Author: ellen

Picture this: you get a phone call, like the one Louise Gluck received in late August. The Librarian of Congress asks if you would be so kind as to be the United States Poet Laureate, and, like Gluck, you say yes. Now what? I asked two poets, Regie Gibson and Susan Donnelly, to imagine what they might want to do.

Although the position is honorary, it also seems to be about helping a hungry population find nourishment. And, in fact, Donnelly calls poetry “daily bread –daily and extraordinary at the same time, sustaining and universal, not just the property of a small group of poets. I think that poetry is needed in difficult times, and this is a difficult time.”

Donnelly is the award-winning author of the chapbooks, “tenderly pressed” and “The Ether Dome”; and the collections, “Eve Names the Animals” and “Transit.” Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Ploughshares, and is included in “The Norton Introduction to Poetry” and “The Norton Introduction to Literature.”

Donnelly, who has always held part time office jobs to support her work as a poet, calls herself a “working class poet” and wishes more poetry reflected the experience of work. She would also like to see more people learn the discipline of writing in traditional poetic forms (“maybe a National Sonnet Day”). She and Gibson both speak of encouraging more minority voices.

Gibson envisions introducing more people to poetry by recruiting an army, not of soldiers, but of poet-ambassadors to invade the country’s schools with a broad-based message as much from the streets and performance stages as from the universities.

“I would take applicants from among people in the final stages of their M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts) studies and among those with performance experience. This isn’t just a land of academics and these ambassadors would be more indicative of the way the U.S. is.”

Gibson, recently named by Boston Magazine as one of the city’s “rising stars” in literature, is a former National Poetry Slam champion and the the author of the collection, “Storms Beneath the Skin.” He and his work appear in the film, “Love Jones” and he has been featured on National Public Radio. He also hosts the Ritual Word Arts Series the first Monday of the month at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge. He also wants to see people recognize the relationship between poetry and other arts.

“I’m talking about the musical/visual art/language connection,” he says. “You look at Jackson Pollock’s work. He was painting the way jazz felt to him–and this was 60 years ago. There’s a weave that makes up the tapestry of American culture. If we understand that, once we look at the culture and see how it all fits together, we see what it means to be an American beyond the jingoism of forced patriotism.

“Poetry, culture–these are what define a people, not economics,” Gibson says. “Culture will let us know whether or not we are truly a people or just individual fiefdoms bound together for individual profit.”

Why is there a poet laureate at all but to remind us that this deeper aspect of our lives matters? To remind us, that, as Donnelly says, “poetry is mysterious and sexy and subversive,” that it has the power to let us know ourselves and our world more fully.

“This is a time,” says Donnelly, “when poetry is a like transformation we may all need. Poetry can open you to your own surprising self. Poetry is cheap, like the leaves on the trees. It should be dispersed widely. The more you have of it, the more you will have, like love.”

At the Back Bay restaurant where Edith Pearlman and I are having dinner, ours is surely the only table where grammar is being discussed. And being discussed passionately. Pearlman has a bone to pick with adverbs. (You remember–the ones that modify the verbs.)

“I’d like to see ‘very’ and all other adverbs held accountable,” she says. “I think adverbs are slack. If you have to use an adverb, the verb is weak.

“A stronger verb,” she concludes “will banish the adverb.” (Notice how muscular, how energetic her sentence is. Nothing circuitous, nothing unclear. No adverbs.) We sip our wine and pick at risotto, while pondering how adverbs, used indiscriminately, can suck the life out of verbs. How often, for example, do we say we are “so” concerned or “very” or even “terribly” concerned? Simply saying, “I am concerned” should be enough to cover most situations, but, without those ubiquitous modifiers, it sounds almost meaningless.

