Category: writing

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The Good, the Bad, and the Boring: Writers Reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Writing about the World, One Year Later

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Words to Light the Dark Places

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Writing of War, Pointing Toward Peace

This is a surreal moment in time. Every day the news is of strangely public preparations for war, even thoughts on timing an attack to avoid Iraq’s torrid spring and summer months. Kevin Bowen, the director of the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, has seen war and its consequences. After serving in the First Air Cavalry in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969, it is not something he wants to see again.

“What grace is found/ in so much loss?” asks a poem in Bowen’s book, Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong .

Bowen is the author of prose, translation, and three books of poetry, the winner of a Pushcart Prize and awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council for both poetry and fiction. His upbringing in Boston’s West End was strongly grounded in Catholicism and communal responsibility–a responsibility to be, as he quotes the French writer Simone Weil, “on the side of lightness.” Now, sitting in his UMass Boston office, Bowen is surrounded by reminders of war. The Dorchester Vietnam Memorial is close by, the JFK Library down the road. Even the nearby gas tank with its bright Corita Kent stripes recalls the Vietnam era. On the book-crammed shelves that sag dangerously on the wall behind him, a spine directly above Bowen’s head reads, The Lessons of the Vietnam War .

“Everywhere I look there’s some sort of marker from the war,” he says. It was an experience that left him sharply aware of the vulnerability of the body and of the spirit. “I saw what war does to the spirit. You see great moments, but you also see how war demeans human beings as well. They say you see the world when you join the military and you do really see the world.” Bowen pauses and adds softly, “When I left Vietnam, it looked like the moon.”

What Bowen saw makes him now want to grab us all by our collars and hold us so we cannot look away from the unfolding scenario. In a recent article in Intervention Magazine , Bowen wrote,”Mornings now, like many, I wake to the sound of cars turning over and think of other engines turning over somewhere far away. I fear that, thanks to the poverty of our politics and our imaginations, it is Death who sits behind the wheel and that he is hungry for a fresh harvest.”

At a time when, in the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “things are in the saddle/ and ride mankind,” Bowen believes strongly in the poet’s responsibility to call out to the world and make people see in new ways.

“The role of the poem is to breathe life into things. It’s life affirming in a situation that’s death-affirming. There is a sense that beyond the politics, the tools, the toys of war, death is what’s being chosen. Writing poetry is a way of fighting that off. You write alone, and the poem is what you send out there that you hope connects you to the world. It’s important to speak out. It’s an affirmation of humanness and it allows you to sustain yourself personally during this time.”

One of his recent poems, Once More Again, reads in part, “Once more again the body counts on the news,/ the hungry armies moving across the desert.//I hear a plane drone overhead and think of fuel/ seeping down air shafts,/ the loneliness of death anywhere.”

“There are no answers for questions never asked,” Bowen wrote in the Intervention article. He notes that it is the poet’s job to ask, and that that, too, is a patriotic act. As poem written by the Vietnamese poet Nguyen Duy and translated by Bowen and Nguyen Ba Chung, says, “In the end, in every war/ whoever won, the people always lost.”

 
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Listening In on an Earthworm

Reach for the sky now
Don’t ask me why now
You push
You pull
You gather the wool.

A roomful of children mime the words and sway to the rhythm. And in the middle of the room is Elizabeth McKim, poet.

This is her warm-up. Soon McKim, of Cambridge, will have the students hunkering over sheets of unlined paper, working on poems of their own. Since taking part in a pilot program in 1971, McKim and her friend Judith Steinbergh, of Brookline, have been “poets in the schools,” working poets bringing children the chance to learn about the art and craft of poetry. And much more.

Some see arts education as an extravagance. Last year the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which funds poets in the schools throughout the state among its arts programs, saw its meager budget slashed by 62 percent to less than $10 million. McKim and Steinbergh and the children they teach know better. They know that these are life-expanding lessons on the power and precision of words, on discovering and respecting creativity, on looking beneath the surface of their world.

“Poetry gives a kind of strength to children and teens that they need so badly today,” says McKim, adding, with a shrug, “We all need this.”

