Author: ellen

One City, One Book. Remember when that community-wide reading program started in the 1990s? What an idea, a whole city sharing the experience of reading a single book–people on buses and park benches, in libraries and living rooms, alone or with their families or neighbors, as if gathered around some huge urban campfire, all taking in the same words. So, readers of Boston, Brookline, Cambridge, and Somerville, I have a modest proposal. Let’s read together, a slightly smaller work: Four Cities, One Poem. And at this time of year the perfect poem is Gail Mazur’s “Baseball.”

Gail Mazur is Writer in Residence in Emerson College’s graduate writing program. Her five books of poetry include They Can’t Take That Away from Me, a National Book Award finalist. She is the 2005 recipient of the St. Botolph Club Foundation’s Distinguished Artist Award.

“Baseball” was first published in Ploughshares and is included in Mazur’s new book, Zeppo’s First Wife: New & Selected Poems, due out this fall from the University of Chicago Press. It was suggested by another poet I admire, Lloyd Schwartz. Read it a few times–for the meaning, the sound, more meaning, more sound. If you’d like, send me your comments. Or just enjoy on your own some of what the poet Robert Graves called the “stored magic” of poetry.

Baseball

The game of baseball is not a metaphor
and I know it’s not really life.
The chalky green diamond, the lovely
dusty brown lanes I see from airplanes
multiplying around the cities
are only neat playing fields.
Their structure is not the frame
of history carved out of forest,
that is not what I see on my ascent.

And down in the stadium,
the veteran catcher guiding the young
pitcher through the innings, the line
of concentration between them,
that delicate filament is not
like the way you are helping me,
only it reminds me when I strain
for analogies, the way a rookie strains
for perfection, and the veteran,
in his wisdom, seems to promise it,
it glows from his upheld glove,

and the man in front of me
in the grandstand, drinking banana
daiquiris from a thermos,
continuing through a whole dinner
to the aromatic cigar even as our team
is shut out, nearly hitless, he is
not like the farmer that Auden speaks
of in Breughel’s Icarus,

or the four inevitable woman-hating
drunkards, yelling, hugging
each other, and moving up and down
continuously for more beer
and the young wife trying to understand
what a full count could be
to please her husband happy in
his old dreams, or the little boy
in the Yankees cap already nodding
off to sleep against his father,
program and popcorn memories
sliding into the future,
and the old woman from Lincoln, Maine
screaming at the Yankee slugger
with wounded knees to break his leg

this is not a microcosm,
not even a slice of life

and the terrible slumps,
when the greatest hitter mysteriously
goes hitless for weeks, or
the pitcher’s stuff is all junk
who threw like a magician all last month,
or the days when our guys look
like Sennett cops, slipping, bumping
each other, then suddenly, the play
that wasn’t humanly possible, the Kid
we know isn’t ready for the big leagues,
leaps into the air to catch a ball
that should have gone downtown,
and coming off the field is hugged
and bottom-slapped by the sudden
sorcerers, the winning team

the question of what makes a man
slump when his form, his eye,
his power aren’t to blame, this isn’t
like the bad luck that hounds us,
and his frustration in the games
not like our deep rage
for disappointing ourselves

the ball park is an artifact,
manicured safe, “scene in an Easter egg,”
and the order of the ball game,
the firm structure with the mystery
of accidents always contained,
not the wild field we wander in,
where I’m trying to recite the rules,
to repeat the statistics of the game,
and the wind keeps carrying my words away

—Gail Mazur

Everyone knows what a writer at work looks like. We’ve seen it in all those movies; in fact it’s playing a supporting role right now in the charming “Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont “. The writer sits at the typewriter (yes it’s almost always a typewriter unless it’s a period piece, and then it’s a quill pen) ekes out a word or two, rips out the paper in an arcing motion (unless it’s the quill pen scenario), crumples it, and tosses it onto to the floor. That’s writing. Or not.
The writer sits at the typewriter (yes it’s almost always a typewriter unless it’s a period piece, and then it’s a quill pen) ekes out a word or two, rips out the paper in an arcing motion (unless it’s the quill pen scenario), crumples it, and tosses it onto to the floor. That’s writing. Or not.

