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john wisniewski
What was it like growing up in Buffalo, NY?
Many friends here in Boston, where I have lived for more than 50 years, assume, because of my four plus decades association with Brooklyn as an editor of Hanging Loose Press, that I grew up in New York City, but I'm a native of Buffalo-- like Bert Stern, Fanny Howe, Henry Braun and Elizabeth Swados, to name a few other poets. A baby boomer, I grew up at a very special time. The U.S. post war economy was expanding at a rate never seen before. Buffalo was a thriving industrial city of steel mills, auto plants, foundries, etc. That all came to a crashing end soon after I left for college. It was also a time of opportunities for working-class kids like me, opportunities unheard of by my parents depression era generation, attending college to name just one, even an elite college like MIT, where I studied physics as a scholarship student.
Buffalo's Polish immigrant population in the 1950s was second only to Chicago in size. My family lived in the predominately Polish East side of the city. We lived first with one then the other pair of my grandparents where Polish was spoken more often than English. One grandfather worked on the railroad, the other in a foundry. My parents, who both attended Polish Catholic grade schools, grew up bi-lingual, but I was encouraged to only learn English. My father, who didn't finish high school but got a GEd, started out as a welder at the Curtis Radiation factory, where I learned Joyce Carol Oats father also worked. Later he got an unskilled job at the Buffalo Water Works. Our lives were governed by his ever changing shift-work schedule. When my brothers were born, we moved into an apartment in a public housing development. ("Birthday" in 'Away' Away is my latest poem about my 1950s Buffalo childhood.)
I attended the local Catholic elementary school that bordered the housing project. Nuns impose a strict discipline to keep the large, crowded classrooms from becoming unruly. The curriculum was narrow: reading, writing, arithmetic and religious instruction. Resources were meager. For example, when I announced that I had received the Christmas gift of a Gilbert Chemistry set, the nuns appointed me roving science instructor, visiting classrooms to give chemistry demonstrations.
By the early 1960s, my family joined the "white flight" from city to suburb, a trend common to many big cities--fueled by racism, I'm not proud to admit. Like countless families at the time, my parents were able to buy a house in a new suburban development and afford a middle-class lifestyle despite still holding working-class jobs. I started 9th grade at a Buffalo public high-school, but half-way through my sophomore year, when we moved out of the city, I transferred to Maryvale public high school in the suburb of Cheektowaga.
I was a typical Sputnik generation science geek in middle and high school, but supplemented my reading of science fiction, technical manuals and biographies of scientists, with novels and poetry. I loved 19th Century American authors: Hawthorn, Melville, Poe, Mark Twain and Whitman, but I didn't attempt to write poetry until college. When I started to, it was to impress an English major girlfriend, but I didn't produce anything memorable.
Why did you decide to leave a career in physics to become a poet and essayist?
The anti-Vietnam War movement had a lot to do with it. Opposition to that war reaching a peak of activity my senior year at MIT, 1969-1970. Students and many faculty at MIT and on most other college campuses in greater Boston were demonstrating in the streets, occupying buildings, and generally disrupting "business as usual." Revelations surfaced at MIT about its complicity in the war effort, where almost 80% of research funds came from Defense Department grants. Instead of "The Idea Factory," we began to call MIT "Pentagon on the Charles." My own physics research involved high power lasers as diagnostic tools for a big fusion project. (Back then it was thought that energy from controlled fusion would be achieved in less than a decade. Fifty years later, the same claim is being made today!) It became clear to me as my graduation approached that if I followed the career path to become a physicist in grad school and after, there was a very high likelihood that my research would eventually become weaponized. I didn't want to have anything to do with that, so I dropped out and became an anti-war activist and a teacher.
My final two undergrad semesters at MIT, I enrolled in a poetry workshop taught by Denise Levertov, poet-in-residence that year. That was a transformative experience. Denise and her husband Mitchell Goodman were nationally prominent anti-war activists and spokespeople (see Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night). The other students in the workshop were a remarkable group, drawn from other area colleges, not just MIT. About half of them have become well-published poets. One, Arthur Sze, is the current US poet laureate. Denise welcomed and encouraged my decision not to pursue a career in physics. But, I didn't decide to become a poet overnight, it happened gradually in the years after MIT, when she mentored me and the championed my poetry, eventually introducing to my first full poetry collection (The Buffalo Sequence and Other Poems, Copper Canyon Press 1977).
Could you tell us about writing "The Buffalo Sequence"? Who were some of your inspirations while writing this?