Pearlman is the author of travel articles, op-ed essays, and two prize-winning short story collections, Vaquita and Love Among the Greats. A third collection, How To Fall, is scheduled for publication in February, 2005. This fall she will teach a course at the Boston Center for Adult Education called, “Taking the Time to Be Brief,” a title that captures her feeling about how to write: shorter is better. Careful revision and boiling down make for stories in which each word needs to be the right one. Her own work habits make for precise writing. She composes her work on a typewriter and uses the computer only for her final draft.

“I revise by retyping the entire page. I know the computer makes it easier to revise, but not easier to revise well. The longer you work at a piece, the better it gets. And the shorter it gets.

“I want to inspire would-be writers to become passionate about parts of speech,” she says. “The mechanics of writing are important to master in order to do justice to the content.”

Why bother? Who cares if adverbs are overused, verbs undercut; if anyone remembers what a dangling participle is?

Pearlman points out that people have probably been bemoaning the decline of English since Shakespeare was a tot. But if the language loses its potency, how will we speak to each other? I am on guard for worrisome signs everywhere, from incorrect punctuation in literary novels to the unintentionally hilarious crawl at the bottom of the CNN screen: Eerie, Pa. …the Niagra Mohawk grid (no wonder there were power failures); to the certainty that nothing good ever comes in a sentence containing the words, “to serve you better.” And it isn’t only writers who are responsible for the care and feeding of the language. Just asking for our lattes “tall” when we want the smallest size chips away at the intent of the words we use.

But guarding the language goes deeper than noticing the laughable missteps. To paraphrase Tip O’Neill, all politics is verbal. George Orwell knew that when he envisioned the language-based horrors of 1984. We don’t need grainy 1930s newsreels to see how words can be weapons of mass destruction. And every day’s news of “the Patriot Act,” “the Defense of Marriage Act,” “ethnic cleansing,” or “regime change” shows their mind-altering power. As the poet Ruth Stone has written, “Words make the thoughts…They herd your visions.”

Edith Pearlman and I finish dinner and go our separate ways. I walk home thinking that maybe, if we could just keep our words powerful and sharp enough, we might not need other weapons. Who knows? It could happen.

“It’s not a true poem unless someone picks it up and reads it,” says poet Peter Jay Shippy. But he admits the audience can be hard to find.

“One part of you has convinced yourself there’s a huge audience waiting out there if only someone would publish your work,” he says, adding that there is that other part that is convinced no one will ever want to publish or read your work. Shippy writes what he describes as “wacky, weird-looking” poetry designed to draw a reader in with “fireworks and costumes,” “a goofy title and a strange first line.” He pictures readers approaching his poetry the way they might approach abstract art. He figured he might have a hard time getting published.

And, in fact, for two decades after he graduated from Emerson and got his M.F.A. from the Iowa University Writers Workshop, he taught and wrote and saw little evidence of an audience eagerly awaiting his work. Then, in a single magical year, his book, Thieves Latin, won the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize and was published by Iowa University Press. Then Shippy was given a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, and, as icing on the cake, he was named the Emerson College 2002 adjunct teacher
of the year.

Betty Buchsbaum is almost surprised to call herself a poet and to find an audience eager for her words. Although Buchsbaum spent her teen years filling speckled notebooks with her poetry, she spent her career teaching literature and creative writing and serving as vice president for academic affairs at Massachusetts College of Art. Now retired, she has returned to poetry. In January 2004, her book, The Love Word, will be published by Chicory Blue Press.

“I write from the perspective of a long life and a long marriage,” says Buchsbaum, whose poems are marked as much by personal history as by academic expertise. She says she has no illusions that her work will have a huge audience, but she has seen response enough to feel encouraged. She has enviable publication credits, recently won a New England Poetry Club prize and, after readings, is consistently surrounded by admirers.

“It’s nice when someone says that something you’ve written means something to them, stays with them, helps them.”

Although they write in very different voices, Shippy and Buchsbaum might both find their ideal audience in Rosalie Bookston. A librarian at the Brookline Public Library who also leads an informal poetry study group, Bookston is a thoughtful and far-ranging reader. She relishes the challenges and rewards poetry can offer.

