Doug Holder interviews poet Aine Griffin

Red Letter Poem #96

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.  To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

                                                                                                          – Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #96

Mundane. . .workaday. . .humdrum. . .prosaic. . .pedestrian: we’ve an expansive vocabulary for what we take to be the commonplace – most of it tinged with dissatisfaction if not outright disdain.  Perhaps it’s human nature: that the daily experiences, even those we once prized, can quickly tarnish beneath habit and disregard. . .unless, that is, some change in our circumstance drives those boring presences out of reach and makes us keenly aware of how sweet the water actually tasted, now that the proverbial well has run dry.

 

Jennifer Garfield (who, I am happy to report, has become an Arlingtonian in recent years) has published poetry in such journals as The Threepenny Review, Frontier Poetry, Sugarhouse Review, and Salamander – and she recently received The Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing Parent-Writer Fellowship.   She is performing one of the vital tasks we depend upon from all cherished artists: to cast even the ordinary of our days in sharp relief so that we might feel once again the extraordinary beauty in the simplest of moments.  She does this by setting her poem in the most perfunctory of situations (grocery shopping) and framing her cascade of thoughts in fairly unpoetic diction (“Have you ever considered/ how everyone has a face?”)  But as her mind suddenly seems overwhelmed with the simple delight of being a human among her fellow homo sapiens, we begin to find ourselves swept away by her enthusiasm (“Show me any beast// and I will see the prince inside.”)  And all it took to prompt this epiphany was. . .two years of a global pandemic and soul-crushing isolation.

 

I heard William B. Irvine speaking recently about his book The Stoic Challenge, trying to make the worldview of these old Roman philosophers accessible (and, in fact, vital) for a modern audience.  We tend to summarize the Stoics as being people who suppressed their emotions, but Irvine says that couldn’t be further from the truth.  It’s only the negative emotions (anger, jealousy, despair) from which this philosophical stance seeks to unburden us, while fully embracing tranquility, contentment, and delight.  His rule of thumb: “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”  Choose your own life rather than dreaming of a more perfect (and hypothetical) life-to-come.  He suggests the technique of “negative visualization” – a brief thought experiment where you imagine your life without one of those ordinary elements in order to have its precious nature instantly burnished again.  He reminds us, “Covid-19 is a kind of brutal substitute for negative visualization” because we are all actually experiencing the long months without: a window seat at our favorite café, a crowded dance floor in a local club, a tableful of family or friends laughing over a home-cooked meal – or even the freedom to reach out spontaneously past the shield of a mask and just touch someone else’s face.

 

I was standing in line the other day at my own local market (while maintaining a respectful distance, of course), and remembered Jennifer’s upcoming Red Letter contribution.  I stared hard at all those pairs of eyes hovering just above the mask-line – and I had the urge to. . .well, tell them about this poem I’d just read, to offer them a copy, to remind them how utterly astonishing it is to recall – not what we, at the moment, lack but all that relentless beauty that remains close at hand.  And so I have.

 

 

 

Faces

 

 

I’ve been thinking about all the faces today,

and at Market Basket I had an overwhelming desire

 

to reach out and touch your face, to feel 

your cool skin, your rough unshaven chin, 

 

your fat rouged cheeks. Have you ever considered

how everyone has a face? I am suddenly in love

 

with all the faces, and isn’t there a phrase­­–– pimples

and all? That’s where I am today. Show me any beast

 

and I will see the prince inside. It’s not that difficult

to love a face. Now I am staring in a mirror, but for once

 

without judgment. I have no regret for my wrinkles, my nose. 

Today, pores seem like a miracle. We survive. I like seeing you, 

 

stocking up on chicken broth and chocolate bars, walking

through the picked-over aisles of a world gone mad, 

 

or good. I’d like to keep you safe. I’d like to touch your face. 