In 1972, I joined a collective of other recent college grads and grad students plus a group of teens to start an alternative high school, The Group School (TGS), in Cambridge. The late '60s and early '70's saw the emergence of a national "free school" movement, a response to deep dissatisfaction with traditional education. Our school's philosophy was that students needed to fully participate in shaping their education, not just the curriculum, but in all aspects of running the school. TGS was tuition free and designated for working-class teens. The students came from the housing projects and surrounding working-class neighborhoods of Cambridge. I taught math, science and creative writing there until I left in 1980 to teach at UMass Boston.
The founding group of students came from North Cambridge, many from the Jefferson Park Housing development. I was 23, then, just 5 or 6 years older than them. Tradition teacher/student roles dissolved at TGS. I came to view the students as my friends and in many ways I learned as much from them as they did from me. Importantly, they put me in touch with my childhood growing up in a Buffalo housing project much like where they lived. Becoming intimate with their lives and reflecting on my childhood was the inspiration for the poems I was writing then, which became The Buffalo Sequence. (I've written a lengthy personal essay about this which is archived in the TGS website https://www.thegroupschool.org/memories-and-memoirs/oirz9b2dtu91itvo489lhggh4p9393-ayz3m )
Do you find inspiration in the Objectivism school of poets?
Yes, indeed, and Doc Williams, too, of course, who they took off from. Did you know that the Objectivist Press in 1934 published the first iteration of Williams' Collected Poems 1921-1931? ABE Books is selling a copy of this rare hardcover for $1184!
I was most directly influenced by Charles Reznikoff and Lorine Niedecker; later by George Oppen, too. Reznikoff's urban poems composed during his daily walks along the streets of Manhattan were a big influence on the flaneur poems in my collection Reconnaissance (Hanging Loose, 2016) and Niedecker influenced the poems that percolate throughout my poetic journals in that same collection. Observational Poetics is the name I've given my work. It draws
directly upon an ancient Song Dynasty text that Resnikoff liked to cite: "Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling." He added the italics.
Reznikoff, who was employed editing law journals, later elaborated on the term, explaining that an Objectivist is “a writer … who does not write directly about his feelings but about what he sees and hears; who is restricted almost to the testimony of a witness in a court of law; and who expresses his feelings indirectly by the selection of his subject matter." George Oppen, for his part, summed up his Objectivist poetics thus: “Thinking with things as they exist,” elaborating upon Williams“ ’No ideas but in things.”
The poet Harvey Shapiro, editor of the New York Times Book Review in the 1960s, who I knew and published, was a second generation Objectivist. He knew them all. Zukovsky was a neighbor of his in Brooklyn Heights. Harvey told me that whenever he visited Reznikoff's apartment in Manhattan, Rezi would press upon him copies of his many self-published books. He had a closet stuffed with them. Reznikoff didn't have publisher until he was 68 when New Directions introduced him to a wide audience with By the Waters of Manhattan. Shapiro described what he learned from his Objectivist mentors once in an interview: “…from them I got the sense that the world did not exist to be exploited in rhetoric. That there was a way of writing about objects, things, landscapes, trees, that gave the object its own life, its own space, while still permitting the poet's imagination to create the poem.”
Could you tell us about writing your most recent poetry collection called "Away Away"?
I keep a journal where, in addition to diary entries, I copy quotations from my reading and jot down observations that I later turn into poems. It was my way of keeping in touch with my poet self during the years I worked full-time, 11 months a year, as an administrator and professor at UMass Boston, while also editing Hanging Loose magazine and books. I'd work up the jottings into poems during summer vacations. All the poems in 'Away' Away were written after I retired from UMass, but nearly all of them were still derived from my journal, which I keep to this day. In addition to individual poems, I've written poetic journals and travelogues influence by Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior, which combines prose descriptions of places he visited and people he encountered, interspersed with haiku. I've freely adapted his haibun form, but instead of haiku, I've turned my epiphanies into short poems. There are two poetic diaries and a travelogue in this collection, plus a "pillow book," modeled on the diary by that name compiled by Sei Shōnagon, a 11th Century court lady to the Chinese Empress Consort Teishi.
The title poem "Away" is a 7 poem sequence describing the remote easternmost corner of Maine, bordering Canada and the Bay of Fundy, where my wife and I vacation for two weeks every August. The final section of the book consists of poems written during and about the COVID pandemic.
Any story you could tell us about Denise Levertov?
I refer you to my memoir My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov (MadHat Press, 2021), which is full of stories about her. One story from the memoir, about her political activism in Boston, circa 1970, can be found online in the Arrowsmith Journal (https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/journal/praxis
What is your opinion on the Russian/Ukraine War?