“Poetry is demanding.,” Bookston says. “You have to work harder, slow down, re-read it. You need to talk about it and read it again and hear it aloud. But it’s so refreshing what you can discover.”

Maybe that’s the point–that more important than number of copies sold or overflow crowds for a reading is the gift of a reader’s time and attention.

“You have books you love, you develop love affairs with certain poets, and you wonder what it would be like to have someone look at your work that way,” Shippy says.

Bookston acknowledges how hard it is for poets. “The odds are terrible. It’s so highly competitive and the audience is so small. But, when you find a poem or a poet you can relate to, it’s such a treasure: Here’s this little jewel and this is just for me.”

Eli Newberger and the squirrel have reached détente. Newberger’s role is to weave increasingly elaborate wire barricades around his backyard bird feeders. The squirrel’s job is to climb a nearby tree and leap, unerringly finding an unguarded path to food. Smart squirrel: Newberger’s a pushover. A pediatrician, teacher, musician, and author of The Men They Will Become, he shrugs, “The squirrel’s got to eat, too.”

Newberger’s entire life work centers on how the smaller, weaker creatures of the world–primarily human ones–can thrive in a world built around adult concerns and conveniences.

“Children are the ones most affected by the choices we make,” he says, “like the choices about whom we’re going to enrich at the same time that we deprive the government of resources for health care and child care, schools, and social services.”

As Newberger points out, every civic choice–whether it is to spend money on war instead of health care or cut tax revenues that support education–has consequences for society’s most vulnerable members.

“The most vivd and important single insight for me,” says Newberger, ” of what children need in order to grow up with a strong sense of themselves is one adult in their lives who is crazy about them, who will always be there for them and always advocate for them.”

But Newberger sees social realities that make it difficult, if not impossible.

“Women, who provide much of the nurturing and caring and consistent influence for children, are obliged to navigate between their children’s needs and demands and the often dismissive attitude toward that in the workplace. More children are living in poverty, and that’s gotten sharply worse in the past few years. The requirements of work are so rigorous, especially in impoverished families, that it puts more pressures on family life. To develop strong character, kids kids need to know who they can count on. Parents don’t necessarily have what they need to be able to give children what they need.

“We’re losing sight of something that’s really really frightening and that’s going to have longer term costs. Increasing numbers of children drop out of school and give up hopes for having meaningful productive lives, They are growing up with a kind of emotional barrenness.”

An extreme example of an adult world inhospitable to children is in the southern Sudan, with its years of ongoing conflict. The so-called “lost boys” were forced to flee for their lives, wandering over miles and years together trying to stay alive and out of harm’s way. William Aleer Mabil is among those who survived. He left his home at about age five and now lives with his foster family in Bedford. He has found a voice for his experiences in poetry.

“I am writing through my life experience of how I see myself to be,” says William. “When I see myself as I am now and the things I have lived through I think I’d better do something before I die to show my dreams and what kind of person I am. By writing poetry I can let people know who are the people who are now living here with them. It is one kind of self-expression of the secret life of what you have in your heart and what you have in your mind and what kind of humanity you have.”

William is not sure how old he is–somewhere between 18 and 21. The immigration authorities assigned him and all the other Sudanese boys the birthday of January 1.

“Like a twisted life, bitter and sweet–that’s how my life was,” he says. “Thousands of us lived together through disease and starvation, taking care of each other. We were brain-draining, taking what is good in somebody’s mind and then with that you make your own way of living.

“You have to accept pain and disappointment as part of your life. I’m coming out from the bad things. My aim is to do the right thing. I want to let people know I was born on this planet to do something special, to show people what kind of life are we. We are human: that is all.

“People do things according to their own hearts and their own ambition. I want to do right instead of what I have seen. You have to offer yourself and struggle to do your own life.”

