The Grolier Poetry Foundation and Forums Trust to Host the First in a Series of Events in 2019 to Raise Financial Support

The Grolier Poetry Foundation and Forums Trust to Host the First in a Series of Events in 2019 to Raise Financial Support

This Event will be Held on January 25 at the Historic Sheraton Commander

by Francine C. LaChance

francine.lachance@grolierpoetrybookshop.org

2019 is shaping up to be an exciting year for the Grolier Poetry Foundation and Forums Trust. The first in a series of events, planned to raise financial support and celebrate the Grolier legacy, features Peter Balakian, Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet and Grolier Board Member, and Susan Barba, Poet and Senior Editor for New York Review Books. They will read from their poetry, discuss their work, sign books, and take questions from the audience. This event will be held on Friday, January 25, at 7pm, at the historic Sheraton Commander, coincidentally, also established in 1927, the same year as the Groler. Afterwards, there will be a reception with generous amounts of delicious hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar. Although the reading starts at 7pm, doors will open at 6:15pm to welcome guests who would like to enjoy food and a drink before the reading.

Trustee and  landlord of the famed Bloc11  in Somerville,  Ifeanyi Menkiti said he “very much looks forward to this event, which honors the now 91 year old Grolier tradition of bringing poets and those who love poetry together.” The guest list of poets, so far, includes: Kathleen Spivack, Frank Bidart, David Ferry, Robert Pinsky, Lloyd Schwartz, George Kalogeris, Fred Marchant, Martha Collins and Askold Melnyczuk. Poets Balakian and Barba gave us a preview of their discussion, stating: “We will reflect on poetry and its relationship to trauma, collective memory and the poem’s engagement with history.” Menkiti remarked “The focus of this reading aligns beautifully with the Grolier mission. Hosting these types of events is exactly what led me to save the Grolier from closing in 2006, and continues to excite me about our future.”

Poets Peter Balakian and Susan Barba shared their reflections on the Grolier, along with a request for support:

“For us, as for so many poets, the Grolier has been a vital location, and, for nearly a hundred years, a temple to poetry and the most historically important bookstore of its kind. Because poetry is the cutting edge of language and a singular force in probing human experience, the Grolier remains essential to American life. Please come out and support the Grolier and its future.” 

Another reason to come out and support the Grolier is that they are now transitioning from a private operating foundation to a public charity. Menkiti’s intention has always been to shepherd this legendary cultural institution, and thereby to prevent any possibility of its ever closing, as almost happened in 2006. Menkiti is working closely with Francine C. LaChance, Consultant for the Grolier, to develop a broader range of funding opportunities in order to shift the financial burden from himself to some other sources, which include: donors, grants, and events, including the upcoming evening at the Sheraton.

“The Grolier is and has been a beloved icon of culture and poetry for near a century, while also preserving the historic quality of Harvard Square. With many friends who want to support us, this shift to a public charity makes sense,” said Menkiti. While Menkiti will continue to lead the cultural work of the Grolier, he also noted that he did not intend his role as the primary source of financial support to continue indefinitely.

The Grolier expresses gratitude for the following support, for the January 25th event:

Venue Sponsor, discounted rates:

Michael Guleserian, General Manager of the Sheraton Commander

Book Sponsors, donated books:

Randolph Petilos, Poetry and Medieval Studies Editor, University of Chicago Press

Sue Berger Ramin, Associate Publisher, David R. Godine

Event Supporter:

Askold Melnyczuk, Arrowsmith Press.

The Grolier, owned by longtime Somerville resident Ifeanyi Menkiti, also acknowledges long standing support and generosity from our friends, with special thanks and gratitude at this time to Kathleen Spivack, David Ferry, and Emily Nammacher.

Tickets and select books by featured poets are available for purchase online. If you are not able to attend this event, you may still purchase these featured books online, for pick up at the Grolier, or for shipping, after the event. If you would like to have your books signed, please email: francine.lachance@grolierpoetrybookshop.org.

What can you expect from the Grolier in 2019? Menkiti remains fully engaged in continuing and advancing the cultural work of the Grolier. He appears to be ramping up more events, more publishing projects with the Grolier Poetry Press, and some new and exciting special projects, including, potentially, a fascinating event that would be of great interest to our local friends, and currently under consideration with the Cambridge Historical Society.

Additional 2019 events and readings include: an event featuring Robert Pinsky and his book length poem An Explanation of America, now celebrating 40 years; a re-issue and celebration of David Ferry’s Grolier Poetry Press book Ellery Street; and the Arrowsmith Press Book Launch. Readings in the Book Shop will feature poets Ben Mazer and A.E. Stallings, George Kalogeris, and Raul Zurita and William Rowe translator.

