Judah Leblang: A Middle-Aged, Jewish, Gay Man Chronicles his life in Prose and a Play.

Judah Leblang

Judah Leblang: A middle-aged, Jewish, Gay Man Chronicles his life in Prose and a Play.

By Doug Holder

  I got an email from a writer acquaintance Judah Leblang. It seems that his department at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. (that he worked at for years) transferred to Endicott College in Beverly, Mass.--where I teach. He also told me that he has developed a one man play based on his memoir (My Place: One Man's Journey from Cleveland to Boston and Beyond)  titled One Man's Journey through the Middle Ages. His memoir chronicles his youth in Cleveland, Ohio during the 60's and 70's, his attachment to that down-at-the-heels city-- and his life as a Jewish, gay single man. The show explores Leblang's fear, and loathing in Provincetown, Mass. (A gay mecca) one summer-- his rather sudden hearing loss, and the universal themes of aging and loss.

Here is an excerpt from Leblang's memoir about his grandmother, Cleveland, and the world beyond the broad lawns and narrow minds of the suburbs:

"I knew my parents didn't like to go into the city. My mother saw Cleveland as a cauldron of riots, crime and burned out neighborhoods, a place to avoid. Still, on a sunny day in May 1968, I was an eleven-year-old boy who knew that Cleveland was full of wonders like planes and trains and buildings that pierced the sky, miracles my grandmother and I would share like her warm pastry. And so my grandmother and I stood quietly as my mother drove off, back to the safety of the eastern suburbs.

Waiting for the bus, Nanny's maple tree rustling above us, I thought of other times, other adventures with my grandmother, when I was five, seven, eight. On special weekends, she would baby-sit for my brothers and I, bringing her pastry and her Jewish rye bread, her cough drops and powdery scent into our suburban home. At five, before the accident, I'd sing and dance for her entertainment, repeating rhymes I'd learned in nursery school-"Mary had a little lamb," "Humpty Dumpty," and later, "My Country 'Tis of Thee," which I'd warbled at a school assembly in Kindergarten in my thin childish voice. Later, I'd tell my grandmother she was beautiful, promise to marry her when I grew up. According to my mother, I was a little khnifenik, Yiddish for a "flatterer."

 

  I used to read Leblang's column in the Somerville Journal where he held court from 1999 to 2001. Leblang lives in Medford now, but he was a denizen of Teele Square in Somerville. Presently Leblang is a columnist for Bay Windows- a gay newspaper in Boston. His slice-of-life stories have been heard on NPR and many other radio stations. Leblang counts Somerville writers Dan Gerwitz (Formerly of the Boston Herald) and Randy Ross (Founder of Media Chowder--a networking group for writers) as friends, and the trio used to perform in the area with a piece about being middle aged.

 I asked Leblang why he feels he has a story that is worth being told. He said: “Memoir writers have been accused of being navel gazers. Hey...I am not Bill Clinton, or Nelson Mandela. But I feel I have a story that people can relate to. We all have to make choices; we all grow old; well all have to deal with loses." And Leblang tells his story with a winning combination of humor and pathos. Of being a single gay man

 of a certain age, Leblang said: "I am part of a subculture of middle-aged gay men that belong to a culture that puts youth and looks at a premium. It is challenging to meet someone near my own age for a possible relationship."

 Leblang will be leading a memoir writing workshop this fall at Somerville Public Library in Davis Square, and will be performing  his play in the area--check his website  http://judahleblang.com for more information.

Review of Thurston Moore's Alabama Wildman

Thurston Moore

Review of Thurston Moore's Alabama Wildman
By Ian Thal    

Thurston Moore, better known for his musical output, also writes poetry and prose that are at once both experimental and accessible. Review originally appeared in the 11/20/2001 edition of Ibbetson Street Press Update, a free email newsletter covering small press literature.

alabama wildman, Thurston Moore (111 pages, hardcover. Water Row Press, P.O. Box 438, Sudbury, MA 01776, 2000) $18.95

Thurston Moore, best known for his work with the highly influential and innovative “no-wave” band Sonic Youth, demonstrates the same free ranging experimentalism with words that has defined his songwriting and guitar playing over the course of his musical career.

While much of his writing is concerned with the details of everyday life in bohemia common to predecessors amongst the Beats and the New York School, Moore’s everyday life includes being a iconoclastic figure in an important avant-garde movement that bridged the gap between the youth counter-culture of punk rock and compositional uses of noise, prepared instruments, chaos, and collage.

