Somerville Poet Michael Franco: Composing the life in which we are living

Recently I caught up with Somerville poet Michael Franco. Michael Franco is a poet, playwright and artist. His publications include: The Marvels of David Leering [Pressed Wafer 2017] A Book of Measure Volume One: The Journals of the Man who Keeps Bees [Talisman House 2017] How To Live [Zoland, Cambridge Ma. 1998]. He was the founder of the Word of Mouth Readings Series in Cambridge Ma. and was a board member for the Pioneer Valley Poetry Festival. He is currently a Visiting Writer for the University of Coimbra, Portugal and curator of the Xit The Bear reading series in Somerville MA

 How has it been for you as a poet and writer living in Somerville?

I got lucky in our move to Somerville...... it has given and allowed me to construct a sense of Place... always missing from my Navy Brat life... I have now lived here longer than in any of the residences my parents and I had (we moved 11 times before I graduated high school - in 5th grade I went to 3 different schools). Somerville has been a grand location to work in, raise a child in and to attempt acts of Community in.

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Tell me about the genesis of your the XIT The Bear Room Series. Your first readers were William Corbett, Fanny Howe, and Gerrit Lansing—all have passed.... Howe most recently. What kind of legacy did these poets leave?—who did you identify with the most?

The new reading series [Xit the Bear: Readings in The Press Room] was planned before we started looking for a home in the late 90’s. I wanted to create a space ...away from a campus, library or bar, that might be inviting for writers to read in and so then to Respect the readers and their work and the audience as well.

I ran the Word of Mouth Series in Cambridge for close to ten years (in the Henderson Carriage Building beneath Tapas restaurant at 2067 Mass Ave.[1987-95 & then at various locations until ‘97]): Originally with artist Katha Seidman who lured the artists, (who were shown with each reading) and Andrea Stover who read manuscripts with me and dealt with the bar. [Over the years Joseph Torra and Angie Mlinko would follow her on the bar]: each in their way essential to the atmosphere created. But it was always by the generosity of Polly Guggenheim and Glen Matsura who handed me the downstairs bar to use for free on Sundays. We had a great run: Readers from Bill Corbett to Diane di Prima & Robin Blaser, Nathaniel Tarn, Lee Harwood, David Rattray, Kenward Elmslie, CD Wright & Forrest Gander, Fanny Howe of course, Nate Macke, Ken Irby & Robert Creeley; basically every one I could hope for in between. I did afternoon readings of Stein and Spicer texts which I scored for the voices of poets whom I admired, plays, a text built from the combined correspondence between Olson, Creeley and Cid

Corman (Bill Corbett reading the Olson part) held benefits and hung art by local artists .. I even convinced Mike Mazur to hang reproductions of his Dante prints when Robert Pinsky read (& wonderfully) from his then new Translation. Bill Corbett recorded his grand book On Blue Note for Cambridge’s Zoland Books & Roland Pease down there... but it all hinged on the restaurant and when they closed up we got maybe two weeks notice. The last reading was a jazz band made up of Clark Coolidge and David & Tina Meltzer with Andrew Schelling and Anne Waldman the week before...it was a grand place to stop... but it left a lot hanging & I vowed a better place if there was a next time where only I could pull the plug.

In projecting a new series I wanted to both continue my original proposal for Word of Mouth [which I kept calling “an Oral Magazine” which I was editing and a “A Place to Practice”]. But I wanted now to be in control of the space & to make it a Place in the imagination where one might actually want to read sans Saturday Night’s stale beer overtones! So the Press Room was built in our former Somerville Garage (slightly delayed by the joyous intrusion of our son’s birth & life) & I started putting away $25.00 a week from tips so that eventually I could actually pay the readers, and from that the Xit The Bear reading series emerged which takes place there along with other events (Somerville poet and filmmaker John Mulrooney recently brought his Rusty Doves band in for a small & wonderful show & I have the occasional writer in residence out there. In between I continue with my restoration of a 19th C Hand Press & attempt to relearn 19th C printing techniques or do my work in collage. When I am done with this interview I am heading out there to pull proofs on what I hope will be a small broadside of an H.D. poem and a short text by Robert Duncan.)

All of this I have to say (to get back to yr actual question) was grounded by Bill Corbett (who I describe nowadays as a silent partner to the first Series (a concept which would make him flinch I think) but Bill sent people my way whom I would not have been in touch with and Bill respected what I was doing (even if he disagreed with it) because he sensed my Intention at work... and he Never complained if I took a pass on a writer.) He was indeed Word of Mouth’s and Xit’s first reader: Solo at Word and then for the Xit reading I paired him with Gerrit Lansing as an Opening.

