Category: writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you for coming to listen.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.