Category: writing

From the window of John Shattuck’s office at the JFK Library, you look out to a view of crystal blue sky and the shimmering water of Dorchester Bay. Shattuck looks out that window and sees a city that symbolizes freedom, a city of human rights activists, both past and present. He sees Boston filled with students and workers from other countries, reminders that some of us were handed our human rights–the free speech and equality before the law, the right to basic human necessities, and to living without fear of torture or enslavement–at birth; and others achieved them only after a long, difficult journey.

As chief human rights official in the Clinton administration, as former ambassador to the Czech Republic, and now, as CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and author of Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America’s Response , Shattuck has spent his career focusing on human rights issues worldwide. And he wants Americans to realize that that global concern is in their best interest.

“It’s a practical subject, not just a question of one’s ideals. It’s about the interest we have as a nation to promote international stability,” says Shattuck, noting that “terrorism finds its best breeding ground in countries where human rights are repressed.”

Listening to Shattuck I am reminded of the Zulu word ubuntu . It’s a hard word to translate because it stands for a concept we don’t have in English, though we may need it. Ubuntu means that in order to be fully human, we need to know that others have their rights to be fully human, as well. In his book, No Future Without Forgiveness , Desmond Tutu described ubuntu as “knowing that (we belong) in a greater whole and (are) diminished when others are humiliated or diminished.” A useful model for nations, too. Maybe for one nation in the world to be fully realized and for its citizens to be fully free, all nations and their citizens must live with similar freedom. It sounds like just what Shattuck is talking about, what he feels we have the obligation to promote.

Yet that’s a model we Americans seem reluctant to embrace. Although we feel a little proprietary about human rights, we’ve also been reluctant to act on behalf of human rights on the world stage. The astounding list of international treaties the U.S. is not party to, for example, includes the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women; the Convention on the Rights of the Child; The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of Migrant Workers; the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution and Child Pornography; and the Optional Protocol on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict; as well as the Rome Treaty on the International Criminal Court, from which President Bush withdrew America’s signature.

Our national traditions of exceptionalism, isolationism, and unilateralism, Shattuck argues in his book, “have made the United States an ambivalent, and from the point of view of other countries, untrustworthy leader when it comes to human rights.”

Just recently, on December 10, International Human Rights Day marked the 55th anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Is it just coincidence that the day falls in this season of darkness and light? Maybe the slowly lengthening days will remind us of the imperative for human rights to shine throughout the world.

When we first heard about AIDS, back when it didn’t even have a name, could we have envisioned an epidemic lasting for decades? From the beginning the battle was against not only a virus, but also against silence and lack of knowledge. The only protection was education and writers were among those trying to get the life-saving word out. I remember approaching the editor of an organization’s magazine only to be told they had decided not to cover the subject because, “AIDS doesn’t affect (our members).”

In 2003 AIDS is a household word and 30 million people are dead worldwide. World AIDS Day, observed on Monday, put the disease back in the news, at least for a few days.

Philip Hilts has never stopped trying to get the word out.. Back in 1981, when the Centers for Disease Control made its first announcement of a mysterious new disease, Hilts wrote about it for The Washington Post. Since then he has written 400 stories on AIDS, maybe more than any writer in the world. He is also the award-winning author of five books and hundreds of stories on other medical and public health subjects for The New York Times and The Washington Post. His most recent book is Protecting America’s Health: The FDA, Industry, and 100 Years of Regulation. This year Hilts has been away from his Brookline home, living with his family in Botswana, where he is teaching journalism at the University of Botswana and working on a book on AIDS in Southern Africa.

“I have felt deeply about the subject of AIDS since the beginning. This epidemic is now, as far as I can tell by (statistics), the worst epidemic in human history, and Botswana is the worst nation in that worst epidemic.

“This is not the public disease that the Black Death was. This disease is quiet. This is a virus that, in a peculiar way, seeks out the cultural weaknesses in each place it reaches, then saturates these crevasses of human frailty and produces suffering and death.”

Although Hilts notes profound differences between AIDS in the United States and in Botswana, there are also frustrating similarities to its early days in this country, particularly denial and the role of public policy. Nearly half the population of Botswana is HIV positive and, although medication is available free, many people do not take it because of a widespread belief that the drugs will not work. One of Africa’s richest nations, Botswana had, until recently, an average life expectancy of 70. The prevalence of AIDS has brought that number down to 50, and firm predictions are that it will drop to a heartwrenching 29. Unlike here, however, where President Reagan did not mention the word AIDS for the first six years of the epidemic, the president of Botswana has taken a very public position, getting tested, speaking out often.

The World Health Organization estimates 5 million new infections in 2003. A new generation is at risk for lack of adequate prevention education.

“The denial,” says Hilts, “is still going on. There is still the reluctance to talk about it.”

Even as he works on his book, he worries that it won’t sell. He calls it “message fatigue,” the way we push all talk of AIDS out of our public and private conversation. We know, we know. We just don’t want to hear it anymore.

We have the drugs now to treat the people who are infected. But education remains the only way to prevent new infections. If we don’t talk about AIDS, if we don’t write about it and read about it, we will continue to live in its shadow. The old slogan of the AIDS group ACT UP still applies: silence = death.

Is everyone in Boston a writer? Everywhere I picture people hunched over paper-strewn desks, at laptops in coffee shops, on park benches, at kitchen tables, the ones whose names adorn spines on library shelves and leap from bookstore windows, and those who hardly dare whisper the words, “I am a writer.”

