Category: writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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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.