Forget the paperless office. Sven Birkerts pictures a paperless world in which a vegetation virus can be stopped only by destroying all paper. All newspapers, junk mail, manila file folders, love letters–gone. And all books. In his essay, “The Book Reconsidered: A Fantasia,” Birkerts, an essayist and critic and author of My Sky Blue Trades and The Gutenberg Elegies, tries to imagine a world without books.

What is it about books? Technology could do away with them. Written communication could continue, maybe faster and more efficiently. But books are more than simply carriers of words, and a world without them sounds like a world seriously diminished.

In A Book of Books, photographer Abelardo Morell considers the solid physical presence of books. In the eye of Morell”s camera a portrait peers out from slightly parted pages, a bookcase rises like the Tower of Babel, water-damaged pages swell and crest, a dictionary”s thumb-index stands like a wall of cave dwellings, a shaft of light falls across raised printing for blind readers.

“I am drawn to how a book looks as a physical reality,” Morell says. “Books carry their experience. They can even approximate human feelings. They grow old and people grow old. Books can be cocky, shy. If a book is damaged, there is the perversity of something beautiful coming out of tragedy. A book has a certain sense of goodness, as a stand-in for buildings and people and feelings.”

The magic of a book is that it gives us an alternate world to enter and get lost in. The past months with their alarming news and extreme weather reminded us of how we turn to books for comfort. Says Birkerts, ” A book creates an externalized atmosphere of inwardness. When we open a book we are, in fact, entering a different space, stepping into it. We say, for instance, that we”re Œin the middle” of War and Peace.

“We have the physical experience that the rest of the book is there waiting for us. It feels four-dimensional and the fourth dimension is the time represented by those pages. Just handling books is gratifying. In some way that is hard to pin down, the very physicality of a book represents spiritual and physical currency, whether it ia open or not There”s the physical experience that the rest of the book is there for you, a symbol of potentiality. There is always that content that”s hidden until you”ve Œun-hidden” it. After you read it, it goes back into hiding.”

And who has not had the experience of re-reading an old favorite and discovering something new? As Birkerts points out, a book remains the same, but we change around it. We bring something new to it with each reading.

“A book is like a companion,” says Morell. “It”s something real next to you. What a gift–finding time and space and opening a book. The characters who live inside may not have seen the light in a long time ”

Time spent with a book has a distinct quality to it, according to Birkerts. “It”s durational time, a kind of deep time that is different in texture from time spent driving or doing laundry or eating cereal.”

It also claims its space, whether you read alone in a wing chair beside a fire or feel a book close around you in a busy airport. Just being around books has a distinct atmosphere; being in a bookstore does not feel like being in a hardware store.

“There is a different feeling in the air when you are in a library or in someone”s own library,” says Birkerts. “It”s similar to being in a museum. Each separate work of art represents a different, more intense version of the world.”

Electronic books, for all their efficiency, don”t do that. They can duplicate the words, but not the sense of being enveloped by them. In Morell”s photograph of a dictionary viewed on-screen, the thumb-index that will never be thumbed looks impotent and silly. The tactile presence of the page is gone.

Birkerts recalls his attempts to read books on a computer screen as “profoundly depressing. What you were taking away was the feeling of stepping into it. If you”re scrolling through the pages, no matter how much you know about technology, it feels as if it”s coming to you from elsewhere.”

Birkerts created his unsettling bookless world for the recent Words on Fire festival that commemorated the 70th anniversary of the Nazi book burnings and the “resilience of the human spirit and lasting power of the written word.” At first, in his fantasy, people get used to reading onscreen. They are, in fact, a little stunned to realize that nothing much has changed. And then little by little, a hunger for visceral connection to the written word grows. Revolutionaries dare to scrawl their words on one surface after another, until, finally, “the surface of the world itself became a page.”