There is a fascination with watching writers work, though the level of action can rival paint drying. A lot of thinking while looking inert is involved. And of all writers, it is poets whose work process can seem most inscrutable. So I was interested to hear about a new web site, QuickMuse.com that challenges two poets in a head-to-head match-up to write a poem in 15 minutes and to allow readers to see each keystroke as they work.

It’s a concept I discussed recently with Joyce Peseroff, a poet whose luminous poems suggest careful writing and thoughtful revising. Peseroff is the author of four collections, including her newest, Eastern Mountain Time, and the editor of three books, including Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon. She teaches creative writing at UMass Boston, where she will be part of a new MFA program in fiction writing and poetry.

“For the reader, it’s always fun to be present at the creation,” Peseroff says of the Quick Muse challenge. “For the poet, it’s almost as if you’re an experimental subject and everybody gets to watch the process. They get to see how much you revise, whether you write the whole thing and then go back. Readers get a sense of how a writer most typically proceeds–what’s the first thing the writer does in response to a prompt But it’s always a draft.”

As a teacher, Peseroff feels it can be important for students to watch the process unfold. False starts and lame detours, reworked images and sharpened words can show them that a poem rarely pours itself onto the page in ready-for-primetime condition. Still, she feels opening her own process to observation would be intimidating and might even hinder her writing. Her poems begin in everyday things. Right now she’s thinking about a rooster at her vacation home in Maine that may strut his way into a poem.

“I try to keep alert for images, sounds, rhythms, something that feels like it has potential. It has to have some kind of emotional engagement for me, something that brings a lump to the throat.”

She composes her own poems right on the computer (“I want to see how it’s going to look”), saving a file for each new version.

“Even when initial drafts come fairly quickly, the search for the right word may take weeks,” she says, noting that one personal preference is that, unless it’s intentional, she hates repeating a word in a poem. Once she has a fairly solid draft, the next part of the process is meeting with two poet friends for discussion of each others’ work-in-progress.

“Three or four people is best,” she says, for group critiquing. “With more, you can get overwhelmed with comments and suggestions. You have to be able to trust the people you’re working with. I tell my students you should bring work that is something you want to change rather than something you consider finished. For me, the workshop members are my ‘ideal readers’. ”

Okay, so by this time you’ve gone through all those cotton candy summer beach reads. Sure, they were fun, but now you’re ready for some substance and maybe a little something out of the ordinary, right? I went back to some of the writers I’ve recently talked to for City Type for recommendations that could carry you straight through to fall.

Kim Ablon Whitney is the author of young adult novels See You Down the Road and The Perfect Distance, which will be published this fall. She suggests The Cuban Prospect by Boston native Brian Shawver, which she says is especially great for the baseball season.

Tom Daley, poet and poetry teacher, offers these three picks: One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw by Witold Rybczynski. A book for the general reader interested in the history of science and tools, with fascinating digressions into the lives of inventors such as Archimedes. Beatrice Chancy by George Elliott Clarke, a verse play that tells the harrowing tale of the daughter of a white Nova Scotian slaveowner and his African slave in the Canada of the early 19th century. Letter to an Imaginary Friend by Thomas McGrath, an autobiographical book-length poem and a tumultous, heady narrative of growing up in the plains of the Dakotas.

Edith Pearlman, whose most recent short story collection is How to Fall, suggests
St. Exupery, by Stacey Schiff, a biography of the pilot and writer that is eloquent and irresistable; and two novels, Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters and The Shroud, by John Banville, which is dark and fascinating.

Prabakar T. Rajan, author of the poetry collection, Leaving Ripples, offers two recommendations, Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels, a fascinating glimpse at early Christianity but also sits with the largerquestion of the tensions between different approaches to God; and a novel by Walker Percy called the Moviegoer, a very sad, strange, unusual book, with richly odd and quirkily endearing writing.

Jane Holtz Kay, author of Asphalt Nation and Lost Boston, recommends Boiling Point: How Politicians, Big Oil and Coal, Journalists and Activists Are Fueling the Climate Crisis–And What We Can Do to Avert Disaster, by Ross Gelbspan, an enlightening book on the problem of the day or, more aptly, eons: global warming. His book is a thoughtful, intelligent analysis of the problem, told in clear, political activist language.

