Category: writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He might have been a different writer if he lived, say, in Indianapolis or Atlanta, But Jack Canavan, who is working on a book about the 1972 Hotel Vendome fire, is a Bostonian writing Boston stories about Boston people.

“I write because I have to,” he says. “There’s a story to be told and I have to tell that story. Every day I think about it. It’s with me every day. The book I’m working on is all about here, all the resources are here, the characters, the dialogue are all from Boston.”

But more than that, Canavan, born and bred and still living in South Boston, is also a South Boston writer.

“I suppose I could write anywhere, but because I haven’t lived anywhere else but South Boston, I’m a Southie writer. I’m just a Southie person.”

Boston’s neighborhood ties are legend. When I was new to the city I didn’t realize their strength until my first election season here, when one candidate’s victory was explained in part by the fact that he grew up in a neighborhood with a traditionally high voter turnout. Wait a minute–he won an election because of the neighborhood he grew up in? I picture fifth-grade heads down on the desks, hands raised to vote for class treasurer, fast-forwarded to adults pulling the levers at polling stations where their parents once voted. Yes, this is a city of neighborhoods, probably none with a more legendary identity than Southie. And Canavan knows those surroundings well enough to make them real and distinct.

“The characters in my book are from Boston and South Boston, and the behavior of the characters is different. I have to get that down right, that South Boston presence, the language, the dialogue.”

The fact-based novel, which has the working title Without Cause, has been in progress for four years. Much of his writing has been done at the Writers’ Room, where he received two fellowships, including one endowed by Stephen and Tabitha King. He also teaches creative writing at the Boston Center for Adult Education and the Laboure Center and is an editor of the South Boston Literary Gazette. When we meet at the South Boston branch of the Boston Public Library, Canavan knows where we can find an easy place to sit and talk, just as he knows the rest of the neighborhood he translates onto the page.

“There’s a male and female code of dress. You don’t see too many suits. It’s mostly blue collar,” he tells me, noting that my (trust me, pretty generic) outfit marks me as being “not from around here.”

“People here can be tightlipped to outsiders,” he continues. “They keep things to themselves. You know everyone and everyone knows you.”

Sure, we’re talking Southie here, but, except for the names and faces, this could probably apply to a lot of other Boston neighborhoods. This is a city that seems to thrive on believing in distinctions, even when those distinctions define slices of the same pie. The turf is clearly marked, but it’s marked by the same things—the local shops, landmarks, places to congregate; nuances of dress and manner; and most of all, familiar faces–and for the same reasons–the comfort of the known; the urge to create “home.” Isn’t this, after all, where even if it’s fiction, people flock to the place “where everybody knows your name”?

On April 8 and 9 when the sixth annual Boston Poetry Festival is held at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square, it will reflect the vision of one poet, Harris Gardner. And, each week when Somerville Community Access Television airs the program Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer, another poet, Doug Holder, brings the written word to a television audience.

I think of Gardner and Holder as the Johnny Appleseeds of Boston-area poetry, planting a reading series here, a publishing venture there, sprinkling poetry from Amesbury to Warwick, Rhode Island. Most of their efforts are concentrated close to home. Holder co-founded the Somerville News Writers Festival and started the monthly poetry series at Somerville’s Toast Lounge. With his wife, Dianne, he founded Ibbetson Street Press, which publishes books, a magazine, and an online newsletter. He presided for a time over the legendary Stone Soup Poets and is the current host of the Newton Free Library poetry reading series. Gardner originated poetry readings at Border’s at Downtown Crossing and at Forest Hills Cemetery. He has organized benefit readings after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. His biggest project has been the Poetry Festival which, each year, organizes more than 50 poets into a free weekend marathon reading.

Although they are publishers and venue hosts, they consider themselves poets first. Each has amassed a solid list of publishing credits. Gardner is author of the collection “Lest They Become “ and co-author, with Lainie Senechal , of “Chalice of Eros.” Holder’s most recent collection is “Wrestling with my Father.”

I catch up with them at yet another event they started. It is 9 o’clock on Saturday morning and I am in Harvard Square with other early-to-rise poets at what Holder and Gardner call “Bagels and Bards.” Open to all poets, it’s a place to bring new work, share experiences, and schmooze, which, in the basement of Finagle a Bagel , seems about right.

It’s hard for any poet, especially a beginning one, to find an audience, and the city is filled with poets grateful for the audiences these two have helped them find, including at the open mikes their venues often feature.

