Interview with Poet/Archivist Paige Roberts: One foot in the dusty archives, the other in the great outdoors.

Paige Roberts

Interview with Poet/Archivist Paige Roberts; One foot in the dusty archives, the other in the great outdoors.

with Doug Holder

Paige Roberts is a member of the Bagel Bards, a literary group in Somerville, Mass. She is also the archivist for the Oliver Wendell Holmes Collection at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. When she is not working with this prestigious collection, she is often hiking and communing with nature.

Throughout her professional years, Roberts has developed new archival techniques to increase the accessibility and vitality of the archived collections. While she was the director of the Beverly Historical Society, she developed “model archival collaborations” which allowed for the exchange of materials between schools and public libraries.

Roberts also served as the head of special collections at the State Library of Massachusetts in Boston, an archivist at Springfield College, Director of the Beverly Historical Society and has been the President of the New England Archivists.

Roberts received a B.A. from Bates College in Political Science, a MLS from Simmons College concentrating in archives management, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University with an emphasis in New England culture.

I had the pleasure to speak to her on my Somerville Community Access TV show Poet to Poet Writer to Writer.

Doug Holder: I am sure not every person know what an archivist actually does. Can you enlighten us?

Paige Roberts: Well I am a one person operation. I do everything from bringing in collections from donors, and alumni. I am also involved with preservation, the security, and the storage of collections. I handle the processing and cataloging of the collections. The collections I am in charge of are pretty extensive. I use students and consultants to organize collections, to make them more accessible for research. I am also involved in promotion of the collection, website development and management, digitization, etc...

DH: What do you mean by accessible?

PR: There are many philosophies in regard to this. We approach things on a large scale—based on the office that created the record. For instance, the National Archives archives records from the White House, etc... So at our school we would archive records from the office of the Dean of Faculty, etc...Also the records need to have some restrictions for confidentiality. I have to attend to these issues of privacy and at the same time help people research, and have classes come in and access the collection.

I feel the students are scholars and are treated as such. I field many questions from alumni, family historians, and journalists. The Globe used the collection and did a terrific piece about us concerning Jeb Bush's time here at Andover.

DH: Do you guys still have the old card catalog?

PS: Yeah we do. And it is a working one. It is from the early 20^th Century. The writing on the cards is hard to decipher. I have students who are trying to decipher it and transcribe it.

DH: Well, what things do you house at the Wendell Holmes Collection?

PR: Well we have a lot of institutional records, rare books and papers. We have the papers of Henry Stimson—the Secretary of War under Roosevelt, a graduate of the Academy, and later President of the Board of Directors. We have an interesting collection of pictures of the Phillips family, and other fascinating stuff.

DH: What is the definition of a rare book?

PR: There is no formal definition. But of course if it is rare it may be due to the fact that not many were published—or it wasn't a particularly a good book.

DH: Well if it isn't a “good” book then why would you collect it?

PR: Well there is always the idea of a book as an artifact. What does this book tell us of the history of the book? We also collect books by alumni.

DH: I know you are involved in the digitization of the collection. There are some concerns today that books are being thrown out by libraries in favor of electronic records.

PR: That is not my approach. We see digitization as enhancing access to the collection—not for preservation. This process limits the handling of the original work. We have a lot of our files on a great online archive http://archive.org.

DH; You are a budding poet as well as an archivist. I know you love nature, hiking, the outdoors and your writing reflects that.

PR: Yeah I grew up on a diary farm in New Hampshire. In 2006 I went on a hiking trip in the White Mountains. There I met people who hiked every week. So I really got into it. I have been hiking for 10 years. Nature is a metaphor it helps me express questions I am struggling with in my own life.