Philip Nikolayev, author of the poetry collection Monkey Time suggests Glyn Maxwell’s latest poetry collection, The Sugar Mile and Claire Messud’s The Last Life(cq), both superb books.

Katia Kapovich, poet and author of Gogol in Rome, recommends The Irresponsible Self. On Laughter and the Novel, by James Wood, a collection of essays on difficult and fascinating writers and poets that uses modes of laughter as a litmus test to draw a line between the old and modern nove. She also suggests Wake up, Sir! by Jonathan Ames, which takes place in the artists’ colony Yaddo and says she was happy for a week while reading it.

I recommend these wonderful short story collections by Boston-area writers: Calamity and Other Stories, by Daphne Kalotay; On the Nature of Human Romantic Interaction, by Karl Iagnemma; How to Fall, by Edith Pearlman; and The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories, by Steve Almond.

It was a regulation traffic sign, but customized: After “DRIVE SLOW” someone had carefully added “LY.” It was a reminder, just like when the check-out line is marked “10 items or fewer,” that I’m living in a city where people are serious about words. Even, it seems, in pictures.

I recently talked with Pelle Cass, a photographer who combines text and visual images. Cass, whose first name is pronounced “pell,” has work in the permanent collections of the Fogg Art Museum, the Addison Gallery of Art in Andover, the Polaroid Collection, and the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, and available at Gallery Kafayas in the South End. Cass himself lives in a world of words and images. In fact, his wife, Margaret Holmes, is a writer whose work was recently nominated for inclusion in an anthology of Best New American Voices. Though Cass uses text from a variety of sources, he sees poetry and photography as natural partners.

“Photography is like a lyric poem,” says Cass. “I’m trying to show a little the way I think, the way I feel. To me, poems work in the same way a picture does–combining a bunch of things to see if you can come up with something that affects someone.”

The poetry references in Cass’s photographs often come from Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, William Carlos Williams, and Jorie Graham. In one, Koch’s “Sleeping With Women” becomes a sensual mass of deep curls. In another, Williams’s “This is just to say / I have eaten / the plums that were in / the icebox” is written on a pear.

In most of his photographs you can’t read the words. Words are seen backwards on a vase, or cut, jumbled, twisted into landscapes. The effect reminds me of how words, written and spoken, hurled at us every minute, sometimes blur into the wah-wah-wah of Charlie Brown’s teacher in the Peanuts comic strip. Cass’s photographs give the viewer a place where the words lie at a foggy remove just beyond comprehension. It can create a little island of quiet Cass describes as “language dissolving into pre-verbal experience” the way the sounds of poetry sometimes do.

Even when the words are legible, they are positioned in ways that make us see them differently. A headline about the capture of Saddam Hussein, “News brings anger, joy, confusion,”curls on a background of textured fabric. The letters of the word, “equality” are tossed randomly on each other. In a photograph titled, “Abstract” a few words can be read but most are frustratingly illegible on their urgent-looking page. “What I’m about to tell you means absolutely nothing,” says another that uses Cass’s own words on Mobius strips.

“I don’t feel the need to understand,” Cass says about both the text he chooses and the images that result. “I tend to like confused pictures and I try not to have any rules. There is no reason in the world that it has to make sense if it works–that’s the visual artist speaking.”

It’s the visual artist’s reminder to those of us who live in a world of words that sometimes we need a new way to experience words. We need to step back and see them, or hear them, as if for the first time, to remember their power and how they can so easily be manipulated or worn away. And how we might keep them pure

Somewhere between the diagnosis and the surgery, Jeremiah Healy decided to write an article about his prostate cancer. Healy is better known for writing mystery novels and short stories under his own name and under his pseudonym, Terry Devane. This time the story was his own, as he joined the ranks of writers who seek to connect with their readers by offering up their own personal experience.

“I figured I had two ways to deal with it–stay quiet or talk about it,” Healy says. “For me, writing about the cancer was a way of spitting in its eye and coming through the process with a better understanding of a given disease that had targeted me specifically.”

It helps that Healy feels at ease with topics others might shy away from, a skill he first learned as a trial attorney and law professor, and honed as a writer. His most recent book, A Stain Upon the Robe, deals with clergy sexual abuse. But now his topic was not only difficult but highly personal. If Healy had qualms about being self-revealing, though, he brushed them aside to accomplish what he wanted: to give a gift to other men and the people close to them. Noting that he benefitted from the openness of others about their own experiences, Healy says his article was “also a way to pay back, or to Ôpay it forward”.

