Category: writing

I never expected to become obsessed with my garden. I once had a suburban house, after all, with the requisite rhododendrons, tomato plants, crab grass. It was nice, but hardly spellbinding. So why am I completely possessed by a collection of potted plants on a second-story deck not quite the size of a walk-in closet? It’s a question I mulled over recently with another writer and avid city gardener, the horticulturally named Rose Moss.

Moss is the author of award-winning and widely-anthologized fiction and nonfiction. One of her novels, The Family Reunion, was short-listed for the National Book Award. She teaches creative writing at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. In her short story collection In Court, the story “Spenser Street” begins, “The garden next door had a tree.”

“I grew up in an area of apartments and small yards,” Moss says, referring to her childhood in Johannesburg. “When I first owned a house I became completely fanatic. I would read nursery catalogs the way other people would read detective stories.

“When I’m gardening, my space reduces to what I can see, the plants nearby, the insects. It is totally engrossing.” She talks about wanting to concentrate on a small space in a huge world and I am reminded of how her writing does exactly that, placing the reader as carefully as a newly transplanted anemone into a world of finely-drawn detail. It is a world that, as Moss says of a garden, “contains as much as a whole universe.”

But, like the world of a story, a garden is a universe in which the inhabitants keep grabbing the reins and doing the unexpected. You choose the plants and place them. The garden is yours You are in control. But it’s an illusion: the plants soon take over. The one you thought would nicely fill a small space crowds its neighbors, while another you expected to grow large sulks and hangs back. Maybe the saving grace of a tiny city garden is how tolerable our lack of control is when the arena is so small. The miniature skirmishes and conflicts that occur here can be taken in stride. And sometimes the plants give us wonderful surprises we might not have found on our own.

We are in Harvard Square at a shady sidewalk table at Grafton Street and Moss tells me her garden is about the size of two of the tables.

“It’s a tiny patch crammed with spring bulbs, herbs, snow drops, roses in succession. It’s always full of things, like a symphony performance in which every year something is different.

“It changes always. I’m dissatisfied every year and if I don’t change it, it changes itself.”

Moss tells me how much she enjoys looking at other people’s gardens, often on her travels. She describes a Chinese garden in Sydney, Australia, donated by the local Chinese community in celebration of the country’s bicentennial year. Only about the size of a city block, it feels enormous, with its rivers, mountains, and winding paths. The way it is laid out with the varying terrains and vistas, Moss tells me, makes you feel as if you are on a journey. And isn’t that what the best gardens are like, to visit or to write about–isn’t that why we are so refreshed by working in them or looking at them–because they take us on a small journey to a different place?

There’s an old adage, “one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.” Certainly makes sense in these recycling-conscious times. But there is another aspect to the idea, too: even the most humble throw-aways can, in the right hands, become something wonderful.

And that’s just what happens in Fleas! a new book for children and what has happened, also, throughout the life of its author, Jeanne Steig. Steig has written books written both on her own and in collaboration with her late husband, William Steig, the famed New Yorker cartoonist and children’s book author. Together they did, among others, A Gift from Zeus, Alpha Beta Chowder, and A Handful of Beans. Fleas! and Tales from Gizzard’s Grill are Jeanne Steig’s first books since William Steig’s death in 2003 .

In Fleas!, people trade away things they don’t want. The hero, Quantz, after befriending a dog that gives him fleas, goes off on an adventure where his first step is to offload the fleas. He manages to get rid of them in exchange for an overly talkative uncle, whom he then deposits with a man who trades away a huge cheese, and….well, you know how these things go.

“It’s about cast-offs,” says Steig. “Everything finally finds its right place.”

But recycling isn’t only a story line for Steig. It is at the heart of her work as a visual artist, in which her primary medium is what she terms “street finds.” Scraps of roofing tile, bits of tar and cardboard, and other detritus make their way from gutter to canvas in her world. She sees possibilities in the humblest leavings she finds on walks around Boston. She says, though, that the streets here are generally too clean to be a good source of materials. Instead, she receives packages of street scraps sent from Paris by her son-in-law.