His unpretentious willingness to play with the sounds of words, typography, and form is constantly entertaining and provides a new experience on every page. Just as music and noise are integrally joined when Moore straps on a guitar or enters the recording studio, his poetry includes its own noise within. A good example is in the poem, “boredoms” which should accurately represent the Osaka, Japan-based ensemble of the same name to anyone who has attended their concerts or heard their recordings:

boredoms are
no-self WORLD sex-free (lanterns) ON
!??!bBOBOBOOBOBOBBBO øø ø ø ø ø øøøøøøøøøØiØØØiØ
tronix to the phew-ture...--
there is no stop sign when intuition is creative JUICE
HARP::::goddblesss:::
smoder(obo)redoms19998

Thurston Moore’s world simply demands more freedom than most writers allow themselves.

Moore’s background as a musician is also reflected in his sense of meter and rhyme as in his portrait of bassist Mike Watt in “free city rhythm”:

Pushing his broom into zoom
Watt comes to terms w/his room
talking-- to plato “the punk”
two fingers to his chest
(+ THE WHO knows to
rest?)

Even when using more conventional forms, Moore’s writing comes across as fresh. In his poem “contents,” which at first sight looks like a table of contents until one realizes that the lines are not titles of the poems but rather a Burroughsian “cut-up” or collage of phrases found on the pieces that follow. One is forced to wonder if the “about the author:” in the back, the “by thurston moore:” in the front, and even the “index” and appendices are also poems.

The prose and interviews that round out the book give a more literal glimpse into the music scene: the author is interviewed for ‘zines, he meets his musical heroes, he describes himself as nineteen year old guitarist in New York during the late seventies. Here we get a glimpse not of Moore, but of Thurston, a music fan who has not quite overcome the thrill that his idols, Patti Smith, Lydia Lunch, Richard Hell, and Lenny Kaye have become his friends.

A particularly engaging prose piece is “in the mind of the bourgeois reader” in which Moore narrates a sexual encounter with a younger musician and fan named Jackie. While the sex and the use of drugs are explicit, there is nothing pornographic or exploitative; instead there is a sweet amazement at the simple joys that can come from a brief encounter. Thurston is not being heroically transgressive, he is vulnerable, and afraid of falling deeply in love with someone he barely knows. This wide-eyed innocence also appears in a number of his poems such as “punks, flagrant”:

“my name is bug” she says wet
in the eyes, fucked, foamed
“clear as mud”
he feels to hisself
(awash’d post-cum soft
‘pon hot basket tum)

Thurston Moore’s writing, like his music, is both experimental and accessible, making him something of a kindred spirit with e.e. cummings (especially the cummings who does not appear in middle school and high school textbooks.) At the same time it is also an important resource for anyone interested in the early New York punk rock and no-wave music scenes.

Ian Thal
Jamaica Plain, MA

These Hands I Know: African-American Writers on Family- Edited by Afaa Michael Weaver

 

These Hands I Know: African-American Writers on Family- Edited by Afaa Michael Weaver
  REVIEW By Doug Holder  
 

These Hands I Know: African-American Writers on Family. Edited by Afaa M. Weaver. 247pps. ( Sarabande Books 2234 Dundee Rd. Suite 200 Louisville, Ky 40205) $16.95 2002.

So often in contemporary literature we tend to pigeonhole writers into categories by ethnicity, race, religion, etc... What we forget is that good literature addresses the whole corpus of the life experience. It is limiting if we view novels, poetry and short stories as denizens of a particular literary ghetto. Poet, writer, and editor of this collection of essays concerning the black family, Afaa Michael Weaver, writes: "African-Americans like anyone else- experience personal trauma within the family, but a trauma that is also complicated by the symbiotic weaving of racism with the familal and personal losses."

The writing in this collection deals with personal, familial, and societal aspects of the black family, with an eye on the effects of racism on this fragile institution. The book examines family on a universal level, on a racial level, and on a personal level. Like most collections of this nature it is a mixed-bag. For instance, Harvard University's famed Afro-American scholar Henry Louis Gate's portrait of his extended family is informative but the writing was surprisingly flat and pedestrian for a man of his generous talents.

Many of the essayists in this work write about strong matriarchs. Gwendolyn Brooks in her piece, KEZIAH, reports of a mother who was not emotive but strong and up to the challenges of an often unforgiving world: "Keziah Corinne Wims Brooks was and is a courageous woman. It has never occurred to her that she should slink away from any challenges of life. The challenges of life-- the agonies, sorrows, the million and ten fustrations, perplexities...she has looked at with a calculating eye, has judged, has catalogued. She has tamed what had to be tamed, what could, what should be tamed." Brooks pens a compelling portrait of an iron-willed mother. The essays in this collection often reflect on strong women who are the glue that keeps disparate parts together.