Standard Time

All that’s been is all that will be,
every moment arising anew.
I am going nowhere
when I would be playful and whole
(though the ego noise is deafening).
Am I invisible–hidden, unseen, overlooked–
self protection by concealment?
Almost everything (that matters)
is imperceptible, only a sliver of the universe.
An ache of loneliness, yearning for
the celadon of connection.
my timelines of lost chances
what I would want it to be about
if you were nearby
Incongruity of the change of seasons:
feathery rime ice on rock cairns and birds poking at purple lilacs.
The tenacity of existence is conditional.
Reconciling my self–limitless but
never inviolate (even when intoxicated with desire)–
to the movable conversational frontier.
Do I seek the power to control
the transition between the visible and invisible?
Dismantling duration.
— Paige Roberts

THE SUNDAY POET: DAVID A. FORRESTER

David A. Forrester writes:

"I have been writing poetry since I was 13 (I am 59 years old). I have received an A.S. degree in Science, a B.S.M.E., and an MBA."

Miniature Roses

Subtle raindrops falling, tender on my bed
In open air as sleepy eyes awake
Fragrance of a dozen kinds, drift about my head
As the dawning of the day begins to break

Pinkish blues of fragile sky, rise above the trees
The softest slowest movement starts to sweep
Dainty leaves and blades of grass, caught in tiny breeze
The garden ‘round my bed unfolds from sleep

The glitter of the rising sun, waivers through the wood
The wandering light crawls gently down the slope
The meaning of the morning lies, oft misunderstood
As misguided and mistaken words of hope

But yet the beauty overwhelms, sets me up on edge
A day of perfect ecstasy throughout
The bliss of innocence ensues
Displays the panoramic views
Life is all that life is all about

Endicott College Creative Writing Students Series: Featuring the work of Erika Graves

OPALS

                                                          

I often times catch myself gazing down at the white gem on my index finger, standing tall above the others, signifying the month I was born in. I was lucky enough to be born in October, the time of the year when the leaves catch fire with reds and oranges and when cozy, warm sweaters are acceptable to wear again. Not only that, but I get two birthstones for the month of October, both of which adorn many of my fingers. I have the pink tourmaline, which reflects the light into the unknown of space, and then I have the white opal, which is never completely white at all. Each white opal has a color combination like no other, and when the stone that is settled so neatly atop my finger catches the sunlight I am always captivated by the color scheme. At times all you see are blues and greens, ebbing and edging across the surface like the ocean water on the beach. Other times I see reds and oranges, signifying those trees back home that I miss so much. A spectrum of color explodes like hot ash from a campfire, displaying a rainbow of broken glass.



ERIKA GRAVES  WRITES:

I am a freshman studying at Endicott College and am a secondary education math major, though I have always loved to write. I have many notebooks scattered around my dorm room and my bedroom back home in Western Mass, and I gain my inspirations from the world around me and what affects me. For this particular piece I decided to write about the ring I got for my 16th birthday as a present from my mom.

An Evening with the Woodberry Translation Group brings the poetry of Paul Celan, Alda Merini and others to the Hastings Room Reading Series

Woodberry Poetry Room--Harvard University

The Hastings Room Reading Series is holding its first event for 2016 on Wednesday the 10th of February at 7:00pm, at First Church Congregationalist, 11 Garden Street in Cambridge. It’s a different kind of reading than we’ve had before. Instead of featuring a reader, we’re having a Poetry in Translation evening with members of the Woodberry Translation Group. The group takes its name from the Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard, which is where the group met until this year. It is an ad hoc group of translators that has over time included many languages including, Czech, Yiddish, Korean, Turkish, French, Russian, Spanish, German, Italian, Medieval Latin, and 9th century Chinese. They meet most Monday afternoons and help each other out with translations, most especially with the English, since none of them knows all the languages represented and all must create idiomatic English poem translations. They eagerly welcome new participants and new languages.

One of the group’s members, Mary Buchinger, has graciously undertaken to organize the reading for us. Mary read her own poetry for our series with George Kalogeris at the Franz Wright reading in November of 2014. She does some truly amazing things in her own writing. She published her second book of poems Aerialist last year, which attracted some brilliant reviews and praise. Susan Donnelly wrote that “Buchinger maintains [a] metaphysical balance…with poems both airy and grounded, introspective and outward-looking.” That seems to evoke the essence of poetry in the amplitude of its reaches.