The random bits most often become people who may float through the sky in seeming wonder. Or they may wear wistful expressions that belie a harsh setting, such as a desperate border crossing. They manage to look wordly-wise and cheerful at the same time. Looking at them, I think of how Steig manages to recognize the beginnings of art in what has been thrown away, stepped on, rained on, ignored. It is part of a whole, of a life lived noticing what can be beautiful and useful if only someone takes the time to see. At its heart, it is a life of creating books a visual art, of course, but more: it is about making a conscious art of living.

Steig’s fondness for the cast-offs.is apparent in both story and picture. Quantz, even in his itchy torment, manages a gentle affection for the fleas. He tells them, “you dance very well,” as he tactfully suggests they might be happier elsewhere. It is what I imagine Steig is thinking as she transforms a street scrap into part of a picture: you will be happier here.

As I leave Steig’s sun-filled apartment and, walk home, I feel a little bit under the spell of the lesson of her street finds. On one block I see the intentional beauty, yes, of a blazing yellow clump of begonias. But there is also the surprising bright blueness of a van parked nearby. The vivid colors around the neighborhood, the shapes with crisp edges of shadow and soft curving lines: these are the materials at hand. Everywhere is something to see, something to think about, to notice!

“Do you expect me to have the answers cause I don’t.”

The author of that line is 18-year-old Hannah Adams but, as I talk with her, I feel that I or some other adult should have written it to her, with apologies. I met recently with Adams and Rhea Kroutil, also 18, who are both “spoken word curators” at Cloud Place, a Copley Square studio and performance space where teens can work in film, visual art, graphic design, and the spoken word.

Teens accepted into the program at Cloud Place as paid curators are responsible for actually administering–including planning, publicizing, and documenting–arts programs that showcase both their own talents and those of other teens. The venue is supported by the Cloud Foundation, which was founded in 1999 with a stated mission of enriching the lives of urban youth through “the transformative power of art.” Adams and Kroutil, new graduates of Boston Arts Academy and Boston Latin respectively, have worked on arts presentations that most often deal with the social realities that they see around them and dream of changing.

“Social change is the focal point of all my poetry,” says Adams.

Kroutil concurs: “You have to be an agent of social change. It’s important to put socially conscious stuff out there. Everything I’ve ever witnessed in my life is in my poetry.”

What urban teens witness, and what Adams and Kroutil write about, is what they have been handed by earlier generations who could not find the answers to gun violence and domestic violence and families trying to cope with immigration issues.

“The type of world we live in now may hear you but it doesn’t listen,” Adams says. But when the microphone is on at Cloud Place and the lights are dimmed, what these young poets are witness to goes out through the room.

“People listen and they tell us, ‘I’ve been in the same situation’,” Kroutil says. “Adults sometimes say we’re inspiring them.”

What is inspiring to me in the words of these two young writers is the energy and determination that rings through. What is dispiriting is how they are required to re-hash the social ills we earlier generations have been unable to sort out. And so I cringe that the line about not having answers has been left to Adams to write. It is part of an untitled poem that goes on to ask “Why is it that when I go through a box of my father’s 35 year old pins, I find one that says ‘use alternative energy’…what can we do except ask questions.”

Reading this excerpt from Kroutil’s poem “bittersweet,” I hear decades-old echoes of how the personal entwines with the cynically political:
I want to love you
Like nobody knew how to
Wanted to paint your beauty
Like a forgotten Picasso
Write you a promise
That you’d never let go
But words were never enough
And my poems only spoke of idealism
In a time where pacts are meant to be broken

In her poem “verbally violent,” Adams looks for a better way to confront social ills. “I made the decision to be verbally violent so I could transform hate into poetry/…And if every stabber, shooter, sexual and mental abuser had the opportunity to spit a piece on the top of their…lungs, they would put down their weapons of mass destruction and pick up a pen, and a pad, and start shooting with their violent verses.”

It could happen–who knows? At Cloud Place the voices continue to protest, continue to question, continue to soar.