 

 

                       –– Jennifer Garfield

 

 

 

The Red Letters 3.0: A New Beginning (Perhaps)   

At the outset of the Covid pandemic, when fear was at its highest, the Red Letter Project was intended to remind us of community: that, even isolated in our homes, we could still face this challenge together.  As Arlington’s Poet Laureate, I began sending out a poem of comfort each Friday, featuring the fine talents from our town and its neighbors.  Because I enlisted the partnership of seven local arts and community organizations, distribution of the poems spread quickly – and, with subscribers sharing and re-posting the installments, soon we had readers, not only throughout the Commonwealth, but across the country.  And I delighted in the weekly e-mails I’d receive with praise for the poets; as one reader recently commented: “You give me the gift of a quiet, contemplative break—with something to take away and reflect on.”

 

Then our circumstance changed dramatically again: following the murder of George Floyd, the massive social and political unrest, and the national economic catastrophe, the distress of the pandemic was magnified.  Red Letter 2.0 announced that I would seek out as diverse a set of voices as I could find – from Massachusetts and beyond – so that their poems might inspire, challenge, deepen the conversation we were, by necessity, engaged in.

 

Now, with widespread vaccination, an economic rebound, and a shift in the political landscape, I intend to help this forum continue to evolve – Red Letter 3.0.  For the last 15 months, I’ve heard one question again and again: when will we get back our old lives?  It may pain us to admit it, but that is little more than a fantasy.  Our lives have been altered irrevocably – not only our understanding of how thoroughly interdependent we are, both locally and globally, but how fragile and utterly precious is all that we love.  Weren’t you bowled over recently by how good it felt just to hug a friend or family member?  Or to walk unmasked through a grocery, noticing all the faces?  So I think the question we must wrestle with is this: knowing what we know, how will we begin shaping our new life?  Will we quickly forget how grateful we felt that strangers put themselves at risk, every day, so that we might purchase milk and bread, ride the bus to work, or be cared for by a doctor or nurse?  Will we slip back into our old drowse and look away from the pain so many are forced to endure – in this, the wealthiest nation on the planet?  Will we stop noticing those simple beauties all around us?  The poet Mary Oliver said it plainly: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  I will continue to offer RLP readers the work of poets who are engaged in these questions, hoping their voices will fortify all of ours.

 

Two of our partner sites will continue re-posting each Red Letter weekly: the YourArlington news blog (https://www.yourarlington.com/easyblog/entry/28-poetry/3091-redletter-123121), and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene (http://dougholder.blogspot.com).  If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to: steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com.

 

Sarah Alcott Anderson, We Hold On To What We Can.

 

Sarah Alcott Anderson, We Hold On To What We Can. Loom Press, 2021. 119pp. $20.00

Review by Ruth Hoberman


Sarah Alcott Anderson’s debut collection, We Hold On To What We Can, returns again and again to the message of its title. Children grow up, family and old friends die, the places we love change. What can we retain from the passage of time? Anderson is the daughter of a photographer, and the poems are charged with some of the emotional aura of a family album: moments caught—vivid, but trailing clouds of loss.

Anderson, who has an MFA from Warren Wilson College, chairs the English department at Berwick Academy, in Maine. She and her husband live in New Hampshire with their two children, where they run the Word Barn, which hosts readings and workshops. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including North American Review and Raleigh Review.

The challenge of writing about the passage of time, of course, is figuring out how to avoid sentimentality. Anderson does this by using precise language and (mainly) short lines; the poems feel restrained, understated, even reticent. Transitions and context are minimal; moments and images are juxtaposed without elaboration. “Let parts of your world/speak to each other,” the speaker says in “Come Here,” quoting advice an artist once gave her. Or, as she says in “Sweet Gum Seed Pods,” “We hold on to what we can./My son’s hair is thick, golden,/a wilderness.”

The poems are grouped into four sections. The first focuses on childhood; the second losses (great uncle, friend, grandfather, older brother); the third more recent relationships; and finally “Kaleidoscope” addresses the mind-bending complexity of time. But themes and images recur throughout: in particular, as a poem from the first section, “Beginnings & Tornadoes,” has it, “It’s about Time”:

It’s always about time. Strings of little lights

and paper lanterns, the shimmering city over there,




the sirens over there. All those lives

in all those windows.