Please visit our website for more information about the Grolier, including upcoming events.

If you can't attend the upcoming event at the Sheraton, but would like to support the Grolier, please consider making a donation.

Lloyd Schwartz Named Somerville’s Third Poet Laureate

Lloyd Schwartz Named Somerville’s Third Poet Laureate

Somerville resident and accomplished poet, Schwartz will serve a two-year term.

SOMERVILLE – The City of Somerville announced this week its third Poet Laureate, Lloyd Schwartz. Schwartz is a Somerville resident with an impressive literary background including his current work as the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His poetry collections include These People;Goodnight, Gracie; Cairo Traffic; and most recently, Little Kisses (University of Chicago Press). His poems have been published in, among many other journals, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Agni, Consequence, and Ploughshares, and have been selected for the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry (three times), and The Best of the Best American Poetry.

“Somerville has so much creative energy and power, and we are well known for our vibrant arts scene. Similarly, we have a talented, well-educated, and thoughtful writer’s community that needs a voice. In Lloyd Schwartz, Somerville gains a tremendous advocate and partner for the writing arts, and I am proud to welcome him as our City’s third Poet Laureate,” said Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone.

The City created the Poet Laureate position in 2015 to enhance the profile of poets and poetry in Somerville and surrounding communities. The Poet Laureate is expected to bring poetry to segments of the community that currently have less access or exposure to poetry: senior citizens, youth, and schools. Appointed by the Mayor, the Poet Laureate will serve a two-year term and will receive an honorarium of $2,000 per year.

“Lloyd’s work is poised and insightful, and I think it will really resonate with the Somerville community,” said Gregory Jenkins, Director of the Somerville Arts Council. “He conveyed a thoughtful perspective on his approach to this position, and has a passion for promoting poetry through his teaching.  We’ve gained an impressive ambassador in Lloyd Schwartz.”

“I’m honored to have been chosen Somerville’s new poet laureate. I’ve been living and writing in—and writing about—this city for nearly 35 years. It’s come to feel like home. I love its down-to-earth spirit and its increasing inclusivity. Having spent my whole adult life bringing poetry to my students, I value the chance to encourage my neighbors to love poetry as much as I do,” said Lloyd Schwartz. 

Schwartz was chosen based on a series of criteria, including excellence in craftsmanship, professional achievement, and creating a vision for the position. A panel composed of four local poets— Doug Holder, Harris Gardner, Linda Conte, and Hilary Sallick—reviewed applicant work, interviewed candidates, and ultimately chose Schwartz.

“As a panelist on the Somerville Art Council's Poet Laureate panel I am pleased to announce that Lloyd Schwartz will be our new poet laureate. All panel members were impressed with Schwartz's experience, commitment, and poetry. We feel he will raise the poet laureate position to even a higher level,” said Doug Holder.

Jackie Rossetti

Deputy Director of Communications

City of Somerville

617-625-6600 ext 2614

Feb 12, 2019 7PM Newton Free Library Poetry Series Begins!

http://newtonfreelibrarypoetryseries.blogspot.com

Doug Holder Interviews Philosopher Richard Oxenberg about--On the Meanin...

On the Meaning of Human Being By Richard Oxenberg

On the Meaning of Human Being

By Richard Oxenberg

Political Animal Press

Toronto

www.politicalanimalpress.com

ISBN: 978-1-895131-30-7

248 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Not since Saint Thomas Aquinas channeled Aristotle by way of Boethius in Summa Theologica has philosophy and theology met in such an unexpected and enlightened way. Richard Oxenberg in his new book, On the Meaning of Human Being, Heidegger and the Bible in Dialogue, uses a framework employed by the estimable (and somewhat infamous) Martin Heidegger to get at the ethical basis of humanity and the relevance of religion in the twenty-first century.

The first half of the Oxenberg book sets up his secular and foundational approach as well as developing a tool box of helpful terms and delving philosophic concepts. His choice of Heidegger seems at first rather odd (more on that later) and then… and then… not so much. Being and Time, Heidegger’s breakthrough work of phenomenological investigations, is clearly up to the task. Oxenberg manipulates Heidegger’s perceptions masterfully, architecturally structuring his own original arguments from them with deftness and certainty.

Human Being, as defined by Heidegger/ Oxenberg, exists as more than an entity. It is rather a subject connected to objects which are influenced by pretty spooky forces. Oxenberg explores this complex world with verbs that signify value such as “care” and “matter” as in “we care about things” or “things matter to us.” Each object is an object because of a subject’s concern. According to Oxenberg this concern is basic to Being. In his dialectic Being exists not only in a space-time dimension, but also in a qualitative or axiological dimension. The values intrinsic to this dimension are inseparable from Being itself. Humans derive meaning from mattering. Goodness mattered to Plato and Aristotle and also matters to Judao-Christianity and the basis of these sets of beliefs match up in uncanny ways.