Almost any night of the week authors are reading to audiences. Poetry or prose, fiction or non, in cavernous ballrooms or crammed into corners behind bookstore shelves if they read it we will come.

I have an image of us huddling like our distant ancestors around a fire to listen to a story. Why? What atavistic urge draws us and what do we want to hear? I talked recently about this with Andrea Cohen, director of the Blacksmith Poetry Series in Cambridge which is currently celebrating its 35th year. She is the author of two poetry collections, The Cartographer’s Vacation and Long Division, which will be published this winter, as well as short stories.

“As a species we have an ancient longing for the spoken word,” Cohen says. “In terms of listening versus reading, Globe writer and book reviewer Gail Caldwell says ‘it’s a different way of taking in the sublime.’ I think people go to a reading to get what they can’t get from staying at home and reading on their own. There’s an auditory experience, and the communal aspect instead of that of the solitary reader.

We talk about how we both go to a reading to get something extra, maybe what informs the poem or the chance to hear it the way the writer intended it to be heard.

“What I hope a poet won’t do,” says Cohen, “is ‘explain’ a poem.”

Of course it’s not only the listeners who benefit from a reading. I belong to that group of poets that jumps at the chance to read for an audience, and I know how exhilarating that intimate connection can be. After the solitary act of writing, the immediacy of presenting the work to a group is both thrilling and terrifying, a tiny high-wire act. You feel the risk of the exposure and the possibility of an unhappy outcome for all concerned. But you also feel what works and what doesn’t, where the audience is with you, where the words don’t sound right to your own ear. And, after all, what could be more gratifying that listeners giving your work the gift of their rapt attention?

“A reader can generally tell,” says Cohen, “whether he or she is connecting with an audience.”

The writer, too, is giving a gift, one that may never before have been publicly unwrapped. Cohen describes one memorable reading by an emerging writer.

“She had never read before but she discovered she had a talent for reading. She was having fun and the audience was clearly loving it.”

Go to enough readings and you’ll see the gamut–readings going very wrong and very right and hitting every note in between. Easiest gaffes to spot are the inadequate lighting, the non-working sound system or the soft-voiced reader who refuses a microphone, the host who stumbles disrespectfully over the reader’s name or credits, the reader who goes on too long or–what seems strangely more common–not long enough. More subtle is Cohen’s observation of a poet who doesn’t offer a little breathing room between poems. Particularly when a poem carries power, a listener may need a few seconds before moving on to the next one. Prose writers, too, sometimes rush, either out of nervousness or from lack of trust in the material’s ability to connect with and move the audience.

But when it goes well, magic can happen. Cohen and I reminisce about favorites.; She mentions Robert Pinsky, with his palpable love of the sound of language. For me Frank Bidart is one of the quintessential readers. Although his poetry is often a challenge to understand, he offers it with such generosity that it is nearly impossible not to be drawn to its sound and sense.

Look through today’s paper. Someone is reading tonight!

“Don’t write: just listen,” Gill Solomon is telling me. We are on the Boston Common for the annual rebuilding of the fishweir, but more about that later. First there is Solomon putting his hand over my notebook and telling me to learn as his ancestors did, by listening. Solomon is a member of the Massachuseuk, the Native people who gave our state its name, whose language was spoken only, not written.

“Just listen,” he says, “and my words will become part of you.” It is a mark of how dependent I am on the written word that I feel a little panicky. Will I remember what he is saying? I listen hard. I try to picture the long winter nights he describes, when the tribe would have gathered around a fire and the evening’s entertainment would have been the telling of their history.

One of the elders would have started. Then maybe someone else would have said, “That’s not the way I heard it” or “I think it happened this way” and the story would have expanded, grown rich with embellishments, longer with each generation.

But we who rely on the written word, never heard the story. And so we learned only recently about the fishweir. Fishweirs–essentially fences placed in flowing waters–have been used for thousands of years to trap fish. Beginning in 1913 with subway excavation under Boylston Street and continuing through the 1990s as foundations were dug for Back Bay office buildings, workers uncovered wooden stakesdthat were eventually identified as remnants of ancient fishweirs. Carbon-dating of the stakes indicates that, instead of the 350-plus years Boston proudly claims, the human history of this land actually reaches back some 5200 years.