Her lineup for this coming Wednesday looks very promising, including translations of the German poets Paul Celan and Karoline von Günderrode, the Italian poet Alda Merini, the Turkish poet Edip Cansever, and the Yiddish poets Kadya Molodowsky and Malka Heifetz Tussman.

Our great hope is to interest people in coming out to enjoy the poets reading before an audience. This event fits the bill to mark an auspicious beginning to our third year. With space to improvise special readings, The Hastings Room Series is scheduled quarterly. Due to ample intervals between events, there’s not a lot of intentional planning in the way of transitions from one reading to the next. Yet there’s an uncanny continuity to this Translation reading, following last autumn’s reading by David Ferry, well known and admired for his translations of the great Latin poets Horace and Virgil. The Woodberry Translation Group reading also makes an apt announcement to our projected spring segment, a memorial reading to honor the late Pulitzer Prize poet Franz Wright. That is to take place on May 11th. People will remember that Franz himself did significant translations of Rilke, René Char and others. Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright has also distinguished herself as a translator, notably of the German-Turkish poets Zafer Șenocak and Zehra Çιrak. So though these things haven’t been planned in the least, a spirit of interrelation between the readings it seems has been at work.

The list of poets who will be reading their translations is impressive. There will be Tufts emerita German professor Monika Totten, widely published  poet and author Adnan Adam Onart, and Gwendolyn Jensen who has wonderfully translated the Italian of Alda Merini. Kathryn Hellerstein, a professor and translator of Yiddish and German and recipient of the 2014 Barabara Dobkin Award for Women’s Studies, will be joining us also with Margaret Guillemin who has published a bilingual edition of Paul Celan’s Last Poems.

Although poetry would appear to be a very solitary, individual art for writer and for reader, its concentrated oddness ever challenges the status quo in our minds. That is why so many people from other areas, science, history, economics…benefit from reading poetry. It offers something different and questioning about the things we see, find, hold dear and take on with difficulty. There’s always the thing that really happens. Then there’s how that thing is expressed, determining what we feel and understand about what goes on. Gathering different perspectives is so important for us to have a range of possibilities in how we think about our world’s wonders and dangers, as well as in how we revisit those commonest of things that tend to hide in plain sight. When you take it one step further, to translating or reading translations of this otherness of mind, from other languages, you get this feeling of wonder, a possible grace where there had been none. It was expressed so admirably by Keats in his sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”:

    Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
         That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
         Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
    Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold…

Elsewhere Keats told us,

    “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

And all ye need to find your way and be welcomed to the Woodberry Translation Group reading Wednesday evening in the Hastings Room.

Stanzas on Oz Poems 2011-2014 By David M. Katz

Stanzas on Oz
Poems 2011-2014
By David M. Katz
Dos Madres Press
Loveland, Ohio
www.dosmadres.com
ISBN: 978-1-939929-29-7
55 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly
Formal poetic design, when singular and well-wrought, can layer the human condition in a mime of consciousness that enchants beyond any purposeful sense or reasoned expectation. David M. Katz, curtained off in his new collection, Stanzas of Oz, pulls the levers of artistry with jaw-dropping dexterity, producing shimmering verses imbued with redemptive, sometimes transformative powers.

Opening with poignancy and a sense of lingering injustice, Katz’s first two poems stake out territory in the white collar domain of office culture. The poet elicits contempt and ire with calm detail and enraging logic—T. S. Eliot’s objective correlative in spades. The first of this duo, a sonnet, Katz ironically entitles Anniversary. After an early morning firing, a woman leaves her workplace hurriedly. She eases through the institutional glass doors for the last time and, taking with her some paltry belongings, she tosses her company benefit plan binder. Nothing else happens. But, of course, everything happens: a life defined by its work deconstructs itself into anonymity. Pathos at the heart of the piece has its way,

She had taken a glance at the office behind her
And seen only one person she could possibly hug.
She prefers to depart without any reminder
Of a confidence shared with a meaningful shrug.
No, she’d rather go out and leave nothing behind her,
Not her snapshots of nephews, her bent pencil can.