Charles Coe and Sean Singer are very different poets, but they share music’s strong imprint on their lives and their work. Coe is the author of Picnic on the Moon and winner of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Fellowship. But, before deciding that his real passion was writing, he started out as a singer, a soloist performing his own compositions while playing acoustic guitar, a front man for a Nashville rock group, and a jazz vocalist with several New England bands.

Singer writes poetry that has music at its core, whether he is writing in a blues-inspired rhythm, paying homage to old records (“100 grooves to the centimeter”), or riffing on the musical implications of his name. His book, Discography, was the 2001 volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets and won the Norma Farber First Book Award. from the Poetry Society of America.

The combination of poetry and music is a natural. Poetry’s music, from its spoken-word origins to classical rhyme and meter to the hip-hop rhythms of contemporary performance, grabs us viscerally and enlarges the impact of its words.

“Writing poetry and writing music have a lot of similarities, says Coe. “Songs have a more conventional structure, with meter and rhyme, but there is rhythm and flow to poetry, too.

“There is a greater range of topics in poetry–at least in what I write about.

Sometimes there’s a vague shape of a poem that’s already stuck up in my noggin. Other times there’s an image and I have no idea how the heck I’m going to make it into a poem. It’s like kneading dough. But I think a lot about the flow and the rhythm that suits the subject. I hear it in my head.”

When Coe writes about James Brown, for example, the rhythm of the words sounds percussive. His poem about Charlie Mingus, by contrast, has a sound that is “spooky, meditative, and moody,” with the music echoing from the subject to the words.

“The fact that poetry is in lines,” Singer says, “allows us to manipulate sound in different ways, almost as if you’re composing. Line breaks are a minor technical point to people who don’t know what poetry is, but they are a microcosm of the way we can live our lives.

“I think,” Singer continues, “that there should be no discrepancy between the sound of poetry and the sense of poetry. Poetry should give you visceral pleasure. As William Carlos Williams said, ‘If it ain’t a pleasure, it ain’t poetry’.”

Coe sometimes works in collaboration with a baroque cello and harpsichord duo in which the combination of music and poetry requires the collaborates to have a deep understanding of, and respect for, each other’s art in order to find a balance point where neither dominates. Even in thinking about a poetry reading, Coe approaches it as if it were a concert.

“The tone and feel, the pacing in any kind of performance, more than the actual content, is what holds it together. We’re trying to create an alternate reality for audience, and we don’t want to do anything that takes them out of their dream.”

Singer concurs. “Music is a way to reach a different reality, and poetry is a link to that other reality. Poetry is so compact. It’s an entire artistic experience on one page. It permits time travel. When we read a poem written by someone in the past, their mind can be connected with us in the present. When we read the poem aloud, the connection is visceral–speaking the words gives us a physical connection with a person from the past. I want people to enjoy the way poetry does new things with language and makes us think about the significance of the words we see and use.”

“I cannot exist without poetry,” says Coe, and Singer would probably agree. “I could never not have music as part of my life and my work.”

It’s a tricky business, giving voice to the written word. Writing turned into performance is a minefield of potential missteps. The results can be exhilarating or disappointing. At their best, readings lift the words off the page and let them catch the light. At their worst, they are exercises in self-indulgence and both writer and reader are better served by staying home with the book. I had a chance to see both recently.

On one of February’s most frigid nights, a standing-room crowd was warmed by Wally Lamb’s reading at the Boston University Barnes and Noble. Lamb was reading from his newest book, Couldn’t Keep It to Myself, which he wrote with members of a writing workshop he led at a maximum security women’s prison. He delighted us from the first moment, thanking us for coming and talking about how the book came to be written. He was gracious and plainspoken, reading with respect for his material and his audience. He seemed as pleased as we were to be there. He invited questions and–a small but thoughtful thing– repeated them so we all could hear.

By contrast, David Mamet, reading in Cambridge from South of the Northeast Kingdom, appeared bored. He was clearly unprepared and he riffled through the book, reading random pages in a listless and distracted manner. Although many audience members appeared to know his work well and admire it, Mamet barely tolerated their questions. I had the impression that Mamet was eager for us all to leave so he could go for drinks with friends.