“I’ve been very pleased by the response. People have said, ‘I’m glad some guy is finally willing to talk about this, including the questions about incontinence and sexual impotence’.about his prostate cancer. Healy is better known for writing mystery novels and short stories under his own name and under his pseudonym, Terry Devane. This time the story was his own, as he joined the ranks of writers who seek to connect with their readers by offering up their own personal experience.

“I figured I had two ways to deal with it–stay quiet or talk about it,” Healy says. “For me, writing about the cancer was a way of spitting in its eye and coming through the process with a better understanding of a given disease that had targeted me specifically.”

It helps that Healy feels at ease with topics others might shy away from, a skill he first learned as a trial attorney and law professor, and honed as a writer. His most recent book, A Stain Upon the Robe, deals with clergy sexual abuse. But now his topic was not only difficult but highly personal. If Healy had qualms about being self-revealing, though, he brushed them aside to accomplish what he wanted: to give a gift to other men and the people close to them. Noting that he benefitted from the openness of others about their own experiences, Healy says his article was “also a way to pay back, or to Ôpay it forward”.

“I’ve been very pleased by the response. People have said, ‘I’m glad some guy is finally willing to talk about this, including the questions about incontinence and sexual impotence’.”

The article, which can be seen on his web site, www.jeremiahhealy.com, may not be Healy’s last word on the subject.

“Who knows, maybe in the future I’ll give the experience of Jeremiah Healy the human being to a character in a book.”

For a writer, using your own life in your work in an explicit way forces you to walk a line edged with potential missteps. When we write our own personal details into our work the result can be generous and meaningful, or narrow and self-indulgent. The fine edge is one I worried about with my own book, Afterwords, a collection of poems I wrote during my husband’s illness and after his death. Rafael Campo is a physician and a poet who has given a lot of thought to the subject. Campo is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Landscape with Human Figure and a collection of essays, The Healing Art: A Doctor’s Black Bag of Poetry.

“This question,” says Campo, “has been a central concern of mine, coming from the medical profession, where we go so far in the opposite direction to shield ourselves in the armor of white coats and machinery and professional objectivity. But I try to push myself as a writer in terms of openness, to make myself more visible. I think there can be damage in too much distance between caregiver and patient, and between writers and readers, too.

Campo shares my concern of trying to figure out how much of ourselves we dare write into our work. He feels the pivotal point lies in motive, in what is driving the writer. If a writer is motivated by self-aggrandizement, Campo says, or is not telling the truth, it violates the contract between writer and reader. On the other hand, he says, there is much to be gained when a writer shares his or her own experience.

“Both writer and reader can recognize themselves in each other’s eyes. It allows the narrator to do the real work of narration, to show what we share as human beings.”

Supposedly Mark Twain said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” That’s how I feel about spring in Boston. How to coax myself out of hibernation? I could stay home and catch the season finale of every tv show I avoided all year or plunk myself at the computer and get sucked into Internet quicksand. But on any given day poets and writers are reading their work around town, so why not go to a reading? In fact, why not go to a week of readings?

I started on a Monday night in Cambridge at Porter Square Books, where Donald Hall was scheduled to read. The crowd had spread across half the store when Hall arrived a few minutes late. He said he’d need to sit down for a minute to recover from getting lost when his car’s navigation system led him to East Boston. But he remained standing and proceeded to offer an engaging reading of poems from his latest book, White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006.

The next night I went to the Boston Public Library. A sizable audience had braved a pelting downpour to hear Nathaniel Philbrick on the first day of a tour for his book, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. As we sat, smelling of wet wool, Philbrick mesmerized us with the story of the 55-year period between the landing of the Mayflower and the devastating King Philip’s War.

Wednesday night is poetry night at the Cantab in Central Square, Cambridge. This Wednesday the featured poet was Ron Goba and the crowd was SRO. For a decade Goba has been the doorkeeper for the poetry venue and a mentor and friend to aspiring and accomplished poets, many of whom paid him tribute in the open mike preceding his feature and in the standing ovation following it. Goba, who has been ill, reciprocated by handing out gift copies of his new book, Collage As Silkscreen.

