Somerville Poet ILAN MOCHARI engages the world with his new book of poetry 'Playthings'

Recently, I caught up with Somerville poet and novelist Ilan Mochari--to talk to him about his new book of poetry "Playthings"  Poet Richard Hoffman writes of the collection:

"Ilan Mochari’s voice in Playthings is exquisite in its range, its responsiveness, its singing. These are poems to be savored and read many times. Whether he is writing about trees native to Mexico, spiders native to his bathroom, or memories native to boyhood, his engagement with the world delivers poems that praise and lament, remember and contemplate. Several are small masterpieces: “Playthings,” “Fiancé, Fiancée,” and “Weekday, City” are jewels. What a treasure. What a pleasure."

Years ago, I interviewed you about your novel Zinsky the Obscure. Now—poetry seems to be a much more important part of your body of work. Explain.


I've always enjoyed writing both fiction and poetry—and I remain ambitious in both genres. More than anything, it's just that Playthings, my new poetry collection, crossed the finishing line before my next novel was ready. But I hope over the next several years to have some new novels to share with the world, too.


You write with great reverence about-- of all things-- spiders, rabbits, etc... I don't think most people would think about the lives of such creatures in their backyard or bathroom, but you do. What's wrong with you? 🙂


Humans are amazing creatures, but I don't know if we produce anything as marvelous as spider silk. Spiders have been on earth for 400 million years—they know how to survive! Lyrically speaking, I love using animals as nouns. Rabbit, armadillo, elephant, camel, raccoon—these words cast potent images and traits in a reader's mind.


I have always thought that buses and trains give us great fodder for poetry. The photographer Walker Evans used a little camera under his raincoat to catch moments on the New York City subway. You have some brilliant poetic snapshots, too. Could you comment on this?


Thank you! I respect the hell out of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (who doesn't?). As a daily rider of Boston's trains and buses—and New York's when I was growing up—I've always been amazed by what I saw, heard, felt, and smelled while commuting. Commutes are a window to the world of how we mortals live, think, and behave: perhaps the finest example of this in U.S. poetry is Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." One of my poems in Playthings, "Station," begins with the poem's speaker positioning his camera in the weedy yard where a nameless city stores light rail trains. I've never taken such snapshots in real life—but I've always wanted to!


Your poetry has a cornucopia of images. It has great range—from the banality of a bus to the high holy of the artist Georgia O'Keeffe. Could one say you are a "renaissance man" of a poet?


It would be more accurate (if less flattering) to say, quoting Whitman, that I resist anything better than my own diversity. I'd be hard pressed to develop a collection of my poems (or my short stories for that matter) around a single, specific theme or subject. A broad theme like nature, sure: I can fit the world under that umbrella. But to your point, miscellany's my thing: I have a difficult time writing about the same ostensible topic more than once, unless years have passed between the efforts. My next novel is dramatically different from Zinsky; the poems I'm working on now are like nothing in Playthings. Incidentally, the O'Keeffe poem is also an homage to my mother, who's a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Their best one, I might add.


Why should we read your collection?


Lusty escapism. Playthings probes the natural world and the thoughtless harm and joy of our imbalanced tryst with it. Beneath that admittedly broad rubric, you'll find meditations on subjects ranging from moons to gum trees to outfield grass. What you won't find are poems about current events or politics. That's not my bag. Plenty of poets do it, and they do it much better than I ever could. I've never had a passion for the news or elected officials. But what you'll find in Playthings is jubilation: a rolling around in earth's muddy facts, the biological and astronomical truths that transcend trendiness and are thus, in themselves, the purest form of diversion from the puritanical shouts and screams

From the Faraway, Nearby


Take me, docent, to the surreal O’Keeffe,

Where a liminal desert & mountainous sands

Set a brown, jawless skull in abandoned relief.

Bones bloom like blessings from holier lands,

Antlers curl Godward like six withered hands

Or calligraphic Hebrew, draped in the sky,

Near cloud wisps stripped thin by symbolic demands.

As if centuries sidestepping questions of why

Left us only with deer horns to deify.



Docent, lead me to the O’Keeffe eternal,

Where the head of the cervid is floating on high,

As if lifted to heaven by forces maternal.

This canvas depicts, this title affirms

An art in the juxtaposed distance of terms.