Steinbergh and McKim have written books of poetry and books on teaching poetry, and are the co-authors of Beyond Words: Writing Poems with Children. In addition, Steinbergh also is co-founder of Troubadour, a Massachusetts not-for-profit organization that marries poetry and music. McKim also leans heavily on music, and on poetry’s oral tradition in which breath and heartbeat form a visceral foundation for sound and sense.

“We start with a lot of out-loud work,” says McKim. “I tell them to be as specific as possible. Listen in on a tree, a hat, a stone. You can use ‘I’ about a voice of something beyond yourself. I tell them to try to talk earthworm. Poetry is voice and breath, but it is also how you put it on the page.”

For both Steinbergh and McKim, the freedom to express ideas is balanced by the rigors of real craft.

“Poetry gives the children a place to put their thoughts,” says Steinbergh, “but with a grace that comes from using literary techniques and choosing words, phrases, and images that will work for them. They learn how to become articulate in an economical way, like artists given paint, brushes, techniques . They can use all those things to transform their own thoughts and feelings into poetry. The intimate place with the child is the place where art is happening. You can see it in the child who is waiting for a word to rise up.”

But just getting thoughts down on paper doesn’t mean it’s poetry. That’s where the craft part comes in. As McKim says, “The addition and subtraction after the first outpouring is the revision–the re-visioning of the poem, seeing it again.” This is part of her strategy in having the student use unlined paper. “It helps them find their own form and find the voice of the poem.”

McKim and Steinbergh feel strongly about having their students share their poems with an audience.

“For me and most poets working in a community,” says McKim, “it’s important to read aloud, to publish, to make it public. When children read their poems they honor the poem. They read it with the strength of their passion. And they love it–even the shy ones. When you see children completely engaged with language, you know you are in the presence of something very powerful.”

Steinbergh agrees, “It’s very moving to see kids reading They’re just up there risking their lives.

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Finding Words in a New Language

Imagine writing evocative poetry, prize-winning prose. Now imagine writing it in an adopted language. It’s one thing to write in the language you have heard and spoken since your earliest days. But choosing to write in a language learned later in life can feel, as writer Ha Jin once described it, “like you are changing your blood.”

Jin, born and raised in China, could never have predicted the life he has as an acclaimed writer of English-language novels and poetry and a professor of English at Boston University. In 1985 he arrived at Brandeis to study English literature in preparation for an academic career in China. But after the killings in Tiananmen Square, return felt impossible. His most clearly marketable commodity was a degree in English, so, in a fiction-worthy plot twist, his new language became his means of survival–and of artistic expression.

Now, 17 years later he is the author of nine books, including Waiting, winner of the 1999 National Book Award, and the newly-released novel, The Crazed.

Recently Jin sat in the fall sunshine, calm amid a hubbub of hurrying students and Commonwealth Avenue traffic, and reflected on the adopted language now at the center of his life. “In the Chinese language I had clear traditions. In English I had to reconstruct my literary heritage. Once I decided to live differently and write differently, I had to understand the consequences. I wasn’t just writing a book. My life, my existence would be in another language.”

His decision has led to him to write of his native country in the language of his present one. “I believe a writer mainly exists in one language. But I think it is good to have another language to supplement your thinking, your perception, and your choice of words. English is a more rational language compared with Chinese, which is more speculative I have to write with all the weight of the language and that is very hard. English is more expressive, more liberating, more powerful. The United States is a superpower and English is a super-language.”

Adnan Adam Onart is another writer who has chosen English as the language of his writing. Onart, whose work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Boston Poet, International Poetry Review, and Poetry Motel, first began writing poems in 1994, in his native Turkish. Then he began translating his work into English. Ultimately, he began writing directly in English.

“I write and I speak in a very specific language, the language of first-generation immigrant Americans,” he said recently, sitting in a nearly-deserted coffee shop. “My poetry is written in that language. The language varies with the country of origin. In my case, I have difficulty with articles because Turkish has no articles, and with the placement of adverbs. It is a language I pronounce in my mind differently.”