Lesego Malepe has done her share of writing in restaurants and libraries, on the T and standing in lines. She says she wrote her first novel in public, at every place but a desk.

“I can write at a rock concert,” she says. But now she doesn”t have to. These days Malepe does her writing at the Writers” Room, a hushed space on State Street in downtown Boston that is home to a community of writers. Malepe has always thought of herself as a writer, but the journey to writing fulltime has taken her across years and miles.

When Malepe was growing up in Pretoria, language was her “plaything.” Her father, a University of South Africa professor whose specialty was the African language Setswana, helped nurture her love of language. She laughingly recalls how life with four brothers spurred her to use words as a weapon: she wrote short stories in which she was the heroine and the villain was whichever brother was torturing her most at the moment. Later, in her novel Matters of Life and Death, she would sharpen that weapon and turn it against the political system that imprisoned one brother at the age of 18 on a charge of high treason and held him for 22 years on the infamous Robben Island.

“To cope, you make order out of the life you are presented with and the people and places around you,” she says. She put her world into a novel because, “you can get at deeper fundamental truth through fiction.”

At first Malepe tried to make sense of her world by studying political science. She came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar in 1978, got her Ph.D. at Boston University, then taught political science at Wheaton College until 2001. She wrote op-ed pieces that appeared in major newspapers and wrote short stories, as she says, “to entertain myself.” But the deaths of her parents in the late 1990s, and of a brother in 2000, changed everything.

“I realized I could die any time and I thought if I”m going to die, I want to make sure my book is published. I took stock of my life and decided I wanted to do only what I felt I was meant to do.”

She gave herself two years to see if she could make her living as a writer. She gathered her savings, knowing she had the fallback position of teaching political science in South Africa; rearranged her life; applied to the Writers” Room; and started writing five hours a day.

Malepe”s first name means “you are blessed” in Setswana, and she feels she has had blessing with her writing. When she finished writing Matters of Life and Death, she decided against all advice, to publish it through iUniverse. (“I just wanted the book to be out there.”) It sold so well that it is being reissued by Genesis Press and an agent offered to represent her. She has just completed her second novel, Truth and Reconciliation and is working on a memoir, My Father”s Language. She is a writer.

“Even when I am tired my soul and my mind feel so fresh, so alive. Some days are hard, some are easy. Sometimes chapters just pour out. Those are the times that I live for. Some days every word is a drop of blood. But I”ve trained myself to sit there anyway. This is my writing time.”

It was a dark and stormy night. (Oooh.) She saw a stranger watching from across the street. (Oooh.) Suddenly she heard the slow creak of the front door. (Oooh…and then?)

Scare us, please. Children, whether shrieking with laughter at the adult who says, “boo!” or huddling with nervous pleasure around a campfire for ghost stories, can’t get enough. Neither can adults, who read enough scary stories to make mysteries one of the most popular book categories. It seems to be instinctive: we love being scared. But just a little. Just to the point that mystery writer Jeremiah Healy calls “disquieting.”

“We like to be scared,” says Healy, “but we prefer when it’s vicarious.” He compares the pleasure we take in reading mysteries to the delicious danger we knew as children listening to a scary story, but knowing our parents were there to protect us. “I think people don’t read mysteries to be scared as much as to be entertained. The fear you feel toward the end of the book is like the glass of port or the dessert at the end of a meal.”

Healy is the award-winning author of 17 novels and more than 60 short stories written under his own name and under his pseudonym, Terry Devane. His most recent book is the Terry Devane novel A Stain Upon the Robe. A former military police officer, attorney, and law professor, Healy writes legal and private-investigator mysteries that are often set in Boston. As a college student working in a sheriff’s office, Healy first learned about how people function under extreme conditions.

“I came to appreciate a level of fear I had not known before and how you need to control it in order to function. Now I can put my fictional victim in that mindset.”

It could be argued that, these days, we live in that mindset. Why at a time when world events seem unremittingly frightening–and random–do we still seek out this added dose of dread? In fact, we want something scary to read now even more. Healy says that, in the last two years the popularity of mystery books has soared. It’s understandable. The page, the binding are solid boundaries from which the terrors cannot escape. It’s an implicit contract between author and reader: I’m going to entertain you by scaring you, but in a good way, a controlled way. So don’t worry: on the last page, everything will be all right.

Says Healy, “In difficult times–uncertain economic times, times of war, both of which we have now–people want an organized story they can follow. They want a story that troubles them, but within a certain range. And they want a resolution.”

In a mystery, terror follows a comfortingly predictable course. As Healy points out, a gunfight in the first chapter is not likely to have serious consequences for the hero. As the book progresses, the mayhem quotient will increase.

“It’s like a roller-coaster,” he says, “where the biggest drop is at the end. If the biggest drop came at the beginning, you wouldn’t think much of the ride by the time you got off. The action is in control, but escalating.”

The type of action readers look for may depend on the lives they lead. Healy’s type of mystery often attracts an audience of professionals comfortable with complexity and drawn to more cerebral tensions. Those who feel their work lives are more routine and lacking in excitement may seek out the heightened stimulation of graphic slasher stories.

But whatever our preferences in style, mysteries cut across all lines, socioeconomic, ethnic, gender, and age. As readers, we think a scary trick is a treat to be savored.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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