At Xit putting him up with Gerrit Lansing was a conscious declaration of the poetics of the series: No Masters no manifestos, as indeed lift had quietly proposed: Just Poets of deep commitment, at work at the height of their capabilities... whose example was boundless Curiosity and Joy- Nothing more nothing less: But always Companions to the all rest of us trying to pop our heads out into View in the poetry world; they were Certainly not writers who were looking for power or position or to form a group or school. I am coming to see that period as a New Boston Renaissance with spiraling connections to San

Francisco/Berkeley via myself Robin Blazer & Nate Mackey and a broad field of active deeply caring poets like Ms Howe, Robert Pinsky, Askhold Melnyczuk, Gerrit Lansing, Patrick Pritchett, Amanda & James Cook, David Rich (all up in Gloucester & still working in the glow of all that was Gerrit Lansing and so Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini); Edward Barrett, Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno & Patricia Pruitt; Ros Zimmermann, Chloe Garcia Roberts ...Peter Gizzi, Martha McCollough, Elliot Cardinaux out in the hinterlands ...just to name but a few of the folks at work in the Field....... This, as I keep quoting Stein saying, is The Composition in Which We Live.....ever forming and dissolving with flashes of infamy or brilliant inspiration shimmering across it like a grand squall... But this Composition must be composed and that is what I am striving for and trying to encourage in others.

You were involved with the Somerville based Lift Magazine—founded by Joe Torra. Can you tell us about the germ of the idea that started this? What was unique about this publication?

The “germ” I missed! It occurred at an after-reading dinner that I was cooking: I left the room to attend to the food and when I came in to serve it a romance was starting at one end of the table and Torra had proposed a magazine to be called “Entropy” (a name I talked him out of) at the other end. The marvelous writer TJ Anderson and I were asked to be contributing editors.

As to what was “unique”: Nothing! It was a magazine without funding or any institutional authorizations made at a dining room table (the early covers were printed on my big hand press by myself with the artists present & instructing me) & the Xeroxed pages were hand sewn by the editors, (this before it was taken glossy) And I think that was its most important mark: Anyone with the time & energy can do this. You don’t need a university or a patron or any other authorization: you need people to gather together and Make it. And the energy from this Act will in turn start a circulation. The good or bad or “importance” or “uniqueness” of it have little to do with the Act of making it, which is the genuine gesture.

You have commissioned local poets' plays. Which play stands out in your mind? Do you think poets are natural playwrights?

That was back in the second or third season of the Word of Mouth series... I was writing short verse plays and the other poet was Barbra Blatner, who was and is an honest playwright & is still quite active in New York. But the plays were not “commissioned” it was just what we were working on at the time.

I don’t know from “natural”. What happens is that I start to Hear a form that seems to be moving as dialogue and some sense of an arrival at meaning.... and I follow it as far as possible in what ever form. Actually all of my work since 1991 under the title A Book of Measure [there are now 2 completed volumes [Vol. One The Journals of the Man who Keeps Bees came out from Talisman House in 2017, Volume 2 The Book of The Night Sky, is largely unpublished and a third volume, The Book of the Far Shore, which I am working on currently]... but all of my work has been a conscious mixing and blending of all the forms available to us....without boundaries. Volume II has an entire 5 act verse play which I am perpetually reworking, about John Dee imbedded within it and an appendix of short stories The Marvels of David Leering (which is a book being read by the Narrator of A Book of Measure & which in turn contains translated poems by Jalal al-Din Jalabiense that Leering is reading: so books and authors inside of books and authors), which were published in a beautiful edition by Corbett’s wonderful Pressed Wafer.

In attempting some type of an introduction to A Book of Measure I landed on this:

A BRIEF NOTE ON THE TEXT OF A BOOK OF MEASURE:

“I hope this collection will contribute to a literary tradition that resists distinctions between poetry and fiction as one way to save history from the doom of duality.” Fanny Howe /Radical Love [2006]

I think of A Book of Measure as a Composed Through Text, by which I mean that in working within its emerging Field I have attempted to employ All of the Compositional Elements available to me via an equalizing of Sound, Image, image and sound clusters, typeface, word line and paragraph spacing, caesura and text block, to name a few; with which to fully articulate the text.

In this, A Book of Measure follows a line that traces back to the typographical indications, so keenly ripe, within the fascicles of Emily Dickinson, extending into our own time, running through the work of Gertrude Stein, the technical proposals contained in Olson’s Projective Verse and into the Practice of a Whole Art, articulated in Robert Duncan’s Ideas of the Meaning of Form and the breakthrough in the textual layering of his HD Book.

From Dickinson’s Field of the page to Duncan’s explorations on a Selectric Typewriter.... we find ourselves now, in composing with word processing and Google awaiting, within the full deployment of the imagination, with new possibilities and indeed new responsibilities, opening to the author– who needs but employ them.

Which is then to say we are, with the advent of the computer, as far from the author submitting a hand written manuscript to the Publisher’s graphic interpretations, as the first scribes attempting to stabilize the old stories into manuscript or movable type were from the Tales of the Campfire.

It is my hope then that this is a Different book; An ark of Forms- A book of Measure.