The poem mourns the long absence of a childhood friend: “Why/did it take us this long? My children have filled me./They have filled me. I should have called you.” The repetition suggests the way children both satisfy and consume. Now, at last, they talk and remember: “girls racing headlong toward the magic/and the hurt. No one could have stopped us./We had salt in our hair and we were fast.”

Other poems make similar efforts to recreate past moments or bridge distances between people. “Let me put you there,” “MacMahan Island” opens, inviting the reader into the speaker’s past, in this case a church service in Maine when the speaker and her twin sister are five. But we never quite get there. The moment hasn’t just slipped away; it was illusory to begin with, infused with a future that will undo it. “In two years, our parents/will separate. All that is, seen and unseen.” This snippet from the Nicene Creed appears as part of the church service, but also as a reminder that, much as her minister father might insist on the reality of the “world to come,” any single moment is inseparable from the ones preceding and coming after them. The speaker and her sister pretend they are lost:

I had heard about lost explorers—shipwrecks.

Where were our parents

those afternoons? Just behind or ahead of us,

I am sure. We are always turning,

responding to someone calling a name.

The sisters feel secure enough to want to pretend they’re lost; someone will always call a name. But in a sense they really are lost—caught up, as we all are, in fantasies and a future we can’t foresee.

To compensate for these uncertainties and losses, the poems celebrate love—not romantic love so much as a relatedness manifest through gesture. In “Turning to Go,” for example, the speaker stands behind her naked three-year-old son as he climbs a rock:

I stand behind him,

my arms ready. I imagine

holding my arms this way

for the rest of my life,

as if the space

I create with my limbs

will endure

his turning to go . . .

This idea that the mother’s gesture might create something enduring—combining memory and love in a single, embodied manifestation—strikes me as strangely powerful.

Such a gesture turns up in other poems as well. In “Turn, It’s Been Three Decades,” the speaker remembers drawing on her children’s backs: “If I could have traced my finger gently in circles/along your skin forever, girls, if I could have,” she says longingly. In “Moonstone,” the speaker opens, “If I could, I’d press my thumb along you/like I do across this smooth moon necklace…” And “Come Here” ends:

This drive has become




everything I can’t say

to you. In slow, half-moon

strokes, I will




wipe your face

with a warm cloth.

This is all I can promise.

The gesture compensates for what can’t be expressed or reconstituted.

What “drive” is the speaker referring to? The book is framed as a journey by the poems that open and close it. The first poem, “Caution,” warns “Do not run/on this trail.” And the last, a prose poem, “Free Advice,” is set on a highway: don’t mistake the taillights you see for the windows of a hostel, the poem warns us. We may be invited into the poems as co-constructors of past moments, but we’ll never quite arrive anywhere. “Maybe I’ll meet you in the dark,” “Free Advice” concludes, evoking Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass ends, “I stop somewhere waiting for you.” But Anderson isn’t as sure as Whitman about the meetup: “Maybe I’ll meet you in the dark, but you have to keep walking for now. Think of the gestures we all misread, slough them off, step over them. Keep going.” We will never get the whole picture—of the past or of each other—but perhaps the gestures of affection offered by these poems suffice.

Somerville writer Steven Beeber: Finding the bagels, knishes and schmaltz in Punk Rock

 

I caught up with Somerville writer Steven Beeber, author of Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk. This study of the intersection of Punk Rock and Jewish culture must make for a very interesting read. I don't know if any Punk Rock dirges have made it into a hymnal yet, or can be interpreted through Talmudic Law.... but hey, as the Bard wrote, " Ah, Sweet mystery of life."

How has living in Somerville been for your writing life. Do you think it is a good place for creatives?




Somerville is an excellent place to be a writer. I’ve heard it said that there are more writers here per capita than anywhere else in the country. I’m not sure that’s true (I’m not a statistician), but I do know that in a field that can often be lonely and isolating, that there is a genuine community here, which is so important. It’s not Paris in the ‘20s, maybe, but the cafes are plentiful and the gatherings regular, so it isn’t far off. Also, my wife and I both have writing “sheds” in our backyard, so that’s yet another plus. On a more serious note, it should be said that the institutional support from the city itself is amazing. The Somerville Arts Council, among other institutions, is pivotal to providing not just support, but a forum in which writers can reach an audience.