Anyone who has attended readings has probably seen the gamut. There are the readings you wish you had missed by the inaudible reader who refuses the microphone, the author who goes on too long, or, more frequently, the one who doesn’t go on long enough.

Then there are the shining successes, the writers who truly offer the words they have written. In the presence of an open-hearted reader, we are atavistically spellbound–children begging for a story, cave dwellers drawing close around the fire.

“There is no one way to be a great reader, but a reading gives the audience a chance to hear how the poet hears her or his poem,” says Gail Mazur, who knows more than a thing or two about readings, especially by poets. A teacher and the author of four books of poetry, Mazur founded and spent 29 years as director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education before stepping down last spring. A reading, she feels, can change forever how you see a piece of writing.

“Writers have their own styles of reading,” she says, citing some poets she knows and admires. “Frank Bidart is an intense, expressive reader, who wants the audience to know exactly what he means by every word and every mark of punctuation. Louise Gluck has an austere presence, but she reads with utter clarity. There is a starkness to her poetry and a starkness to her reading. And there is sometimes also a dry wit that you might not get just by reading the poem on your own.

“Alan Dugan is blunt and workmanlike in his reading. There is no separation between him and his poem. And Robert Pinsky is a brilliant reader of his own work and also of the work of others. It’s thrilling to hear Robert read a poem like Frost’s, “To Earthward,” for instance, because you can hear the music and all the poet’s intentions.”

The bottom line is probably that a writer who sets out to give a reading should “give” it in the sense of offering it to the audience. As readers, writers can be generous or withholding. To paraphrase an old song, David Mamet heard us knocking, but we couldn’t come in. Wally Lamb opened the door and plumped up the sofa cushions.

Last February, when the world felt newly fragile, City Type made its debut as a column about how Boston’s writers and poets see their world. As it marks its first birthday, I went back to some of the people I’ve talked with to see where the year had taken them and what was on their minds. It is no surprise that they all felt the cloud of war hanging in the air reflected in their work.

Michael Brown is a poet, host of the poetry slam venue at the Cantab in Cambridge, and author of Falling Wallendas and two collections about to be published, Susquehanna and The Man Who Makes Amusement Rides. His poetry has frequently been political, but this year it has grown more so.

“I’ve always written political poems but I feel like I can’t get away from that now,” he said recently. “I’m on sabbatical and doing a lot of writing and I’m finding that probably one out of every three poems I write is political. These are just the things I’m thinking about.

“Right now we are, in many ways, the German people we used to rail against. The Germans probably didn’t shut their doors against what was going on. They probably just went home and had their dinner and their evening entertainment. They were just living their ordinary lives. That’s what we’re doing, too.

“If I had other ways of speaking out I would do that. But I am a poet, so this is what I need to do. This is my responsibility as a citizen.”

Marcie Hershman, the author of Tales of the Master Race, Safe in America, and Speak to Me, took a polar bear plunge on New Year’s Day as her way of immersing herself in a world that feels entirely changed.

“There is a sense of dread. It’s hard, especially when we know something is about to happen,” she says now. “Immediately after 9/11 I starting writing about it, then I stopped. As an artist, you have to get perspective. It’s like the first anniversary of a death. You’re past the energy of active grief, and energy of surmounting it. The second anniversary is an emotional letdown. You reach a certain maturity with it–that this can happen to me– this death, this wound, this grief–and I must go on. But now it feels wider than that: do you trust your companions on this march? Who is it you’ve had to clasp hands with or clench fists against?”

Norah Dooley’s children’s books, Everybody Cooks Rice, Everybody Bakes Bread, Everybody Services Soup, and Everybody Brings Noodles are about people sharing a Cambridge neighborhood, recognizing what they have in common. She told me about the Talespinners, an intergenerational storytelling group she started in 1998.