Thursday was another dark and stormy night and a hard choice, with the monthly Tapestry of Voices poetry reading at Borders in Downtown Crossing and, at Brookline Booksmith a reading by contributors to Confessions of the Other Mother: Non-Biological Lesbian Mothers Tell All. I decided on Harvard Bookstore, where Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert was discussing his book, Stumbling On Happiness, which looks at why our brains are usually bad at predicting what will make us happy.

On Friday back at Porter Square Books I heard Charles Rappeleye talk about his fascinating new book Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution.

On Saturday morning I joined the weekly “Bagels and Bards” discussion at Au Bon Pain in Davis Square. The roundtable, started by local poets and venue hosts Doug Holder and Harris Gardner, starts at 9 and is open to all early-risers. Then I stopped at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square. Grolier is newly reopened under the ownership of Ifeanyi Menkiti, a poet and Wellesley professor.

Then, on Saturday night it was back to Harvard Square to help celebrate the release by new publisher Arrowsmith Press, of Bergstein, a book on the paintings of Gerald Bergstein (cq), with responses by writers and poets including Sue Miller, Askold Melnyczuk, Lloyd Schwartz, and Jill Kneerim. (I was one of the “and others.”)

On Sunday I stayed home, read the paper, planned my reading ventures for the next week, and thanked the good fortune that landed me in such a vibrantly literary city.

Reading about yourself is like looking in a mirror. Boston has seen itself in major literary works throughout its history, works that reflected the city and sharpened its self image. But the image handed down from its earliest days is at odds with the reality of a city filled with people from every part of the world.

It’s that reality I wanted to talk about. So I met with Rajini Srikanth, an associate professor of English at UMass Boston and director of the University Honors Program who moved to the United States with her family at age 19 from her native Mumbai. It seems significant that among the five books she has written or edited are two, The World Next Door and A Part Yet Apart, whose very titles speak of feeling separate. In the university settings where Srikanth has spent most of her time in this country diversity is valued, but off-campus the city’s Yankee self-image can feel 18th-century strong.

“The academic world has enabled me to find my relationship with the United States,” says Srikanth, “Of course it’s an artificial world, but in an ideal classroom there is an exchange of very different opinions among students and between students and teachers.

“But I felt that with the birth of my children I started to engage with the real fabric of American–and Boston–society, in day care, in the PTA, in the classroom,” she says. She adds that, as an Asian-American in a city that has for so long seen itself as pure Yankee, “you become aware of just how oddly placed you are. You don’t feel part of the landscape.”

It was what W.E.B. DuBois, the African-American author and civil rights leader found as a Harvard student in the late 19th century, “I was in Harvard but not of it.”

Srikanth notes that from its beginnings the city was good at promoting the brand. It was Bostonians–the original Massachusetts liberals–who articulated a vision of what a new nation might be. And America’s city was Boston. It still is the keeper of the flame. We live intimately with our history. It’s not just those red bricks on the Freedom Trail that remind us every day that, when the country was being formed, Bostonians were major players.

“I was very intrigued by what it is that makes Boston hold itself as the embodiment of the early American image,” Srikanth says. “It was the center of intellectual thought and that led to the erection of a certain sort of American self that Boston takes great pride in and did a very good job in advertising. The more skilled you are with words, the more you can say what you are and people will believe it.”

Through writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, and William Dean Howells, Boston got to see itself as a fulfillment of John Winthrop’s vision of the “city on a hill.” And that worked then.

But the indisputable evidence now says that Boston is different. The 2000 census found more than half of Boston’s population was African-American, Asian-American, or Latino. And, slowly but surely that diversity is beginning to give us a fresh look at ourselves in print. Srikanth points to how Boston looks in the work of writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Martin Espada, and Gish Jen (cq). I think also of Allegra Goodman’s novels and children’s books by Irene Smalls and Norah Dooley.

The picture is getting more colorful, the vision wider. While we treasure our history, we can see we’re not on the cramped Mayflower anymore. There’s room for everyone here and you can read all about it.

If there’s one thing as important to Boston as its sports teams, it is its history. One piece of its literary history, a poetry workshop almost half a century old, resides in an ornate building at 5 Commonwealth Avenue, home of the Boston Center for Adult Education.