As someone who bears the surname of a grandfather born in Lviv, I've paid close attention to developments in Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian invasion, and I've written a suite of poems about the ongoing conflict and the Ukrainian resistance. Beltway Editions will publish them as a chapbook titled 'Special' Operation this spring.
Anthony Snyder aptly titled his recent book about the region that encompasses Eastern Poland, Ukraine and adjoining nations "Bloodlands." By his count, from the time of the Nazi's rise to power until the end of WWÀ II, 14 million noncombatants were killed in that region by the combined forces of Hitler and Stalin, including more than 4 million Ukrainians as a result of Stalin's forced collectivization and induced famine (the Holdomor). The current invasion of Ukraine is a reassertion of Russia's ruthless imperial ambitions going back centuries. It is tragic that there have already been an estimated one million Russian casualties and almost as many Ukrainians. Putin is a war criminal. Sadly there is no end in sight to the death and destruction. I fear that Trump's recent gunboat diplomacy in Venezuela and assertion of American hegemony in the Western hemisphere, our so-called "sphere of influence," will further embolden Putin against Ukraine.
What was it like counseling inner city teenagers while you were writing "The Buffalo Sequence"? Did you feel that you learned something from them?
I think I previously answered this but I'll add the following. I shared an apartment in North Cambridge with another Group School teacher, in the same neighborhood where most of our students had grown up and still lived. The Jefferson Park housing development was just a few blocks down the street. Traditional teacher/student roles didn't exist at TGS. Students called me by my first name. After school hours, I often hung out with them. If one of the students played hooky for more than a day, my roommate or I would go find them and persuade her or him to come back. If one of them got arrested for petty theft, breaking and entering, or car theft, we'd get the call to come bail them out and later served as character witnesses in court. If one of them was kicked out of his home by parents, we took him in to assure he didn't end up living on the streets, often for just a day or two until things were resolved, but other times for extended periods. Fifty years later, I'm still in regular contact with quite a few of my former students. I find it shocking to realize that some of them are now in their 70s!
You are also a literary editor and publisher. You joined West End Press as an editor and later Hanging Loose Press. Could you tell us about editing "When We Were Countries: Outstanding Poems and Stories by High School Writers".
John Crawford started West End Magazine circa 1969 out of the West End bar, which he frequented as a grad student at Columbia. When he moved to Boston in late 1972, he immediately looked up Denise Levertov, whom he'd previously met in New York. I as introduced to John in Denise' kitchen over lunch. John published a few of my poems in West End, then proposed to devote the entire next issue to my complete "Buffalo Sequence," paired with a book-length poem by Richard Edelman, another protégé of Levertov's. That double chapbook appeared in 1974. Subsequently, John invited me to join West End Press, which began to publish books as well as the magazine. It's mission was to publish neglected working-class and minority writers. I stayed as an editor with West End until 1979, by then John had moved the operation to the Midwest and eventually settled in Albuquerque.
I was invited to join Hanging Loose Press as an editor in1980, replacing Emmett Jarrett, one of the founders. The remaining three founding editors, Ron Schreiber, Robert Hershon and
Dick Lourie were all 10 or more years older. HL magazine began as loose, mimeographed pages inserted in an envelope with art on the cover, the it literary hung loose, hence the name. That format remained for 28 issues. The current issue, #118, is an 150 page, perfect bound, glossy publication with an 8 page color art insert, a format we adopted over three decades ago. Hanging Loose, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, is the oldest independent literary press still in existence. Since 1976 we've published books as well as a magazine, almost 300 titles to date, primarily poetry.
Every issue of Hanging Loose magazine features a special section devoted to high school-age writers. These teen poets consistently produce mature, well crafted, stunning work. One year, Adrienne Rich selected three of them to be included in the Best American Poetry annual. Every 10-15 years, we go back and cull the best teen poems that first appeared in the magazine and compile a "best of" anthology. When We Were Countries is the fourth such anthology. The others are Smart Like Me, Bullseye and Shooting the Rat, each of which received glowing reviews.
.What are you currently working on, Mark? Any future plans and projects?
I'm compiling a "new and selected poems of witness and resistance," i.e., a selection of my political poems spanning four decades. I've also written and published many essays and memoirs over the years. I hope to find the time to gather them for book publication in the near future.
***** John Wisniewski is a freelance writer who has written for Paraphilia Magazine, L.A. Review of Books, Toronto Review of Books, Small Press Review, Chiron Review and now KGB Litbar. He currently resides in West Babylon NY.