“We did a show of world folk tales this fall and included a tale on the futility of violence. I’ve always wanted to do that story, but it is not a happy one. This year, somehow, people seemed ready to hear it, and it got the most passionate, excited, and positive response.

“It is a Limba tale from West Africa. In it all the animals have a contest to see who has true strength. All are appreciated for their displays of diverse strength. After elephant is man’s turn. The animals do not respect his strength. He gets angry, goes to where he has hidden a gun, and shoots the elephant–blam! Dead. The animals run away and hide and ask themselves, was that strength? They decide it was not: that was death. And that is why to this day, man walks alone in the forest and the animals hide from him. He is the animal who does not know the difference between strength and death.”

Adnan Adam Onart is a poet whom I interviewed about what it’s like to write in an adopted language. Now, in his adopted country, he is preoccupied with what he calls “the unbearable heaviness of what might be.”

“I was born and raised in Istanbul, the edge of the Balkans. I have firsthand experience how complex the web of the past is, and how delicate today’s balance. I chose to live in this country because I value a society built on the concept of freedom. I assumed a new responsibility I had not bargained for when I became a naturalized citizen.

“My poetry cannot stay the same. It takes time for words to tell what they mean, for them to become poetry. By that time, what type of world we might be living in, what type of country America might have become? I wish my poetry could be a warning. I don’t mean to say this is 1930’s of Germany. Still, I wonder could anyone then have anticipated the magnitude of human tragedy that was to come?”

Winter’s dark days often remind us of dark times in our lives. Samuel Bak, a visual artist and author, and Michael Mack, a poet, have each lived through years of unimaginable darkness. Each has crafted his experiences into transcendent art that reaches out with unblinking honesty.

Bak, an internationally respected painter and the author of a memoir, Painted in Words, was seven when his hometown of Vilna, Poland, came under German occupation. As a Jewish child, he saw his world changed forever. He and his mother survived the war physically. He survived spiritually by drawing, drawing constantly what he saw around him, and ultimately by creating paintings that bear witness to the unspeakable nightmare of the Holocaust.

Bearing witness is the foundation of Mack’s art, too, although his darkness was more private. He was five when he found his mother crying uncontrollably, scissors in her hand, her hair cut off, asking, “Has my face changed? Am I the Blessed Virgin? ” It was the beginning of her battle with schizophrenia that would engulf the family.

“One first and foremost creates for oneself,” says Bak. He is sitting in a yellow room, sunlight streaming in through long slanted windows of his suburban home. He is gracious, and thoughtful. “Art communicates on many different levels. You make a choice. To me to reach out to others may be more important than it is to other artists.”

Mack’s art, also, grew beyond his need to explore his life, to reach out to others. In a Cambridge coffee shop, his bike parked outside, he speaks quickly. Between sips of herb tea, his long, expressive hands underscoring his words, he tells how poetry gave him a way to make sense out of his experiences.

“It became a therapeutic process, though I didn’t set out for it to be,” says Mack. The culmination is his 90-minute performance piece, Hearing Voices (Speaking in Tongues).

“It’s a tremendously healing thing–the art of witness. It connects me to the world and makes me feel like a human being. It reconnects me to an important part of my life and the people in it. But it’s not only about witnessing my life; it’s about other people’s lives, too. I find a lot of people have never mentioned their brother, their father, their child to anyone else.”

Bak concurs. “I feel it is important for me to speak of my experiences, maybe to attract attention to what happened, maybe to explore what happened, and maybe to integrate my fears and apprehensions and almost my disbelief that I am still around.”

When a major exhibit of his work was held in Landsberg am Lech, a center of Nazi activity during the 1930s and site of the prison where Hitler wrote Mein Kampf Bak “suddenly realized this was much bigger than myself. It had somehow grown beyond what I am.”