Oxenberg deals with the estrangement of theology and philosophy forthwith and without hesitation. Rene Descartes is quickly fingered as the evil genius and historical bad guy and his philosophical dualism, although spectacularly successful in mechanistic living, entices questioning seekers down the wrong rabbit hole in mankind’s search for meaning and truth. According to Oxenberg/ Heidegger Cartesian facts are nothing more than abstractions of our “caring about things.” When humans set their sights on an object (a desk, a chair, a friend, themselves) they do so for the sake of something. Subjects project that value onto their object and this defines meaning. The subject cannot be separated from the object, and thus this is not a subjective process. Nor can this be considered objective. It is a process of projection that extends into the future and back to the past, and it must be understood as a whole.

Heidegger calls his re-envisioned human being Dasein or Being-in-the-World. Each Dasein can be described as Being-towards-Death, that is, authentic being, or Das Man, that is, inauthentic being. Later on Oxenberg describes yet another mode of existence he terms Being-towards-Life offered by Judeo-Christianity. Soren Kierkegaard points out man’s alienation when confronting death in his arguably authentic life. Anxiety causes this Being, a being lost to existential despair, to seek eternal life to fulfill himself. Eternal, by the way, is not necessarily defined in temporal terms. Oxenberg goes to great lengths to describe its qualitative fabric.

Curiously, early in the book Oxenberg states that modern scientific thought deliberately “seeks to discount the subjective concerns of the observer in an effort to provide a strictly “objective” account of reality.” He argues that this viewpoint results in a distorted understanding of Being. Oxenberg is right on both counts, of course, if he is referring to Newtonian science and mathematics and I think he is. But he would not be right if he were referring to the bane of Einstein’s original and elegant theoretical inclinations (God does not play dice with the world)—quantum physics. In fact it is impossible to read Oxenberg’s description of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology without one’s mind wandering into the realm of quantum mechanics (think Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principal and the Double Slit Experiment). In this quantum world the observer by his very observing alters his object. Also in this world exotic particles demonstrate invisible connections over space and time. This spookiness, begging for theological answers, finds its equivalent in Heidegger’s concepts and buttresses, in an architectural sense, Oxenberg’s theological explorations.

Heidigger, who in his life purported to seek authenticity with the same zeal that Aristotle sought goodness, joined the German Nazi Party before World War II. His supporters argue that he did so for career purposes and never became an active party member. Maybe. Oxenberg does rehash those sorry facts in a brief and unsatisfying attempt to understand Heidegger’s disastrous move. In fairness, Oxenberg had no choice, his use of Heidegger’s analytic necessitates some kind of explanatory comment. Ignominy can’t be ignored in the midst of righteous exploration.

In the second half of the book Oxenberg creates a rapprochement of sorts between philosophy and religion. He aims to accomplish this by explicating the Old and New Testaments with the use of Heidegger’s already developed hermeneutical tools. Heidegger would not have approved. That said, Oxenberg’s approach I think succeeds, and succeeds startling well at that. His understanding of language raises up Jewish and Christian traditions to a connective level of philosophical symbolism. His coverage includes the iconic stories within Genesis, as well as the biblical Jesus Christ. His analysis of the Christ as messiah and the appellations of the Son of Man used by Christ himself and the Son of God used by the Christian faithful hit the mark. The human spirit seems to transfigure into the Spirit of God, a oneness more often acknowledged by mystics, traditional Buddhism, and other eastern religions.

Oxenberg makes no claim for Christian exclusivism, but he does argue for the “existential disposition” of Christ’s revealed teachings. The Spirit of Christ becomes for Oxenberg a mode of Being-in–the–World that gives the slip to the proponents of existentialism (Jean-Paul Sartre, Camus, et al) and seeks the goodness of love and community. Religious beliefs for Oxenberg seem to merge in a rarified metaphorical and transcendent, but no less real philosophic, realm. Paul Tillich, Thomas Merton and others have followed similar lines of reasoned mysticism. Keep in mind that Aristotle identified contemplation as the highest form of happiness. In any case, Oxenberg is in good company.

Memoirist/Poet George Ellenbogen: A Montreal native son talks about his coming of age as a writer in the Jewish section of the city in the 40s and 50s.

I talked with  George Ellenbogen on my Somerville Media Center Show--Poet to Poet/to Writer to Writer-- about his new memoir of childhood and adolescence, "A Stone in my Shoe: In Search of Neighborhood"

Doug Holder: What essentially were the pros and cons of living in a close knit Jewish community in Montreal during the 40s and 50s?