Because it was not written down, most of us do not know this story. But since 2001, led by artist Ross Miller, the Ancient Fishweir Project has built a weir each spring at the Charles Street edge of the Boston Common. It sits where tidal waters once lapped, looking mysteriously and magically out of time and place on the grass. And each spring in what Miller refers to as “this place we now call Boston,” the story is now being told.

Watching this year’s weir being built by schoolchildren recently, I think about how much our understanding of our world, and our city, is rooted in written language. I think of what has been lost by not writing down the story of the weir. It could be as familiar to Bostonians as Bunker Hill and Samuel Adams.

“Think about what you are going to do today,” Solomon tells the children, explaining that this was the time of year when the Native people would gather to repair the weir. “The medicine man would tell them, ‘It’s time for the fish to come back to fulfill their part in the circle of life, to give up their bodies to sustain us. And our role is to sustain the earth.’ “

Solomon says his tribal name is Feather on the Moon . Are there hyphens between the words, I ask him; I will need to provide the exact spelling for my editor. Solomon shakes his head. I am still not getting it: This. Is. Not. A. Written. Language. Well, of course, it is written now to some extent, a concession to the other world the tribe must live in. But exact spellings, which words are capitalized, if there are hyphens are all questions without relevance. Even the name of the tribe, the Massachuseuk at Ponkapoag, Solomon explains with a shrug, just refers to “the place where they put us.”

I can barely imagine living in an unwritten language. But then I think of what could be gained by not writing down the words. I picture those winter nights, those children hearing from the lips of their elders the story of themselves and their people, the stories passed down not as cool words on a page but with the sound of voice and breath, the force of feeling. I picture listening hard.

Not for the first time I think of the atavistic pleasure of going to a reading where the audience sits mesmerized by the sound of someone telling them a story. How much more compelling could it be if the story we were hearing were our own?

For a poet trying to get a little work done, April can be “the cruelest month” in ways T.S. Eliot never envisioned. Ever since it was declared National Poetry Month in 1996, this has been the time when poets are besieged with interviews, readings, and guest appearances that keep them from writing poetry. But shouldn’t this be a special month for the writers as well as the readers? I’ve gone back to some past City Type poets to see how they are observing the month.

Sam Cornish, Boston’s first-ever poet laureate, reports:
I am re-viewing the films of John Ford, America’s foremost cinematic poet; immersing myself in the language and speeches of Martin Luther King (and their wonderful Southern cadences and idiom); and observing very closely my fellow Bostonians, as they are a source of inspiration and material for my poetry.

Susan Donnelly, the author of Eve Names the Animals and Transit, has taught poetry in Cambridge for 15 years. One of her poems was featured in The New York Times last year as a winner in Nicholas Kristof’s Iraq War Poetry contest. I will breakfast with Elizabeth Bishop, (through) the Library of America edition of her collected works and I plan to rearrange a week’s work schedule to give myself five mornings of writing.

Charles Coe, author of Picnic on the Moon, says:
Shucks…I hadn’t planned anything…but now that you mention it, I was thinking of taking a few “mental health” vacation days later this month—like a weekend with a couple of extra days tacked on. I’ll do that, go away somewhere and hole up with my laptop. Thanks for the inspiration.

Frannie Lindsay, author of Where She Always Was and Lamb, tells me:
Writing’s not so easy for me these days, move to Belmont, some other big changes. But I have finished manuscript #3, joined an amazing manuscript group, and have been getting good news, little by little, from good journals (Yale, Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review). I’m kind of happy to be less booked up with readings this year. I remember how overwhelming the last few Aprils were, enough to make me cross out each day of that month until it was finally over and I could get some time to make soup and do laundry!