“Writing in Turkish is not any easier than writing in English. I was experiencing life elements in Turkish. Once I made the switch, I experienced them directly in English. My poetical universe became more and more entrenched in English.”

Still, Turkish has a major role in his life. Onart notes that, after a weekend at home speaking Turkish with his wife and watching Turkish language television programs, he often finds his English a little rusty on Monday morning.

Like Jin, Onart is aware that choosing to write in English has pulled him out of the literary context he had within the Turkish poetry community. “When I write English I forget completely that I speak Turkish. I feel I am immersed in the English language and influenced by English language poets. But I am not part of a community.”

Also, like Jin, Onart uses his new language to write about the culture of his birthplace. “I have a certain experience I would like to convey to an American audience–my daily life as I was growing up in Turkey, with a long, rich history in a specific place. And I feel a special obligation to introduce Crimean culture and history to an American audience.”

Onart also comes from an area of the world with deeply complex political sensibilities, which he tries to leave behind when he begins to write. “I take extreme care not to recreate the tensions, the hatreds from other parts of the world to my adopted country. We should bring richness in our luggage but leave dirty laundries behind. America, the way I perceive it, is a country of fresh starts.”

And new words.

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Dedicated Poets Connect Poetry and Audience

If the Boston area is a place where you can hear poetry just about any night of the week, the credit goes to an eager audience of readers and writers, and to people who have given hours–often their own scarce writing time–to make it happen. People like Diana Der-Hovanessian and Michael Brown.

Der-Hovanessian never wanted to be president of the New England Poetry Club, the group she has led for two decades. “I’m not the type to be president,” she protested when she was first asked. It was especially daunting for her to think of heading a group whose first two presidents were Amy Lowell and Robert Frost.

Der-Hovanessian, whose 20 published books include seven volumes of translations of Armenian poetry, recalls that she finally let herself be talked into taking the post, “because of my Armenian name.” When she joined in the late Å’70s, the New England Poetry Club had a roster heavy with Anglo-Saxon heritage. The box for the club’s prestigious Golden Rose Award is engraved with names like Robert Penn Warren, James Merrill, Robert Lowell, May Sarton, Mary Oliver, and Galway Kinnell.

Over lunch in her book-filled home, Der-Hovanessian said,”I knew it was going to change the club if I became president, and I wondered if I had a right to do that. But I think it was good for the poetry scene. At the time there weren’t poetry slams. The Grolier wasn’t having readings and the Blacksmith House series didn’t exist. There weren’t other voices being heard.”

To bring some of those other voices to the Boston poetry audience, Der-Hovanessian encouraged the club’s board to invite Native American poets, as well as those from faraway cultures such as the Soviet Union, Japan, the Caribbean, Romania, and Finland.

I felt our mission was to entertain people with good poetry, and to provide a place where poets could find fellowship. We have always tried to get the most interesting, best poets we can.”

Der-Hovanessian acknowledges that the time she has given the New England Poetry Club has cut seriously into her own writing time. She has lost track of exactly how many years she has been the group’s president. “If I really ever counted, I’d probably quit,” she says.

It’s a sentiment Michael Brown could understand. As the host of the Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab in Central Square for the past ten years, Brown knows all too well what behind-the-scenes work it takes to keep the poetry coming. The press releases; the scheduling; the national and international contacts with touring poets; the logistics of doorkeeper, sound system, and books for sale all are invisible but necessary chores that eat away at writing time.

“It take time away from my own writing,” he said in an interview at a Central Square outdoor cafe. “But paying attention to other people’s poetry challenges me to write well.”

Like Der-Hovanessian, Brown had a vision of new voices he wanted to bring to area audiences. The slam, in which poets compete in a format that values presentation as much as poetry, was an exotic Chicago import that took a while to find a venue and an audience. But when it took hold, it really made an impression, expanding the scope of poetry to include a completely new group of poets and listeners.