This is the same feeling Mack gets when audiences respond to something like his description of a Christmas when his father, strapped by hospital bills, drew a tree on a large piece of paper and hung it in the kitchen. In his poem, “Holidays in Baltimore, ” he writes, “We gripped markers, stood barefoot/beneath the tree’s gracious branches,/ drew whatever we wanted–// balls, a pony, bicycle, telescope, airplane, dolls,/ Mama. Whatever we wanted.

“It’s variations on a theme,” says Mack. “It mirrors their own experiences, invites them into a dialogue they can carry with them into their lives and talk about with other people.”

Bak’s childhood world, by contrast, can be understood by very few. But the horror of it can be felt by anyone who looks at his paintings of damaged books and teddy bears, dishes and pears, the uprooted trees that speak of an uprooted world.

When Bak says his subject chose him, Mack would understand. Bak writes in his memoir, that he was, “responding to something that was pushing out from the inside, something visceral.

“And this is how it happens. I am in front of my easel. The radio plays music, the speaker announces a change in the weather, and a part of my mind is busy with all sorts of mysterious creative systems. I feel like an obedient servant who is doing what the painting demands.”

This is a surreal moment in time. Every day the news is of strangely public preparations for war, even thoughts on timing an attack to avoid Iraq’s torrid spring and summer months. Kevin Bowen, the director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, has seen war and its consequences. After serving in the First Air Cavalry in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969, it is not something he wants to see again. “What grace is found/ in so much loss?” asks a poem in Bowen’s book, Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong . Bowen is the author of prose, translation, and three books of poetry, the winner of a Pushcart Prize and awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for both poetry and fiction. His upbringing in Boston’s West End was strongly grounded in Catholicism and communal responsibility–a responsibility to be, as he quotes the French writer Simone Weil, “on the side of lightness.” Now, sitting in his UMass Boston office, Bowen is surrounded by reminders of war. The Dorchester Vietnam Memorial is close by, the JFK Library down the road. Even the nearby gas tank with its bright Corita Kent stripes recalls the Vietnam era. On the book-crammed shelves that sag dangerously on the wall behind him, a spine directly above Bowen’s head reads, The Lessons of the Vietnam War . “Everywhere I look there’s some sort of marker from the war,” he says. It was an experience that left him sharply aware of the vulnerability of the body and of the spirit. “I saw what war does to the spirit. You see great moments, but you also see how war demeans human beings as well. They say you see the world when you join the military and you do really see the world.” Bowen pauses and adds softly, “When I left Vietnam, it looked like the moon.” What Bowen saw makes him now want to grab us all by our collars and hold us so we cannot look away from the unfolding scenario. In a recent article in Intervention Magazine , Bowen wrote,”Mornings now, like many, I wake to the sound of cars turning over and think of other engines turning over somewhere far away. I fear that, thanks to the poverty of our politics and our imaginations, it is Death who sits behind the wheel and that he is hungry for a fresh harvest.” At a time when, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “things are in the saddle/ and ride mankind,” Bowen believes strongly in the poet’s responsibility to call out to the world and make people see in new ways. “The role of the poem is to breathe life into things. It’s life affirming in a situation that’s death-affirming. There is a sense that beyond the politics, the tools, the toys of war, death is what’s being chosen. Writing poetry is a way of fighting that off. You write alone, and the poem is what you send out there that you hope connects you to the world. It’s important to speak out. It’s an affirmation of humanness and it allows you to sustain yourself personally during this time.” One of his recent poems, Once More Again, reads in part, “Once more again the body counts on the news,/ the hungry armies moving across the desert.//I hear a plane drone overhead and think of fuel/ seeping down air shafts,/ the loneliness of death anywhere.” “There are no answers for questions never asked,” Bowen wrote in the Intervention article. He notes that it is the poet’s job to ask, and that that, too, is a patriotic act. As poem written by the Vietnamese poet Nguyen Duy and translated by Bowen and Nguyen Ba Chung, says, “In the end, in every war/ whoever won, the people always lost.”