Joyce Peseroff is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Eastern Mountain Time. She is director of creative writing and MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.
Since for me every month is poetry month, I’m not altering my usual routine of reading, writing, and getting to as many readings as possible. I’m not even sure if events in our literary town increase in April, since every month seems to be poetry month in Boston

Doug Holder, the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press, was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes in 2007. His most recent collections are No One Dies at the Au Bon Pain and Of All the Meals I Had Before.
I am putting together a new manuscript for The Cervena Barva Press of my poems, The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel. I am reading Mark Doty’s new poetry collection Fire to Fire.

Gloria Mindock is the editor of Cervena Barva Press and author of Blood Soaked Dresses
On April 3rd, I was guest speaker at a poetry marathon by the Bay State Underground Reading Series at Boston University. I am taking part in discussing the special translation issue of Poetry magazine by holding a discussion group to talk about the poems in the issue. On April 16, Cervena Barva Press celebrates its third anniversary with a reading at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge at 7 with Flavia Cosma, Dzvinia Orlowsky, and Catherine Sasanov.

I’ve been reading Still to Mow, the luminous new collection from Maxine Kumin, and The Best American Erotic Poems From 1800 to the Present, edited by David Lehman, which includes Whitman and Dickinson, of course, but also Francis Scott Key (who knew?) and Isabella Stewart Gardner, great grand-niece of that Mrs. G.

Happy Poetry Month, one and all!

Looking at “All Shook Up,” the exhibit currently on view at the Boston Athenaeum, reminds me of two quotations about books. Alfred Hitchcock, that 20th century master of suspense, once said of a book he was reading, “This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book–it makes a very poor doorstop.” And Cicero, in the first century BCE, said, “A room without books is like a body without a soul.”

While I wonder what these two very different men in two very different times would say about Kindle and audio books, I know they had one thing in common with each other and with the Athenaeum exhibit: they were looking at books as physical objects.

This is exactly what Thomas Kellner, a German photographer has done in “All Shook Up.” Kellner generally photographs architectural landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, Stonehenge, or Times Square. Here he concentrates on the Athenaeum’s interior spaces, using the presence of books to help define them. His process is unique, producing contact sheets of photographs taken in a precisely determined order that he deconstructs and reconstructs, turns and tilts to show us something familiar that we have not seen before.

In the Athenaeum group, shelves of books dance in juxtaposition to windows, columns, dark wooden tables, and lacy metal railings. It’s a visual representation of that heady feeling you get in a library or bookstore where the air is filled with the buzz of books and the sense of what is contained in them. In Kellner’s photographs, the jaunty angles turn the books into advertisements for themselves, enticing us–daring us–to pick just one.

The tilt of the elements and the black contact sheet edges that run through them create images reminiscent of stained glass, something the Athenaeum’s Stanford Calderwood director and librarian Richard Wendorf finds particularly apt.

“Libraries and museums are almost our secular cathedrals,” he says. “They are the new important space for individual and community growth.

“In the interior of a very traditional library such as ours, kinetic movement animates the whole collection and has a visual energy that is a way of talking about the intellectual imagination and energy that lies within the books themselves.”

In Kellner’s photographs the books do look filled with energy, each a tiny glimpse–like a single word–forcing us to look at the pieces that make up the whole scene.

“They celebrate what’s here and give us different ways of thinking about what is here,” says Wendorf. They may also offer a look at what might be there in the future for this 200-year-old institution that was one of the country’s first membership libraries. The Athenaeum also houses a major collection of visual art, so again there is the sense of books as objects, rather than only as containers of text.

Wendorf reminds me, in fact, that the word “text” carries intimations of weaving and is related to “textile,” “context,” and “texture.” In that case, the “All Shook Up” photographs return books to their proper context, weaving them into the chairs, the lamps, and the walls, so we can be surrounded and sheltered by what they have to offer.

This column usually focuses on writers and poets, but that’s only half of the conversation. The other half, of course, is the reader. And so I recently spoke with Abdi Ali who spends his days encouraging a new generation of readers to discover what literature can bring to their lives.