“I feel I’m in this world to be a catalytic agent,” says Gardner, “ to provide space and opportunity for other poets. I’m a bridge builder–sort of a civil engineer of poetry.”

He’s enjoyed bringing together poets from both the city’s academic and performance communities and is known for venues that combine poets with major reputations and those he calls “emerging.”

“I like the mix of new and established voices,” he says. “I think it encourages beginning poets to push themselves more and bring themselves to the next level.”

Holder agrees.“I like showcasing other poets. I like to bring out a new exciting voice. And I like to make a venue lively, not too formal. The poetry should be solid, but I want to have fun. I want it to be eclectic. I like to encourage people who are engaging to put on a show. Poetry should be a joyous thing.”

They are clearly having fun. I picture puppies or maybe lion cubs as they talk, tumbling over each other’s words, interrupting, finishing each other’s sentences, trading verbal jabs over who’s younger (Holder), who has more hair (Gardner).

Holder says, “If we lost everything else tomorrow we’d still be writing poetry.”

And maybe organizing a reading series.

In the last election did you just for a minute wish you could vote for Jed Bartlet, the fictional president on The West Wing? And if I say “woman president,”what’s your first thought–quick–Liberia, Chile, or Geena Davis? With the intersection between politics and culture looking increasingly like an overachieving interstate cloverleaf, it seems fitting that some of the most thoughtful political commentary comes from a former drama critic.

“I think the cultural story and the political news story are inseparable,” says Frank Rich. Rich is op-ed columnist and former chief drama critic for The New York Times; the author of Ghost Light, a memoir; and Hot Seat, a collection of theater reviews; and co-author, with Lisa Aronson, of The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson. His visit to Boston on February 12 for a Celebrity Series “Conversation” gave me the opportunity to consider this writer I have long admired a “City Type” for a day.

For Rich, who grew up in Washington, D. C., politics and theater have always been interwoven. As a student at Harvard he was both a drama critic and editorial chairman for the Harvard Crimson, foreshadowing his career path from theater to politics.

“Maybe the move was fated to happen, but it wasn’t planned,” Rich says, noting that, in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was decimating Broadway. Suddenly theater was a story as much about politics as about stagecraft. “People were literally dying in the wings. I became interested in bursting beyond the bounds of normal reviewing.”

The landscape of news changed, as well.

“The explosion of 24/7 news on television and the Internet,” says Rich, “combined with the swallowing up of network news operations by giant media companies. The changes in media culture and an administration that is probably the most savvy in manipulating that culture have combined to create an almost fictional story line.” He cites as “a classic example” last month’s White House gathering of 13 former secretaries of state and defense which the President, according to news reports, attended for between five and 10 minutes of conversation before everyone arranged themselves for the photo that appeared next morning on front pages across the country.

Surely among the political theater’s greatest hits is the 1992 campaign, where the political-cultural divide blurred as candidate Clinton played sax on late-night television and the nation’s vice president debated a sitcom character, Murphy Brown. By now we’re used to it. We barely blink when scripted illusion trumps reality. When we watched footage of President Bush serving Thanksgiving dinner to the troops in Iraq in 2004, did we even realize that those applauding soldiers and marines were having their cranberry sauce and stuffing at around 6 AM? Looked like Thanksgiving dinner to us. And of course we’ll always have the “Mission Accomplished” backdrop, the summer stock brush clearing.

Thinking back to his reviewing days, Rich says, “I think the least important role of the critic is to come to a judgment about a show.” He tells of another former Times drama critic, the legendary Walter Kerr, who “made you feel what it was like to be in that theater on that night.” Reviewers like Kerr, he says, felt their job was to generate an excitement about the art form, and perhaps to champion something new and exciting, even if it might be unpopular.

Actually, that sounds like political writing, too: trying to offer the reader a front-row seat to what unfolds each day. Since we can’t always attend the performance, we need to rely on someone to tell us about it. We’re hoping for a reality show.

“War on terror!”
“Moral values!”

I am in Cambridge, in Anne Bernays’s and Justin Kaplan’s cozy sitting room and we are throwing down catchwords like trump cards. We are talking–well, ok, we’re ranting–about how civil discourse is increasingly dumbed down into shoot-from-the-hip slogans with superimposed political meanings. As a result, when we talk about public issues, we’re often speaking in code, consciously or not.

“Defense of Marriage!”

One resolution the three of us would like to see in the new year is for people to say what they mean and mean what they say. Bernays and Kaplan have spent their careers doing just that. Bernays, a novelist perhaps best known for her book Professor Romeo, teaches at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Her newest book, Trophy House, will be published next fall. Kaplan is aPulitzer Prize-winning biographer who was the editor of the last two editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. He is also, Bernays adds, “good at household repairs and a very good cook.”

