/after the peace has begun, when furies/ have been talked back into the earth.”)

Some of my favorite poems are tiny ones that carry the weight of a large idea, a kind of less is so much more situation. I find it exciting to see a work that is both deeply powerful and deceptively small. “Attached,” a poem by Danielle Legros Georges, is like that. Georges is a writer and translator who lives in Dorchester. She is an assistant professor at Lesley University, and the author of the poetry collection, Maroon. “Attached” grew out of a trip Georges took several years ago to her native Haiti. The poem is a mere 11 lines, with spare and unembellished language, that opens with the modest image of a cart bearing two sacks.

“I would go into Port-au-Prince for errands,” says Georges, “to check out interesting spots, and to visit the library, galleries, churches, museums, and so on. Port-au-Prince has the bustling and chaotic qualities typical of a lot of cities: people going about their daily lives; kids going to and from school; the noise of markets and car horns; people doing all sorts of work—whether in offices, schools, shops, bookstores, or on the street. You see the market women, charcoal sellers al in black, and waving through traffic the bourettier or bouretye, the “spider-cart” hauler—a man on foot who works hauling loads and who serves as the engine to his cart.”

The spider carts carry construction materials, furniture, anything that needs moving. One hauler in particular, working his way through the traffic with an enormous load, caught her attention.

“He was covered in sweat and barefoot,” says Georges, “Seeing that man made me question his job, the necessity of his labor. I also wondered what this man was thinking. I asked myself who are the people who do this kind of job and other jobs nobody else wants to do?”

“Underlying these questions for me were those questions attached to economies—local and global. Who carries the load? Who is considered the cheap labor? Cheap for whom? What is it like to be in a “track” that gives you few choices? What sorts of loads do we carry?”

Georges says, “I think we all know people who are load-bearers, even if we ourselves haven’t been these people—immigrants remaking their lives, single parents, students, people working two or three jobs in order to support themselves and their families.”

Back in Boston, at an exhibit of work by Haitian artists, Georges saw a painting by William Decillien (cq) of a hauler and his heavily-laden spider cart.

“In the painting,” Georges says, “the line between the load on the cart and the mountain in the background was blurred, as if to suggest that the mountain and the load were one.”