Ali is a teacher of humanities at the Boston Arts Academy, a pilot school that is the city’s first and only high school for the visual and performing arts. He has taught there since the school’s opening in 1998 and is the founder of and faculty advisor for Slateblue Arts, the student art and literary magazine. Ali is also an advanced doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

What he wants his students to recognize is how literature can give us words for what we have no words for. He mentions a two-line poem by Louise Bogan called Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell, that reads: “At midnight tears/Run in your ears.”

“That kind of reading experience where you might not even know who the author is and you might not know the intent of the work, can still have something to say about your life.. You couldn’t articulate it, but you find articulation here.”

It’s that kind of deeply transformative experience of reading that Ali tries to make possible for his students

“The teacher in me is always trying to find texts that do for my students what books do for me,” he says. Among the books that he has seen make a strong impression on his students are White Noise by Don DeLillo and Flight by Sherman Alexie.

As for his own reading, Ali characterizes himself as an “unusual” reader.

“Reading, for me, is a private pleasure. I have friends who read a lot of fiction recommended by their friends. But for me reading is not so public. It’s a very private activity. I’m probably more fussy about what I read, so I take my time with recommendations.

“Some writers never let me down. I’m very forgiving of them, like Michael Ondaatje and poets like David Ferry, Thom Gunn, and Robert Pinsky.

“I read like a writer. I want to read something that takes me to someplace at a high level of language. The first or second sentence has to grab me, though sometimes I’m open to the first paragraph. I read to be informed but more importantly, I read to be surprised,”
Ali and I talk about how, at its best, reading becomes a deep conversation among book, author, and reader. He mentions the poet and critic Mary Kinzie’s image of the reader reading, but at the same time, being read.

“We can have a connection with the part of the work that is reading us and telling us who we are. It’s a kind of reading experience that is saying something about our own lives that we couldn’t articulate but that we see being articulated in the book.

“I think we’re all seeking some language, some metaphor, some word to say the things we’ve felt profoundly, deeply. The act of reading is our best chance of that.”

It ‘s a kind of connection that, Ali admits, doesn’t happen for everyone, but then there will be the moment when it happens for one of his students.

“The student for whom it does waits for me after class to talk. Then I know.”

Michael Epstein does what I’ve always meant to do. He keeps a list of the books he has read. In fact, it’s a list of 1082 (and counting) books he’s read since 1978 . And since he retired last spring from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he was chief operating officer and executive vice president, the list has continued to grow even more impressively. What began as simple listing has expanded to include a brief synopsis and what he calls “nuggets,” meaningful passages, pithy quotes, memorable characters.

Suddenly book lists are part of the zeitgeist, it seems, almost hot in the way “journaling” and “scrapbooking” were just a season or two ago. Art Garfunkel has one on his official website–1023 books read at last look since June, 1968 (cq). The United States Army Chief of Staff has one, too, broken down into categories from Sublist 1 for Cadets, Soldiers, and Junior NCOs to Sublist 4, for Senior Leaders Above Brigade Level.

After talking with Epstein near his Cambridge home, I am filled with regret that my pathetic attempts resemble those diary entries where “not much happened today.” What Epstein has, by contrast, is an organized body of work listing the books, yes, but even more documenting time spent and ideas encountered. His list shows a way of honoring the passing days by paying attention to them.

“It’s a reaction to the total fleetingness of life and our inability to stop time,” he says. “Maybe it’s aging or maybe it’s the pace of the world, but having started the journal and having it now in its 30th year, I think it’s one of the best things I’ve done.

“It’s a day by day record of your life. How many days can we remember? How much can you keep in your brain’s CD-ROM?” Epstein asks, laughing that he’s got a lot of 1950s song lyrics in there that he’d like to delete. But, looking at his list, he can remember not only the books, but the days spent with them– the summer at the rented house in Wellfleet with his baby daughter.

Part of the pleasure for him, too, is the tactile experience. If you’re looking for a gift for him, don’t get an audio book.

“I like the physicality of books, the heft of a book, the look of the cover.”