The objects of our afternoon rant are those insidiously familiar terms so loaded with agenda that, when we say or hear them, actually frame our point of view. Terms like “support our troops,” which Bernays drily notes, “is code for ‘I’m a Republican’.” A visitor from some other world, hearing the phrase, might assume it had a relatively apolitical meaning, appreciation for the men and women who put their lives in danger on behalf of us all. Most Americans, though, would understand it as not only support for the individuals serving in the military, but also support for the war they have been sent to fight.

“It’s the difference between “liberating” Iraq and “occupying” it,” says Kaplan.

“It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic,” says Bernays. “I worry that people grow up accepting these things like candy, not questionning the meaningless phrases they use.”

“No Child Left Behind.”
“Patriot Act.”

The power that comes with naming has been understood since the Garden of Eden. But the power to name has morphed into the power to frame as politicians use their naming rights opportunities to put their objectives on our lips. Remember Alice in Wonderland: When the March Hare insisted Alice say what she mean, she protested, “At least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.”“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”

“I teach writing,” says Bernays, “and I’m exquisitely aware of how people use words. I get terribly heated when I feel someone is deliberately manipulating words to pull the wool over people’s eyes. People haven’t been taught to question.”

“Tax relief.”

Even examples that seem innocuous leave us speaking in built-in conclusions. Unless we keep our skeptical, critical, analytic abilities sharp, we’re left mouthing cliches that, as Kaplan points out, provide people with a substitute for thinking.

“Ethnic cleansing.”

Words are conscripted for political purposes so routinely that, when we hear them benignly uttered on the evening news, we can lose sense of how truly horrific they are.

“In an odd way it’s almost criminal. It’s manipulation of your brain. Words are used as weapons,” Kaplan says, adding that, there are parts of the world where that might be an improvement.

Now, what was that you said?

What we’re reading now: Justin Kaplan is reading The Peabody Sisters, by Megan Marshall, which will be published in April. As soon as Anne Bernays finishes her reading tasks as a judge of fiction for the Massachusetts Book Awards, she’s looking forward to reading Volume One of Norman Sherry’s The Life of Graham Greene. I am reading The Fading Smile, the late Peter Davison’s charming dish about the Boston poetry scene between 1955 and 1960, with its intimate glimpses of the astounding group that included Lowell, Sexton, Plath, Kunitz, and Frost.

From Anne Bernays’s forthcoming book, Trophy House, to be published in September by Simon and Schuster: The sky was as blue as a Delft plate and cloudless except for a few wisps near the horizon. More and more people. I realized, were staying on past Labor Day, enough to make me uneasy. Figures, rendered tiny by distance, walked near the edge of the bay, a couple were sitting on the sand, wearing fleece of many colors. A man with bushy eyebrows appeared from over a dune. At his heels was a black standard poodle, clipped to look like a turn of the century chorus girl. The dog calmly pooped onto the sand and failed to kick back over what he’d left there.

From Justin Kaplan’s forthcoming non-fiction book, Innkeepers, scheduled to be published by Viking/Penguin: When John Jacob Astor died in 1848, at the age of 84, he was the richest man in America. His fortune, an estimated twenty to thirty million dollars, mainly founded on his holdings in Manhattan real estate, was ten to twenty times greater than that of the nearest contenders in that line, the inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. William Backhouse Astor, the old man’s son and heir, had the body put on display in the parlor of his house in Lafayette Place. The undertaker installed a glass window in the black silk velvet pall so that citizens who pushed their way through the crowd of gawkers could look upon the face of wealth incarnate.

Some people have it all planned out. They have their maps and they’re sure of where they’re going. Others, and I am one of them, make plans but then tend to drift a little with the prevailing winds, sometimes arriving in an unexpected place.

Afaa Michael Weaver is one of those, too. He is a poet, playwright and professor who holds an endowed chair in English at Simmons College, where he is director of the Zora Neale Hurston Literary Center. When we meet, he is preparing to leave for China, where has spent much of his time in recent years. The life he is living probably was not what he envisioned when he was a child named Michael S. Weaver growing up in an African-American family in 1950s Baltimore, or during the 15 years he spent as a factory worker. And I can’t help thinking that the story of his journey lies in his name.

Michael Weaver became Afaa M. Weaver when the Nigerian playwright Tess Onwueme gave him a name from the Ibo language.