The workshop, under the guidance of John Holmes, was there in the late 1950s, in a room on the second floor, when, as literary legend recounts, Maxine Kumin and Anne Sexton met and began their friendship and their poetry careers.

In a telephone interview Kumin said, “We were just two shy housewives, a pair of closet poets.” They were also eager students, quick learners whose prodigious gifts ultimately reshaped the poetry landscape.

The workshop was there in 1962, taught then by Sam Albert, when Ottone (Ricky) Riccio, joined it. Five years later Riccio became the workshop’s teacher, a post he held for the next 35 years, including the years when I was one of his students. Now two poets, Tom Daley and Jennifer Badot, share the position, teaching alternating terms.

“It’s an honor to fill Ricky’s shoes,” says Daley, who had been one of Riccio’s students, “but it’s a tall order.” Daley’s work has appeared in literary journals and won the Charles and Fanny Fay Wood Academy of American Poets Prize.

Badot, who has been widely published in small magazines and has taught several poetry workshops, concurs. “I knew that Ricky was a revered master teacher with a devoted following. I was also aware that this was a workshop with a rich history where many, many (poets) had honed and polished their craft, discovered their voices, so I was honored and humbled and wanted to serve the poets at the table and do justice to the tradition of the workshop itself. It’s the longest-running workshop in the area (like the Fantasticks off-Broadway)!”

Daley sees his role as one of guidance and encouragement. “It’s interesting to watch people evolve over time. Unlike in a class, the leader facilitates, rather than teaches. I don’t feel that ‘I, the teacher, am imparting wisdom from on high’. What I feel I can offer is to understand why the poet did what he or she did. Regardless of where the poet is coming from, we need to honor the creative effort.”

He likens the process to learning calligraphy, where learning to shape the letters is only the beginning.

“You also need to learn to breathe so that the letters can be fluid. It’s a balance of discipline and imagination, just as learning to write poetry is. And the goal of a good workshop is to show participants how to tap into that imagination, so they can find new ways to articulate the emotions and ideas that inspire them to write and so they can leave each session feeling challenged but also encouraged.

“Writing is such a solitary experience. The workshop gives you a place where, once a week, you can share your triumphs, your frustrations, have an audience, have a voice, sit and listen to other people’s poems, get a multiplicity of perspectives.”

Badot hopes the workshop participants will “stretch themselves and grow as poets. My goal for the workshop is to create a supportive and artistically rigorous environment where we are very kind to the poet, yet demanding and exacting of the poem. “

Both Badot and Daley say part of the workshop’s strength lies in its democracy, the fact that it is affordable and open to all. Badot calls it “a true poetic melting pot. Beginners and masters alike can sign up and sit at the table, roll up their sleeves, and dive into the soup.”

Just look at any bestseller list and you’ll see how much we love to read memoirs. We want to know, of course, what happened and why and what that says about the world. But reading about someone else also helps us know what is authentic about ourselves.

As Richard Hoffman describes it, writing memoir sounds like a recipe for making soup: it’s most nourishing and most flavorful if the ingredients simmer for a good long while. Hoffman’s own memoir, Half the House took 17 years of simmering.

“People think of memoir as recall,” says Hoffman, who is also a poet and author of the recent collection Without Paradise. “On the first level are the facts–who, what, when, where. It has to be real. But you need to make the connections and it takes a long time if you do that honestly. You carry the questions with you. There are ethical pitfalls: laziness; the temptation to hurry, to round off the edges. But the important thing is not letting go until the story coheres as narrative.

“Truth has historical value and ethical value, but it has no literary value.” Hoffman tells his students at Emerson College where he is writer in residence, “Don’t turn your life into work. Turn it into art.”

Art is what turns the raw story into something we want to read. Of course we can get the news from poems and find truth in fiction, but memoir speaks to us in a highly personal way. So why not, for art’s sake, take a few liberties? It is a question that causes hot debate, not to mention public disclaimers and serious career consequences. Does it really matter if a memoir is true? What if a million little fabrications would make it a better read?

First of all, according to Hoffman, the truth may not tell the whole story. “It’s not a matter of truth,” he says, “ it’s a matter of honesty.”