How in the world is Jewish culture reflected in of all things-- Punk Rock?

Jewish culture, as opposed to Judaism the religion, is deeply embedded in Punk, especially the original version of Punk that came out of New York City. Needless to say, New York is home to many Jews, and this was especially true in the 1950s and ‘60s, the period during which the Punks came of age. The character of Jewish culture—ironic, humorous, attuned to the injustices inflicted upon the marginalized—is all but synonymous with Punk. Add to that a preoccupation with neurosis, anxiety, and, above all, Nazis, and you have all the ingredients to birth a new rock movement. Ultimately, I would say that Punk was a reaction to the Holocaust by the first generation that was raised in its aftermath.


Did the Ramones, John Zorn, Lou Reed, the Dictators, etc... ever talk extensively about their Jewish background in regards to their music?

Only John Zorn did before I approached them about my book. His Radical Jewish Culture movement took the unspoken elements of NY Punk to an explicit level, which makes sense since he is categorized as Post-Punk more than Punk. But in regard to the others, all of them did speak about their backgrounds extensively on record for my book. Tommy Ramone (born Tamas Erdelyi), for instance, was raised in anti-Semitic Hungary until coming to NY as a child, and his idea for what became the Ramones bore all the hallmarks of his conflicted feelings about being an outsider. In many ways, Tommy was the mastermind behind the band, the original manager who insisted that they look and behave a certain way, the one who came up with their signature drum sound and joined the band because no one else could be taught to play it, the one who, most pivotally, insisted against the other members protests, that Joey be the lead singer. While Dee Dee and Johnny felt that Joey was the opposite of what a rock star should look like, Tommy knew that it was this very quality that made Joey perfect. As I say in my book, this look was about as Jewish as it could be, to the point where Joey could have passed for an anti-Semitic caricature in the official Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer. In regards to The Dictators (all of whom were Jewish), the lead singer, Handsome Dick Manitoba and the original songwriter Richard Meltzer, were especially forthcoming about the connection, though others such as the producer, Sandy Pearlman (of “Mo cowbell” fame) and lead guitarist and band founder, Andy Shernoff, were clearly influenced by their backgrounds. Lou Reed, of course, wrote indirectly about his Jewishness from the beginning and more explicitly about it near the end. “The Black Angel’s Death Song,” from the Velvet Underground’s debut, appears to be about the killing fields of Holocaust-ravaged Poland, and “Egg Cream,” from one of his last albums, extolls the magic of that “Jewish elixir” that was so much a part of his New York Jewish boyhood. Reed also took part annually in the gathering known as The Downtown Seder, a hip Passover gathering organized by the Knitting Factory founder Michael Dorf, in which Reed would read the traditional Four Questions attributed to the Wicked Child. Many other members of the Punk scene also spoke at length about their Jewish backgrounds, including, among others, Lenny Kaye of The Patti Smith Group, Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs, Alan Vega of Suicide, and Punk manager and impresario, Danny Fields (to whom Legs McNeil dedicates his oral history of Punk Please Kill Me.) My book, The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, contains profiles based on extensive interviews with almost every early Punk rocker of importance.


The Punk Rock scene originated in the Lower East Side of New York City, once the home of many Jewish immigrants in the early part of the last century. This was fertile ground for the Jews starting out in America. How did this neighborhood help to birth this new genre of rock music?




I actually published an essay about this very subject in a collection called Jews: A People’s History of the Lower East Side. In it, I posited that the LES was pivotal to the burgeoning Punk scene. Not only did Hilly Kristal (born Hillel Kristal on a Zionist Socialist collective in New Jersey) choose that location for CBGB, the club that became the ground zero for the scene, Tuli (Naphtali) Kupferberg of The Fugs and Lou Reed of The Velvet Underground both performed there regularly during the late ‘60s when future punks such as Chris Stein of Blondie religiously went to see them. Tuli remained there most of his life, and Richard Hell (Richard Meyers) fled there from anti-Semitic Lexington, Kentucky as a teenager. I could go on, but the bottom-line is that many of those who laid the groundwork for Punk and many of those who brought it to fruition, both lived and worked there, and even if they didn’t, they were influenced by its volatile mix of gritty urban drama and theatrical liberal schmaltz. It’s no mistake that CGBG was within spitting distance of Ratners, Katz’s and the Second Avenue Deli.