At the Chophouse, the second of these office culture poems, moves to the other side of the ledger. Katz’s protagonist has just fired a key member of his staff, a woman who helped make him a success. Her loyalty was without question, as was her naivety. This narcissistic boss mulls over his heartless decision with a sophisticated double scotch, twist of lime, no ice drink. Even worse, the bastard seems to have some insight into his former employee, as well as a touch of self-knowledge to boot.

On a personal note, I remember when the CEO/First Bureaucrat of GE, Jack Welch, very publically dismissed the concept of company loyalty as useless and outdated. By the time the word trickled down to the old school asbestos-breathing factory workers, who fitted out their homes exclusively with GE appliances, they had already retired and died (often one followed the other pretty quickly). I represented those men and women.

In his comfortable chophouse Katz’s protagonist considers this misbegotten and one-way concept of company loyalty,

She was first, no question about it. Did the
Books, yes, the records,

Held away the creditors—babysat, for
Christ’s sake. Just us two, and my bright idea,
Which she barely understood. “Software bringing
Business to business,”

“Innovation,” tentative rounds of funding,
Smart-ass venture boys, dog-and pony demos,
IPOs—through all of it, all she knew was
Loyalty, dogged

Loyalty. And now? Just behind me there’s a
Frozen city: that’s how I see the past, and
When I let her go, she had started freezing
Up like a statue

Notice the clipped fourth line of each stanza, a half-line with five syllables. It works wonderfully by adding both emphasis and some very real drama.

Without doubt, my favorite piece in the collection is the title poem, Stanzas on Oz.
Katz probes the art of poetry and the wizardry of its creators. The movement of the stanzas progress from flamboyancy to dread to a dream of oblivion. Every stanza repeats a refrain, albeit sometimes altered There is a nice bit on poet Philip Larkin’s poem, This Be the Verse and its misanthropic view (mom and dad don’t do well in this poem) of human existence. Ending the piece with a twist, Katz’s persona admits to fooling us with his prosody, and hiding his isolation beneath a surface of mesmerizing rhythm and structure. Duplicitous as it surely is, poetry pleases with an alternative world of awe and wonder. Consider the penultimate stanza,

Let’s take the plunge and meet the magic man.
Let’s take the plunge into delirium
Below the waves, down to a chambered garden,
Where all the bubbles rise into oblivion.
His show proceeds according to plan
Of stripping down, unlayering the onion.
Inside this stanza, deep below the surface,
We hold our breath—but find no larger purpose.

Villanelles, perhaps because of their plotted repetition of lines, handle obsessions very well. Katz knows this. One of his villanelles in this collection, The Picture of My Father in a Chair, showcases this strength. The poet’s persona recalls an unhappy cloud hovering over the quiet of family life. Zeroing in on the offending picture, Katz explains,

The photograph is none the worse for wear.

He seems to be at ease. She wasn’t there.
I find his license, other souvenirs.
This picture of my father in a chair

Recalls his ignorance of her affair
And how the rye had hidden all his fears.
The photograph is none the worse for wear.

That solid room’s dissolved into the air
Of who we were, through some of it coheres
In a picture of my father in a chair.

The poet concludes his collection with charm in a poem entitled Between the Covers. He chronicles his literary heritage through William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and many other late greats, including Ezra Pound. I found the first and last lines in the Pound section telling and not without irony. Here’s that section,

These were friends and parents,
     Lovers as real to me
As anyone outside
     Of covers—Father Pound,
Sailor, mate aboard ship
      On the terrifying
Trip to Hades, always
     The earliest rooster,
Explainer of the past,
      The guide who lost the way.

Back in Kansas now, I watch the tornadoes pass, and appreciate even more the technicolored illusions of Katz’s enthralling verses.