Think about it: there is a difference. Beyond the facts–yes, real, verifiable facts–needs to be an honesty about what those facts signify and how they came together to create a particular present. This is where the simmering comes in. Memory shifts, we change with new experiences, replaying echoes of old conversations until finally, over time, we come to understand the facts differently.

Says Hoffman, “That it is about your memory already puts a memoir at one remove from fact. We take in our experience and we make a story. What kind of story is it? You have a contract with the reader. You’re telling the reader what kind of story it is. A memoir has consequences. I wrote a memoir that sent a man to jail, where he died. What if I had made that up?”

When the edges of truth and fiction blur, we lose our ability to tell what is real from what is not. And that, Hoffman reminds me, gives our memories a public and even political dimension. Advertising can tell us how to remember events, and political spinmeisters’ shaping of reality can make us question the experience of our own eyes and ears. In the bubble of 24/7 news coverage and reality television we live in a kind of terrarium of sensational stories where quiet words can get lost. So the volume gets pumped up, the truth fattened with attention-getting details. Who cares? We should. Those fiction-enhanced “memoirs” may be good stories and we may enjoy reading them, but if we insist on not caring whether or not they are true, we risk forgetting how to see what is real.

What is it about poetry? Why at the most extreme moments of our lives do we reach out to it? I think, for example, of a reading I did just two days after the attack on the World Trade Center. I wondered if anyone would come out. They did, in surprisingly large numbers. There was a crowd, fragile and subdued, instinctively searching for a comfort they sensed poetry could offer.

Why does poetry have the power to lift us, enlighten us and, yes, comfort us? I mulled over this question with Katia Kapovich and Philip Nikolayev. Poets originally from the former Soviet Union, they now live in Cambridge and, together, edit Fulcrum, a journal of English language poetry from around the world. Their most recent poetry collections are Nikolayev’s Monkey Time and Kapovich’s Gogol in Rome.

To Kapovich, poetry’s power to offer inspiration or solace lies in our actual need for it. She sees poetry as physically necessary to human life, deserving of its own tier on the nutritional pyramid.

“We need a refined version of what we call speech,” she says. “Our brains are in need of some kind of verbalized music. It is something physical like serotonin. We are supposed to have it and sometimes we are not able to produce it for ourselves.”

Well, yes, poetry does feel like an organic need with its roots in spoken, rather than written, language. I picture generations of people sitting around fires, telling each other stories not in everyday speech, but in a form with a particular sound and way of meaning. And what burns itself into our brains is not only the words, but the spaces between them.

Says Kapovich, “It’s like medicine. Our sick spirits are cured by the divine power of poetry. It needs to be a very high quality of poetry. It only helps when it is very good–like something approved by the FDA. Poets can tell good poetry from bad. They know it immediately. With poetry I don’t like, it makes me silent. When it’s good, I’m ready to scream, to be passionate. Critics need time and distance to tell. Poets know it viscerally.”

Nikolayev differs. “No, not viscerally. They know it from a lifetime of reading poetry, practicing.”

Maybe it’s the atmosphere of Kapovich’s and Nikolayev’s book-crammed apartment, maybe it’s the influence of being witness to their intense discussion, or maybe it’s just the pleasure of being in a place where poetry matters so much. Whatever the reason, I am nudged by a sense that poetry is closer to the core of one’s life for Russians than for most Americans. Kapovich and Nikolayev agree that Russians and Americans approach poetry differently. To begin with, Russian poets simply tend to write fewer poems than American poets. And their subjects differ.

“American poetry is more self-referential, Nikolayev says. “Russian poetry is more dramatic, about love and death.”

“The American poet’s goal is different, to sing the beauty in the trivial, to make it accessible,” says Kapovich. “American poets write more about life. The Russian poet wants to write the one magic poem where all your experience, all the music you carry in your heart is compressed like a spring ready to jump out. A totalitarian regime helps compress the spring by repression of every human thought. Freedom can be like a prison. It paralyzes poets. We need the opposition.”

Nikolayev nods. “Totalitarianism does wonders for poetry,” he says drily, adding “The Russian poets feel that to write a great poem is more important than to live another day.”

Which brings us back to poetry’s physical hold on us.

“At the last minute of your life, Kapovich says, “to write this kind of divine thing, this orphic poem, with rats following the flute silently, obediently.”