“After the ’60s I never thought I’d be in the forefront of a cultural movement again,” Brown says, looking back at the growth in the poetry audience nationwide, and in the Boston slam audience that fills the Cantab’s downstairs room every Wednesday night. Brown, author of The Falling Wallendas and the newly-published The Man Who Makes Amusement Rides, says “I’m riding a surfboard on a cultural wave. I feel very fortunate to be in a place that values the written word and has a nucleus of quality poets.

“We’re always looking for the next great writer. Our main goals at the Cantab are to give new people their first feature, to have a good representation of what’s going on nationally, and to find the strongest poets from our own community. We draw an audience that’s not only poets. And everybody who comes in to read or to listen broadens the appeal.”

The New England Poetry Club’s readings are held the first Monday of every month from September to June (in January it’s the the second Monday) at 7 at the Cambridge Public Library on Broadway. During the summer, readings are on alternate Sundays at the Longfellow House in Cambridge.

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Poets Help a City Find its Voice in Grief

 

After the towers fell, we needed poetry. We hungered for answers no news broadcast could provide.

We also, each of us, had a story of that day–the way we heard, the people we knew, the ones we held close–that we needed to find a way to tell. For the poets, musicians, photographers, the response was instinctive. For those who felt they had no immediate way to express their sense of the experience, the Boston Artists’ All Souls Project offered an entry point.

The Project grew out of a collaboration initiated by Clara and Bill Wainwright, the founders of First Night, who recognized the need for a communal response to September 11. A major piece of the Project was a series of free writing workshops held in neighborhood branches of the Boston Public Library, led by poet and writer volunteers from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the writers’ groups PEN New England and the Writers’ Room.

“People had an over-abundance of memories and feelings that they were anxious to share,” said Steven Ratiner, literary coordinator of the All Souls Project, who understood the overwhelming difficulty of writing about the event. In one of his own poems, he wrote, numb and bewildered, of “…the old/ universe/world where we once/ blindly made a home. Ashes.”

Ratiner, who is the author of Giving Their Word: Conversations with Contemporary Poets, has served as poet in residence in nearly 200 schools and is experienced in coaxing writing out of those who don’t think of themselves as writers.

“The hard part of this was to reflect on the experience in a way that would lead to writing. It felt too big. I wanted to find some narrow window that would create a small starting point for someone who may not think they’re carrying around an important part of the story. I asked the people in my workshop to think about sound.”

For one workshop participant, Mary Agnes Mullowney, that became the starting point for a poem. She wrote, “There must have been a sound/ a whoosh/ a sigh/ a rumble/…but we never heard it/ as we watched/ over and over on TV/ silent buildings, folding down upon themselves/ as if made of/ silk.”

On September 11, poet Barbara Helfgott Hyett was making an effort to lead one of her regular poetry workshops while waiting for news of her son, who was in one of the World Trade Center towers. He ultimately emerged alive and she later wrote of “…the same God my son is/ calling on now, as he/ trembles with the others/ in the shattering from/ which he will be spared.” When Helfgott Hyett heard about the All Souls Project, she knew she had to volunteer.

“I believe in poetry,” she said. “It’s definitely my religion. I knew this would be important, a peace-making gesture.”

The author of four books of poetry, Helfgott Hyett worked with a co-leader, poet and teacher Sue Roberts, to compile a packet of poems. Using those poems and brief free-write periods, the workshop participants worked to make sense of a world at once normal and permanently changed.

“I was standing on the front steps,/ contemplating my face in the storm door,/ worrying about my sparse white hair, ” Allen West wrote of the innocent moment just before hearing his wife’s “urgent voice/ calling from the top of the stairs” and thinking that, perhaps, he had forgotten to close the latch.

And Laura Hawes remembered, “while I have been on my knees trimming/ the yellow grasses…/ three jets have exploded/ into three splendored blossoms, though/ the season is wrong and it is impossible.”

For Stephanie Bresnahan, who once taught an ESL (English as a second language) class on the 55th floor of Tower 1, the thought of people standing helpless at those windows reminded her of how she had been drawn, on her breaks, to the mesmerizing views. And she thought, too, of one particular student, and wrote, “Before I left New York,/ Amadeu took me to Windows on the World/ to thank me for teaching him/ then disappeared into an elevator/ until today.”