On thing that " White America" has done to Afro-Americans is to make them ultra-sensitive to their skin color. It is interesting to read what trauma folks went through if they were just a shade too dark. Honoree F. Jeffers reports that her grandmother was less than proud of her Jeffer's mother: " My mother says that from the beginning mother was never proud of her. She was too dark, her nose to broad, her hair too nappy. Grandma found no pleasure in being the mother of a foolish dark girl..."

There is another well-done essay by Alice Walker that deals with the roles Black women and men play, that often painfully mimic the gender roles of white society.

This collection is an informative sociological, and literary study of the black family. More than a few of the essays far exceed the creativity of a standard expository composition. This work will appeal to many segments of a diverse society.

* This review appeared in Spare Change News.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/ Somerville, Ma./Nov. 2002

Sixty-Seven Poems For Downtrodden Saints. Jack Micheline. Editor: Matt Gonzalez.

Sixty-Seven Poems For Downtrodden Saints. Jack Micheline. Editor: Matt Gonzalez.  (FMSBW, 1999 www.jackmicheline.com) Dist. by The Jack Micheline Foundation for the Arts.  POBOX 30153 Tuscon, AZ.  85751 No
Price.  238pages.

I guess I am privileged. I know, have published, have interviewed and exchanged letters with a well-known North Beach poet, who harks back to the days of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and others of that ilk, A.D. Winans. Winans, poet and friend to the late, great Beat poet, Jack Micheline, sent me a collection of Micheline's poems, "Sixty-Seven Poems for Downtrodden Saints." Charles Bukowski said of Micheline in a letter to A.D. Winans:

" Jack loves the sun...and the horse and the streets, and he loves the strong and the common people. Jack is the last of the holy preachers sailing down Broadway singing the song...He's fought hard...sleeping on people's rugs, sponging, playing the clown for a night's sleep, a piece of stale bacon..."

 

From reading Micheline's work it seemed that the Buk hit it right on the head. His work is generously laced with booze, "broads", the horses and hounds, the down-and-out, the gone-to-seed, the neer-do-well, the wail of the sax and sex, in short, a long funny/mournful  Blues song.

Micheline was concerned with the plight of the common man. He was in the tradition of Kerouac, living as the vagabond-bohemian bard. He never pandered to the academics, and his poetry lacked any hint of pretense.

Jack Micheline (aka Harvey Martin Silver)  was born on Nov. 6, 1929 in the Bronx, N.Y.  During the 1950's he spent years traversing the country and working Blue Collar jobs.

He was everything from a dishwasher to a street singer. His first poem published under the Micheline name was STEPS in Le Roi Jones' magazine YUGEN (1958). He was included in two early Beat anthologies, THE BEATS by Seymour Krim and THE BEAT SCENE edited by Elias Wilentz. He had several collections of poetry published including: I KISS ANGELS (1964) and NORTH OF MANHATTAN: 1954-1975. He self-published his first collection of stories: IN THE BRONX AND OTHER STORIES in 1965. In June of 1997, Micheline's book, SIXTY-SEVEN POEMS... was published by FMSPW in San Francisco, his home for many years. In 1998 Micheline died from a heart attack on a Subway in the same city.

 

The poems in this collection have a stong sense of setting. They take place in mostly urban settings, where the working-stiff and the marginal characters tend to hang. Micheline constantly celebrates the outsider looking in at the absurdities of the mainstream. In POEM TO THE FREAKS, he writes: " To live as I have done is surely absurd,/ in cheap hotels and furnished rooms,/to walk up side streets and down back alleys,/talking to oneself/ and screaming to the sky obscenities.../ Drink to wonder/Drink to me/ Drink to madness and all the stars..."

 

Contrary to popular notions, Micheline raises a defiant cup and embraces the life of an often-indigent poet. IN CHASING KEROUAC'S SHADOW, Micheline again sets himself up as a downtrodden bum, only to come back and celebrate the fact: 

 

" I am the gray Fox some schmuck
The old pro chasing the mad dream
The crazy Jew himself,
I only know when the cock rises and the crow howls,
To eat, to drink, to take a leak,...
Let's sing a song,
For those who chase the night
For those that dance with light...
The road
The vagabond
The dreamers,
the dancers,
the unsung,
Fuck the Gung Ho!"