I am Jewish, and have a weakness for the Concord, Grossinger's style of Jewish Borscht Belt humor. How did this play out in this music scene?




The Borscht Belt is at the heart of everything. The Punk rockers as teens idolized Lenny Bruce, who began in that world before becoming too risqué to continue there. But other Borscht Belt comics, while tamer on the surface (at least in terms of four letter words), still held the same attitudes as Bruce and dealt with them in the same way. So much of Borscht Belt humor is a coded attack on the mores of polite society, a sendup of the stuffy, hypocritical world in which Jews found themselves. Think, in an earlier era, Groucho doing his number on society doyenne Margaret Dumont. At the same time, this humor was also self-directed, a way of defusing the attack through self-deprecation that at times hinted at genuine internalized self-loathing. Jerry Lewis and his arrested development act, Henry Youngman and his “take my wife, please,” Groucho himself and his “I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me as a member.” Remember, too, though that Groucho is also renowned for his reply to a restricted club that denied his half-Jewish daughter admittance: “If she keeps out of the water from the waist up, maybe you could let her in the pool?”

I don't know if my old Rabbi would agree with your thesis. Has the book been used for serious study in the Jewish academy?


Yes. But I wouldn’t say it’s limited to the Jewish academy. I have been asked to speak on the topic at conferences and universities around the world, and in fact am pretty well known in Germany. You know the phrase, “I’m big in Japan?” I often say I’m big in the other former Axis power.

Red Letter Poem #95

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.  To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

                                                                                                          – Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #95

What should I not say about this poem? 

 

Because, when reading the work of Rae Armantrout – author of ten poetry collections that have brought her such honors as the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship – some of the richest moments are triggered by what is not included within the verse yet somehow materializes in the gaps between lines or even in the magnetic zone between two words.  In the house that is Rae’s consciousness, it seems the walls are paper-thin; strains of poignant music are interwoven with bits of familial patter, pop culture tidbits, solitary reflection – all bleeding through and interacting on the page.  And because of this, her poems can make us feel the current speeding along the skeins of neurons as thoughts leap across various areas of the brain.  In an Armantrout poem, creativity is connectivity and, reading our way inside, we thrill to see where the signals will lead us.

 

Rae was one of the early West Coast practitioners of Language poetry – something of a cross between verse, philosophy, and rarified semiotics.  But unlike many of her New York counterparts, her poems always possessed a sort of ingrained lyricism, and imagery that was less abstract and more intimately connected to our workaday (and contradictory) selves.  As she herself explained, “you can hold the various elements of my poems in your mind at one time, but those elements may be hissing and spitting at one another.”  Today’s poem will appear in her new collection, Finalists, coming from Wesleyan Press early in March.  In some of her recent work, those context-shifting sparks have been muted a bit in the service of a deeper emotionality – and yet we still feel ourselves stepping lightly, sensing the tremors beneath our feet.  So when she says: “I’ll miss you so much when you’re gone”, does she mean the leaves?  The day?  The autumn?  This thinking-aloud on the page?  Or is she seeing right through the page to fix upon our eyes passing over each line, our interaction (our very lives) fleeting?  Saying would only still that tuning fork her words have struck; not saying – even to myself – allows me to feel the vibrations rippling out across my inner darkness where thoughts begin to move in sympathy.  I have the sense I am continually homing-in; and then, exiting the poem, I can see my own home in sharper relief.     