George Ellenbogen:  Well--it was in a sense it was a homogeneous neighborhood. The street I lived on--only one family was not Jewish. The high school that I went to had 1100 kids, probably not more than a half-dozen were Jewish. In essence it was a ghetto. I suppose growing up in a culture like that there is a certain cultural deprivation from the rest of the world. Living in Montreal was like living in a tugboat between an English man-of-war  and a French man- of- war.

Though--it was very comforting in a way. My grandmother , cousins, etc... were a block or two away. There was a sense of familiarity. And of course there were Jews from different parts of Europe-- Russia, France, the Baltic, etc... When I left my immediate neighborhood to go to McGill  University to get my undergraduate degree it was like going to a strange country without any passport. It was very unreal for a Jewish kid from a cloistered community.

DH:  You told me you knew the famed poet/singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen. Cohen grew up in Montreal and went to McGill.

GE:  Yes Cohen was at McGill. He had a number of books in the McGill Poetry Series. The last time I saw him was in Montreal--1959. I told him I was going to England. He said, " Send me your address--I am going there too." I eventually saw him in London. We sat on a street curb and just talked until 3 AM. Later he went to Haifa and I never saw him again. I think Cohen was the most talented poet to come out of Canada. His first book was wonderful. I didn't know him when he became a cultural icon. His songs didn't grab me. But in his early poems there was great music to his writing. You would have to go back to Ben Johnson to see how incredible he was.
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DH:  I did my thesis on food in the literature of Henry Roth. I traced the assimilation of Roth's protagonist in his novel " Call it Sleep" by the food he ate.  Food maybe viewed by some as trivial. But you include a lot of it in your memoir.

GE: Of course food is the community glue. I remember an aunt of mine said I was a "long noodle" and I would never amount to much. But look--food is essential to every culture. It is a picture of people sitting around a table a table sharing things that they like---it could be called a centerpiece of celebration. When I went to the larger world of McGill- I ate the food of the gentile world--ham, bacon...it was sort of symbolic of the world citizen I was about to be become.

The Scottish Book of the Dead A novel by Gavin Broom

Gavin Broom

The Scottish Book of the Dead

A novel by Gavin Broom

Island City Publishing LLC

Review by Timothy Gager

If you’re Elisabeth Kübler-Ross you’ve had a widely accepted theory about the five stages of death and dying. If you are the author, Gavin Broom, your characters get to experience two of them, (maybe three, without giving away the ending) the denial stage and the anger stage. In The Scottish Book of the Dead, a father dies and it brings a dysfunctional family together in one location to deal with his death, and to pick up the pieces of their own lives. These characters, the son, the runaway ex-wife, the brother, and the sister-in-law all must address their shortcomings and their past, while attempting to close a chapter with someone else’s.

In humanity, we all deal with death in different ways, whether it’s diving into side projects (needing to clean out the person’s belongings immediately), quitting a job, or traveling across the world to see a son you’ve not seen in an eternity. Truth is that when someone close dies, each of us die a little ourselves. Broom takes us through this in short, stunning chapters, and in four distinct varied sections. He presents the insanity, real or imagined of the physical and mental world during a pivotal life event. Broom strikes a chord using various writing techniques which show that things aren’t what they look like or appear to be. Often, when a family member dies, people can go a bit crazy, but as you read through the layers of The Scottish Book of the Dead, the world as we know it, also, doesn’t seem based in reality. Author, Broom, allows us to wrestle with the metaphysics of this, but then often, the reality becomes a metaphor, and/or the metaphor becomes the reality. For example, when an earthquake hits, opening up a large crack in the ground, son Adam throws an item of his dead father into the bottomless hole. Later this same item re-appears back at the father’s house. We understand that this empty hole, is the wound, and emptiness, we feel when we lose someone. By using this technique, he puts the reader in a familiar emotional place, a place many of us have been who have attended at an actual funeral, where the feelings of displacement, combined with the lack of sleep from the night before gives off a surreal kind of vibe. In fact, many of the characters, in the different sections have gone on without much sleep for large periods of time, thus changing their mental statuses.

The author, born in Scotland, captures Scottish dialect within the novel. Though this may be distracting for some, it creates authenticity within the text. The sound of the pages are just one of the layers of this multi-layered book. The questioning of reality, and of grieving is another. Perhaps there are more stages of death Kübler-Ross has ignored, which author Broom gives us front row seats to---the stages of guilt and obligation. This is shown again, and again, the characters continuing on, overcoming these stages, only to arrive at a decent emotional place by the end of the book. The Scottish Book of the Dead, is not light reading, but there is enough humor, magic, and philosophy mixed in to not bury us in a giant hole of sadness.