“Afaa means oracle,” Weaver says. “It is a good name for a poet because an oracle is a person who can clarify things in the present time.”

Weaver also has a Chinese name, Wei Yafeng. “Wei” means flourishing or blossoming. “Yafeng” is the title of a section from the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry and carries implications of middle age. Weaver says he asked his Chinese godfather, who gave him the name, to add a “radical,” or character, that indicates grass growing.

Weaver describes the chain of events so logically you think it could have happened to anyone: At first, while working in a factory, he began studying tai chi.

“It helped with my balance,” he explains, meaning physical balance, but noting that, as he began struggling with depression, it seemed to help him maintain emotional balance as well. Weaver continued practicing tai chi casually as he began writing poetry, saw his work published, founded a literary journal, and began freelancing for newspapers like the Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Chicago Tribune. He was still dabbling in tai chi when he published his first poetry collection, Water Song; when he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; and when he completed his B.A. and M.F.A.

And when, teaching at Rutgers University, he experienced congestive heart failure, he added more intensive practice of tai chi to his medical regimen.

“It restored my health,” he says, “ and I thought maybe Chinese culture was something important in my life.” So when he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, he chose to study in Taiwan.

Since then he has written poems in Chinese, including some he considers among his best. And even symbolism from the Kabbalah has found its way into his poetry as this weaver has brought together disparate strands of far-flung cultures.

“There have been different manifestations,” he explains. “At first I was writing about the United States, north and south. My Father’s Geography is part of that. Timber and Prayer I saw as my last ‘migration’ book. Then there is the inner movement of Talisman and Multitudes. At this point I can look back and see more clearly what I was doing.

“It’s a blessing for a poet to know you don’t always have to figure it out. It’s kind of a gift that requires a self-knowledge and self-awareness that are not always available to you, especially when you’re younger. One should always hope for surprises.”

Among the Hurricane Katrina photos that continue to haunt me were those two–you remember the ones–of people slogging through chest-deep water, carrying food. You remember the captions, too: the white people, “finding (food),” the black man “looting.” Just for a minute forget the ethics of ownership versus need or what someone might have to do to stay alive in such an extreme situation. Forget the societal divisions festering just below the surface. Simply think about this: words aren’t neutral; they take sides.

“Change a word and you change the atmosphere,” says Askold Melnyczuk, reminding me of William Blake’s words, “Damn braces: Bless relaxes.” Melnyczuk is the founding editor of the literary magazine Agni, director of the UMass Boston Creative Writing Program, and a recipient of a Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction. His first novel, What Is Told, was listed as a New York Times Notable Book and his second, Ambassador of the Dead was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2002. When we meet, we talk about how often words are used to narrow, rather than broaden, our understanding.

“There seems to be no weight to words anymore,” Melnyczuk says. “There has been a reinvention of language. Deeds used to precede words.”

Now he and I talk about how words have taken the lead, springing ahead of deeds to become slogans that hurry us to pre-ordained conclusions or frame what is in front of our eyes. Think of how our news, for example, is filled with talk of “insurgents” and “terrorists.” If CNN had been around in 18th century England, the insurgents and terrorists surely would have been Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, and all those others better known to us as patriots. And have you noticed when we read now of military casualties, it isn’t “soldiers” or “Marines,” or any other individual person, but rather the vague, sanitized “troops” who are killed or injured? I’ll admit it took me a while to catch on that “a troop” was actually one human being, not some military unit like a battalion or division. Just one human being.

Of course we see mundane examples every day of how words are played with fast and loose, their meanings casually suborned. An inconvenience or service cutback becomes a way “to serve you better (Have a wonderful day).” And “new and improved” is not likely to mean something good.

And, as, Melnyczuk and I note, when words are devalued, writers are left with less to say that means anything; our first line of defense against doublespeak is gone.

“In totalitarian countries.” he says, “the joke used to be that the evidence that poetry was important was that poets would get locked up. Poets in the West regularly envied Neruda that he could get exiled for what he wrote.”

No one gets locked up or exiled for poetry here, and that’s good news. But it also shows how our words have been defanged, housebroken for the benefit of anyone with a product or point of view to sell. Of course words aren’t only for use in public . They keep us close to one another privately, too, as Melnyczuk shows us in this poem:

And So

amid the loved lost causes,
the revival of the classics,
the classless society,

you work on a dirge
for the language your
grandmother loved you in:

snih, trava, lyubov . . .

We can only start with our own words and use them carefully to say what is real. If we don’t protect them, how will we talk to each other.?