INSIDE THE SCAT STUDIO: INTERVIEW WITH DOUG HOLDER

February Member of the Month: Doug Holder

Posted on February 1, 2016 by Erica Jones

Inside the SCATV studio is a monthly blog post where SCATV staff interviews members, to learn a little bit more about who they are and their background. There is a set series of 10 questions they answer. This month, we hear from Doug Holder, a longtime SCATV member and producer of “Poet to Poet, Writer to Writer.” You can check out Doug’s TV show Tuesdays from 5:00-5:30 p.m. on SCATV Ch.3, or online at http://www.scatvsomerville.org/watch.

---

1. Who are you and what do you do?
Doug Holder is the name and poetry is my game. I host the show Poet to Poet Writer to Writer, where I interview poets and writers about their lives and creative process. I also teach writing at Endicott College and Bunker Hill Community College; I am the arts editor of The Somerville Times, and for the past 34 years I have worked at McLean Hospital, as a counselor and as a poetry workshop leader. I also direct the Newton Free Library Poetry Series, and I am the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press. http://ibbetsonpress.com In my spare time I write poetry and have been published in numerous journals. My most recent poetry book is ” Portrait of an Artist as a Young Poseur: 1974 to 1983″ (Big Table Books) I was recently awarded with the Allen Ginsberg Community Service Award from the Newton Writing and Publishing Center.
2. What was the strangest job you’ve had?
Well…way back in the day I got a job through MANPOWER, working in a vitamin factory. I walked around in a mask, in a perpetual mist of liver powder and such, dropping large dollops of powder in vats.
3. What was one of your first SCATV productions (your own or helping others)?
My first guest was Anika Nailah who founded the Books of Hope Project in Somerville. She started this great program to help kids in the projects write, publish and market their own books. That interview has been quoted in a couple of college texts that deal with community engagement.
4. Who were your early creative mentors or source for inspiration?
Well I always loved talk radio growing up as a kid in the New York metro area. I listened to a lot of the great talk radio guys in NYC like Barry Gray and Long John Nebble while growing up, and I always wanted to do something like that. I had a radio interview show in college in the 70s, and I can remember interviewing Piri Thomas, the author of Down these Mean Streets. I tried to get a visiting Allen Ginsberg on my show, but he politely declined. Of course I loved talk shows on TV. Tom Snyder was a favorite, and David Susskind was another guy who comes to mind. In terms of my own writing I was influenced by Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, too many to mention.
5. How do you get passed creative roadblocks?
Just keep writing and something is bound to happen. I find whenever I am at my perch at the back of the Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square stuff starts to flow. Maybe it is the strong coffee.
6. How has SCATV been a positive influence in your creative media career?
Absolutely. I think it has helped me get positions at colleges. They are impressed with the many interviews I have done over the years, and some of my older ones on tape are housed at university libraries like Harvard, University of Buffalo, etc… I have learned so much from interviewing folks. I am in my element when I am a fly on the wall. People fascinate me, and this gives me license to probe.
7. When did you first feel successful?
Well it was nice when you guys gave me the Producer of the Year Award in 2008.
8. If you could have entrance music, what would it be?
” As Times Goes By” as played on sax by Dexter Gordon.
9. What’s your favorite spot in Somerville to hangout or visit?
I am like a fly on a cheap suit at Bloc 11–I am always interviewing folks–grading papers, reading the rags, etc… I just have to say “The usual” and the baristas get me my daily fix. I seem to always be at Market Basket, and I have been to the Aeronaut Brewery recently with friends from work–good beer and music to be had.
10. In 140 characters or less, how would you pitch your show or who you are?
Doug Holder is a man dedicated to interviewing, archiving, recording the many writers and artists who make Somerville the ” Paris of New England”

© 2016 SOMERVILLE COMMUNITY ACCESS TELEVISION | 90 UNION SQUARE, SOMERVILLE, MA 02143 | 617-628-8826 | INFO@SCATVSOMERVILLE.ORG
HOURS OF OPERATION: MONDAY-THURSDAY: NOON-10PM | FRIDAYS AND SATURDAYS: 10AM-4PM