So then to go back to your question: All of this, the readings series, the readings of other texts in the Series the pairing of seemingly disparate poets (my forever favorite was putting up Frank Bidart (yet another “Boston” treasure), with the poet& publisher/artist Tom Rayworth...... or pairing MIT professor/film maker and writer & dear friend Thomas Levenson with the painter/ fiction writer, Thorpe Feidt [whose amazing The Leibniz Papers has Leibniz and Newton reincarnated in Ipswich and married to each other...] & again, both of them part of our Local scene) bringing in plays or writing them (one of those early verse play is in my first full length book How to Live [Zoland, Cambridge Ma 1998] as an integral portion of the textual flow no different from a recognizable “poem” and it in turn was derived from Yeats). All of this is the Field that I see and work within. Everything every avenue / a figure in the landscape a bios at work around me and with me at work within it.

You, like the poet Joe Torra started out as waiters. Now, both of you 'serve' poetry. Can you think of any similarities between poet and waiter. What did you glean for your own writing from this job?

I gleaned a life that gave me time to write. I got lucky and worked for 2 people who actually respected what I was up to [Mary Catherine Deibel and Deborah Hughes at Upstairs at the Pudding or On the Square]: It was restaurant work with all its craziness and stupidity but joy as well and they let me work 2 or 3 days a week and understood that I had another job (2 after I had a kid!)... I was there just shy of 30 years .....and it also coalesced the sense that I have, first generated at my parents dinner table of the essential connection to an actual Life of food and stories. A Book of Measure has no “waiting” stories which are kind of a snooze to me. But it is full of food and dinners and people sharing both.

In an article I read—your community involvement was fostered by the Grateful Dead. Please explain.

That was not so much the Dead as it was Bill Graham who ran the Fillmore West Ballroom in San Francisco in the 60’s and who I clearly saw even at 17 as creating the sense of Place I was talking about earlier & which brings us back to Composing the life in which we are living.

What I learned from the energy centers of Bill Graham or The Grateful Dead was to respect those other energy Centers at work around us. Out of going to Dead shows in the period I was exposed to Bach, Jazz, Blue Grass, Blues, New Orleans jams Bakersfield Country, experimental music and so on & wonderfully on. All on the basis that it was a sincere Music. Graham did the same thing (Miles Davis whom I had barely heard of billed with the Dead for example): All of this was the Community at work around us. All of this equalized the Form(s) being pursued and actively so by people slightly older than I was. One had the sense that you should “Know” (which so deeply instilled in me Wanting to Know), while being repeatedly schooled that there was so much grand creating going on around us that we had no notion about. Doc & Marl Watson walking out at the Fillmore one night.....& I had had never heard of them.... Buddy Rich & his big band or Woody Herman .....Rolland Kirk, Virgil Fox doing a night of Bach & so on & on. It was a magnificent gesture of Inclusion and that inclusion started a Circulation of creative intents and Joy which I am still chasing.

So when you get to me trying to make up a series it was standing on those shoulders. I started introducing complete texts scored for several readers to bring those works into the sense of the Community that I felt forming around the Word of Mouth Series...... Spicer was an early break through with a reading of After Lorca [in the first Season: October of 87] & I know that those readings sent a few people running toward Spicer’s Work, and the reading was generated simply because I had at last found Spicer myself... I did a complete reading (over the objection of the participants who begged for cuts at every rehearsal!) of Stein’s Tender Buttons which at least for myself repositioned the importance of that text; but it was also a pleasurable experience for all of us to “hear” those texts as a community. And this in turn shows up in my work on A Book of Measure with the different forms ...lyric bridges running to the seemingly abstract, narrations, plays, entire books being “read” by the Narrator, the pirated Journals of the 18th C, portuguese writer Maria Torres & her poems, Fairy Tales, historical articles & folk tales; the goal being to not exclude anything that was trying to come into the work at work.

It was to my sense an Enactment of Field.... the idea coming from Charles Olson & Projective Verse of course but enlarged in a generous way ...a more inclusive way by Robert Duncan. Duncan in a lecture for Tom Gunn’s classes which I snuck into at UC Berkeley, saying that once he understood Olson’s proposition of Open Verse he noted that if it were really going to be an Open Form “didn’t it have to include the Closed?” The penetration of that idea into my 20 something mind can not be adequately measured: But like a great Fullerian trim tab it quietly began to change the direction of everything. I should add that all of this was pouring into my imagination as I was discovering Stein and going to the Fillmore in my last years of High School and first college years, where I added classical music (notably Gustav Mahler & Virgil Thompson..... each of whom extended this idea of an inclusive Form) and painting as well.

Which then brings us full circle to Bill Corbett, Fanny Howe, Gerrit Lansing, the reading series and my own work. Inclusion is the Measure & The Placement of Self into the ongoing Field is the goal. Obedience or a School of Something....not so much.

But I am Measuring... constantly ....

& still attempting to place myself where all of this can sweep across & into me.