“In the workshops,” said Barbara Helfgott Hyett, “some of us were poets and some of us became poets.”

A quote she often refers to, from Ernest Becker’s book Denial of Death, speaks to our instinctive need for art during times of crisis: “The most that any one of us can seem to do is fashion something‹an object or ourselves‹and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.”
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Young Poets Explore the World Through their Words

A personal disclosure: the one and only time I was in a poetry slam, I lost to Katie Fowley. I’m in good company: Katie has been beating her elders regularly since her first slam at age 10.

That was seven years ago, when Katie attended a First Night afternoon workshop for young poets and was invited back for the evening slam–a head-to-head competition, where poets are judged as much on performance as on the poem’s content. She made it to the final round that night and has been a Boston-area slam favorite ever since. And writing and performing poetry have become indispensable parts of her life.

“Poetry has been essential to my sanity,” says Katie. “Middle school was not a good time for me, and poetry became a way of venting about all of that. Injustice was my theme. I wrote a lot of angst-type poems. I wrote about poverty and war. For some reason in middle school I felt I was capable of writing about that. Now I feel those themes are larger than me. I don’t know how capable I am to write about things like that. A lot of my poems have a craving in them–being unsatisfied, unhappy. I think there is a desire for something that spawns my poetry.”

She writes of the pain of feeling left out, the rage at witnessing homelessness. But there is also a joyous enthusiasm for life in poems like the one where she writes exuberantly of wanting “to bite and lick this life” and wear “way too much aqua eye shadow. Katie has written two chapbooks and has taught creative writing at Summerbridge, a Cambridge summer educational program, and to her classmates at the Waring School in Beverly. To her, poetry is communication, and she enjoys discovering “the intimacy that can be created even among strangers who are hearing a poem.” It is also an art she works at with serious intent.

“I just want to keep pushing my poetry to new places and new ways of writing. I feel I need to read more to help my writing keep growing,” she says, citing Neruda, Lorca, Mary Oliver, and Mark Doty among her favorites. “I want to figure out how to reach people in the best way and make poetry something that’s not inaccessible. Performance is important to me, but I don’t know if that’s the goal of all the poetry I’m going to write in my life.”

Jared Holzman is another poet who strives for connection and communication through his words. With a mother who was an active participant in Boston’s poetry community, Jared is, at 16, a veteran of poetry slams.

“As long as I could express emotions, I was putting them into words. I always liked how you could convey a perspective and everyone would be attentive. It opened me up to wanting to share my thoughts.”

“I write about society’s corruption and innocence, my own struggles with depression, and a feeling of solitude within oneself,” he says. “I like to work with a strong sense of rhyme and rhythm. I like rhyme. It adds more of a challenge. I like to be blatant and in your face, but I also like to switch off and use metaphor sometimes, too. I try to be provocative.”

Last spring Jared participated in a regional poetry slam for high school students.

“It was very invigorating. I felt nervous and vulnerable being onstage presenting a part of myself. I try to present how I view society and how society’s interaction can influence a person’s emotions.” For Jared, who is a junior at the Castle School, a residential therapeutic high school in Cambridge, the slam also had the dimension of putting him with, as he puts it, “normal high school kids” and seeing that they were concerned with the same issues he was writing about. “It was very healing.”

Jared’s classmate, Toby Hartwell is another poet who took part in that slam, which he calls “one of the most important experiences of my life.”

Toby likes to use the sound of the words to draw his audience to his message, which often deals with world issues.

“I like finding a way rhythmically to make something sound good to the ear, so you can feel the flow of it. I feel I’m saying something that is true to me–this is what I believe in, what I feel.”

“I’m going to continue writing until I no longer have anything to say.” says Toby. Then, flashing a quick grin, he adds, “I always have something to say.”

In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke advised, “Go within and scale the depths of your being from which your very life springs forth.” It is advice these young poets are living by.