 

I think this points to what, in the past, our educational system has gotten wrong about the teaching of poetry: it conveyed the idea that there was a right answer concerning a poem – an astute and demonstrably correct interpretation that we too would reach – if only we were smart enough.  And who (but those of us already irretrievably addicted to this material) would want to embrace such a calculating intelligence test?  We sons and daughters of Walt Whitman are more likely to believe there are a multiplicity of right answers at work inside any poem containing real power – an overdetermined set of meanings, neither random nor trivial, quietly arising from within the text.  Or put another way: there is indeed a right answer for a poem such as “Crescendo”, and it’s the one that poet and reader alike will conceive of – and continually reconceive – according to their evolving hearts and the passing days.  This is the sense I get from reading Rae’s poetry: that I can shake free from the habits of mind, even if only for a few minutes, and better understand our human circumstance.  In a time when the pandemic has wholly reshaped how we think about our lives, I often feel my mind traversing the suddenly-unstable, then gradually-luminous earth beneath my feet.  As the poet Rilke urged, standing beneath Apollo’s vacant gaze: “You must revise your life.”  I find the work of poets like Ms. Armantrout helps in that re-envisioning.

 

 

 

Crescendo

 

 

   The Light 1

 

Three o’clock, about two hours of light left,

glorious on the ornamental pear,

some leaves grizzled dark red.

The large leaves of what we think is

mock orange— yellow again, as when they first

appeared— and will soon fall.

 

I’ll miss you so much when you’re gone.

I’d miss you if I looked away

or if a cloud covered the sun.

I miss this moment

as it goes on happening.

 

 

   The Light 2

 

That little tree,

leaves now grizzled

gold and dark

red, is past

all transaction––

stiff in crescendo,

praising no one.

 

The gold my people

razed the world for­­––

 

cashed out there.

 

 

  –– Rae Armantrout

 

 

 

The Red Letters 3.0: A New Beginning (Perhaps)   

At the outset of the Covid pandemic, when fear was at its highest, the Red Letter Project was intended to remind us of community: that, even isolated in our homes, we could still face this challenge together.  As Arlington’s Poet Laureate, I began sending out a poem of comfort each Friday, featuring the fine talents from our town and its neighbors.  Because I enlisted the partnership of seven local arts and community organizations, distribution of the poems spread quickly – and, with subscribers sharing and re-posting the installments, soon we had readers, not only throughout the Commonwealth, but across the country.  And I delighted in the weekly e-mails I’d receive with praise for the poets; as one reader recently commented: “You give me the gift of a quiet, contemplative break—with something to take away and reflect on.”

 

Then our circumstance changed dramatically again: following the murder of George Floyd, the massive social and political unrest, and the national economic catastrophe, the distress of the pandemic was magnified.  Red Letter 2.0 announced that I would seek out as diverse a set of voices as I could find – from Massachusetts and beyond – so that their poems might inspire, challenge, deepen the conversation we were, by necessity, engaged in.

 

Now, with widespread vaccination, an economic rebound, and a shift in the political landscape, I intend to help this forum continue to evolve – Red Letter 3.0.  For the last 15 months, I’ve heard one question again and again: when will we get back our old lives?  It may pain us to admit it, but that is little more than a fantasy.  Our lives have been altered irrevocably – not only our understanding of how thoroughly interdependent we are, both locally and globally, but how fragile and utterly precious is all that we love.  Weren’t you bowled over recently by how good it felt just to hug a friend or family member?  Or to walk unmasked through a grocery, noticing all the faces?  So I think the question we must wrestle with is this: knowing what we know, how will we begin shaping our new life?  Will we quickly forget how grateful we felt that strangers put themselves at risk, every day, so that we might purchase milk and bread, ride the bus to work, or be cared for by a doctor or nurse?  Will we slip back into our old drowse and look away from the pain so many are forced to endure – in this, the wealthiest nation on the planet?  Will we stop noticing those simple beauties all around us?  The poet Mary Oliver said it plainly: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  I will continue to offer RLP readers the work of poets who are engaged in these questions, hoping their voices will fortify all of ours.

 

Two of our partner sites will continue re-posting each Red Letter weekly: the YourArlington news blog (https://www.yourarlington.com/easyblog/entry/28-poetry/3091-redletter-123121), and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene (http://dougholder.blogspot.com).  If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to: steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com.