Lately Epstein has added a new dimension to his reading, memorizing poetry. I am reminded of the beautiful old-fashioned term, “having a poem by heart,” that acknowledges the reader’s ownership of a poem that has been committed to memory.

“The act of memorizing opens up a new level of understanding of the poem,” Epstein says. “The poet worked to get every word right and, in memorizing, I have that same struggle.” He tells me about a William Stafford poem he has begun to memorize and how working on it word by word has made the alliteration and the sensory images spring to life. He stumbles a little reaching for the first line and we laugh when it turns out to be “Starting here, what do you want to remember?”

That is a question can be asked, too, about why one might want to keep a reading list. Starting here, what books do you want to remember? What days?

It isn’t just about the poetry. That’s the message I take away from my conversation with Boston’s brand new poet laureate, Sam Cornish. Don’t get me wrong–he is certainly not downplaying the art he has been chosen to spotlight. Far from it. In fact, in the few days since his appointment was announced he has been busy responding to requests from news reporters and radio talk show hosts eager to discuss poetry. And, as a member of the Mayor’s Task Force that selected him, I know that he was chosen from a field of outstanding candidates because of his commitment to poetry and his impeccable credentials as a poet.

But the holder of this newly-created position has a broader view of the role that poetry can play in the life of the city.

“I picture a family thinking about what to do for entertainment and deciding to go to a poetry reading as a cultural event with meaning,” he says.

But, again, more than that. “I picture people carrying around a camera for recording visually what they see around them and a notebook to jot down lines about what they’re seeing and what they are thinking about. I want people to notice the ordinary things and see that there’s something more beautiful than a sunset.”

Cornish wants, in other words, nothing less than a city of noticers–people who can shake off the daily fog of routine, step out into the ordinary streets, listen to ordinary words and recognize them for the extraordinary experiences they are. He talks about seeing how people think of themselves as “quite ordinary” and “don’t realize how free and open and special they are.”

“The poet and Madison Avenue may both use the same language, but they have different intentions,” he says, noting that even learning enough about a presidential candidate to make an informed decision comes only after paying careful attention to the use of language.

Which brings us back to poetry. Cornish freely admits that people are sometimes intimidated by what he describes as “self-indulgent, convoluted poetry filled with self-regard that ignores what kinds of lives people live.” He encourages readers to trust their feelings.

“Don’t be put off by a book. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. Poetry is too important and gives such pleasure. Readers shouldn’t be prevented from enjoying it because of a few over-exposed and narrowly focused writers.”

That said, Cornish is the first to insist that understanding and enjoying poetry takes effort.

“It requires a commitment on the part of the reader. You have to take responsibility. You have to give the book your complete attention. You have to interact and pay attention the way you would in a conversation.”

Cornish laments that, because poetry is generally not reviewed widely in the media or displayed prominently in bookstores, it’s not always easy for people to find work they might want to read. He advises readers to search out work from gay and lesbian poets, racially and ethnically diverse poets, women poets, Irish poets.

“These are categories that might sound like political correctness, but it’s poetry people can identify with.” Cornish notes, though, that whatever its origin, good literature has universal qualities that transcend category. His own current bookbag holds three new books of prose: Tattoo for a Slave by Hortense Calisher, chosen for his interest in women writers and Jewish writers; Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden, a novel about Native Americans in World War I; and Property, a novel by Valerie Martin, whom he likens to Alice Hoffman for prose he terms “inventive and magical.” His personal reading habits involve having four or five related books going at once so that “one book speaks to another.”

Cornish hopes his role as poet laureate will have an impact on the city. “Boston is a wonderful city,” he says. “Literature can give people something to talk to each other about.”

And it can help them notice the extraordinary world.

Folks Like Me

In the unemployment line
with those early morning
economic blues
at home
on my feet the president
said the economy is doing fine
(guess it’s just taking its time getting
down to folks like me)

Ohio After the Shooting at Kent State
(June, 1970)

We enter the mountains,
The sudden trees are quiet,
Moonlight finds stones and dust,
The bones of slow animals in the grass.