As Katie Fowley wrote in her poem, “After My Computer Crashed, “… if you want to fall/ to dark uncharted tunnels/. ..to the place where darkness forgets its name/ I can’t explain/ but words will take you there.”
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The Agony of Writing in a Steamy Season

“It’s a combination of the heat and the fact that everyone is running around with no clothes on.” says writer Steve Almond. “It’s not a conducive environment to a big heavy literary experience, either reading or writing.”

Yes, it’s the time when the air is heavy and the reading is light. Of course, on the Red Line, people still read Sartre, but for most of us, it’s the season to dash to the bookstore for the fun summer read before we pack our sunscreen and head for the beach. There’s a time-out kind of restlessness luring us into the sunshine to play or into a dark cool theatre for a brainfreeze of movie silliness. The languor of the weather touches writers, too, and beckons them toward lighter work.

“I was looking into the maw of a big ugly revision of a big ugly novel and it’s hot,” says Almond, who is the author of My Life in Heavy Metal, a collection that includes the Pushcart Prize-winning story, “The Pass.”

Over a bowl of shrimp and noodles at Pho Pasteur in Harvard Square, he elaborates.”When it’s oppressively hot, the last thing I want to do is be engaged in a writing project that feels oppressive. I have no desire to sit with sweat dripping down my face, writing the great American novel. Part of it is physiology–I schvitz. And most of my stories take place in hot weather. I write with my computer on my lap, throwing off heat, and I sit in my boxer shorts writing about guys who are sitting in their own cruddy apartments in their boxer shorts.”

Aside from the heat, there is the rhythm of the year that is particularly hard on Boston writers. In an atmosphere ruled by the academic calendar, summer just naturally feels like vacation.

Almond says, “It’s time to strip down. It’s too hot for heavy self-exploration. It may be a huge rationalization, but I’ll face that grim possibility in the winter.”

On the other hand, especially for writers who teach, there is always the fantasy that, once school’s out, the writing will begin. Almond nods in recognition, laying the last of the shrimp shells to rest in the peanut sauce dish.

“You think it’ll all happen in the summer. You’ll be a writing machine and work eight hours a day. Right. Just when everybody is heading to the Cape and looks insufferably tan and is telling you about their vacations, this is the time you’re supposed to be writing the big heavy novel? Forget it!”

Author Mameve Medwed is hard at work on a novel, but the work seems to fit the season: she is obsessed with passion. Medwed, author of the Cambridge-centric novels Mail and Host Family, is reworking a pivotal scene in her forthcoming book, The End of an Error. The scene depicts more passion than she generally gets explicit about, and she is obsessing over it with editors, friends, and fellow writers.

“I’m having bizarre conversations with editors about things like whether or not he should unsnap her garter,” she says. “I’m trying to up the passion quotient. I keep putting the passion in and taking it out and wondering if I’m somehow passion-deficient. But I guess what better time to be talking about hot things?”

Medwed most often tackles ambitious new work in the fall, her nod to the ebb and flow of the school calendar. What she generally prefers to do in the summer are small projects–essays, reviews, travel articles. She especially enjoys writing book reviews, which she finds a combination of work and pleasure. In June she was delighted to receive a stack of “summer reading” books to review for New York Newsday–light reading, with writing to match.

“I don’t write well in the summer,” she says. “I think I’m constitutionally incapable of thinking clearly when it’s hot. I do most of my writing when it’s horrible out. There is nothing better than to be in your study writing when it’s gloomy and you can hear the rain on the roof. When the weather is beautiful and all the world is outside, all I want to do is walk to Harvard Square for an ice cream.”

But this year, thoughts of passion have claimed priority. “This summer I haven’t pulled a weed. The house is in shambles–it always is when I’m writing,” she says, sitting in her decidedly non-shambled kitchen with its exuberant collection of ceramic cupcakes, wooden pies, fabric fruit, and other non-edibles on every surface.

Medwed is eager to shake off her lusty musings. “I’m obsessed right now, but in the next two weeks I’m going to finish the scene Then life will start up again.”