 

It seems evident in every poem that Micheline knew where he was from, and would not let the reader forget it. He was a street kid from the Bronx, a stumble bum from 'Frisco, and a snake oil salesman. In SOUTH STREET PIERS, the poet describes the setting in where he hopes to have his ashes scattered to the wind:  

"...the red brick warehouse stands
the stevedores haul the rigs to the masts
the kids fight in the streets...
the cleaning girls are scrubbing Maiden Lane,
the smoke pours stacks from the Brooklyn shore--
the fog horn tickles my belly
I hear the drums beat
throw my ashes from the pier when I die."

 

This collection of poems (many of them unpublished before), are not all stellar. Often they are raw, violent and vulgar. Yet, they are a fitting tribute to a man who represented a vanishing breed of poets. Throughout the book are photos of the poet and his friends, and samples of his prolific body of artwork. It is also an important historical and artistic document of an era and a movement, that will be a great interest to scholars, students, and readers in years to come.

Doug Holder/ Ibbetson Update/Somerville, Ma./Oct. 2002

Drunken Angel by Alan Kaufman

 

Alan Kaufman author of "Drunken Angel"

Drunken Angel by Alan Kaufman  (Viva editions. Berkeley, CA. 94710) $18.95

Review by Doug Holder

 I always tell my creative writing students not to be polite in their writing. If a girl steals your boyfriend you don't say: "How dare you-you offended my honor." It's more like " Hey bitch--get your slutty hands off my man."--or worse. To write, to really write, you must be willing to insult your mother as Philip Roth once said. Alan Kaufman, does exactly this with his new memoir "Drunken Angel." He writes about the self-absorbed, abusive monster he once was--fueled with high octane booze. He writes graphically and without apologies about his self-destructive urges, his blind, drunken ambition, his hitting rock bottom, sleeping in the gutters of New York--Tompkins Park in the East Village serving as his bedroom. He writes about being the Bronx child of Holocaust survivors. He portrays his damaged parents and the people in his life brutally and at times cruelly, and at times it was hard to take. Kaufman was a monster. He didn't undersatnd love--he used people as a means to an end--and that end was to drink himself to oblivion. By the finish of the book he comes full circle. He reunites with his estranged daughter, realizes his dream to become an accomplished and respected writer, and stops his drinking. In essence he becomes a human being.

 I was introduced to Alan Kaufman by a few anthologies he edited "The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry," The Outlaw Bible of American Literature," and "The Outlaw Bible of American Essays." I have used these anthologies with good effect with my writing students at Endicott College in Beverly, Mass. and Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. The work by these "outlaw" poets and writers like Henry Miller, Herbert Selby, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Patti Smith and others reaches these young readers. At a time of their lives where they are searching for identity, and often at odds with society, the works speaks to them in a way the mannered work of Henry James never will.

I have had the pleasure to interview Kaufman and conducted a sort of informal Q and A with him on Facebook. Although I am far less worldly than he, and have no where near his accomplishments--I could identify deeply with him in certain regards. Like him I have lived in gone-to-seed rooming houses, I am Jewish-- in my family there are Holocaust survivors, my father and mother are from the Bronx; I toured Israel as a guest of a literary organization, and I had my severe bouts of depression and serious flirtations with heavy drinking. Oh yes, like him I am a poet. Needless to say I was riveted by the book. Kaufman is a novelist, poet, and memoirist,who was instrumental in the development of the Spoken Word Movement in Literature. He is also the author of the celebrated memoir  "Jew Boy" and the novel "Matches."

On one level  "Drunken Angel" can be read as a delicious collection of anecdotes about the literary life and the folks who peopled it. There are portraits of I.B. Singer, (Kaufman was invited up to his apartment when he was a CCNY student) Bernard Malamud ( Who Kaufman dissed at a lecture at Columbia University- and Malamud dropped dead the next day), the ego of poet Jorie Grahm, Allen Ginsberg( Who Kaufman angered at a reading in Germany), Herbert Selby (A spiritual godfather of the writer) and so many more.

And on another level it can be read as a literary self-help book. The book is sort of like a big A.A. meeting with Kaufman in the center of it all. Kaufman is the guest speaker--tracing his rise and fall and his rise once again. There is a lot of stuff in here about the recovery process, perhaps at times a bit too much-- but then again this is a central concern of the book. Yes the Higher Power is mentioned often--but this is the author's mantra for survival.

Kaufman writes about the young man he once was. In short he was an animal. He threw away opportunities like Columbia Graduate school, editorships at prestigious lit mags, friendship and lovers with acts of astounding selfishness. He abandoned his young daughter for booze--his primal relationship. All this  was to block out his tortured childhood with his dysfunctional family--and the demons that psychically possessed him.

But in the end Kaufmman gets straight, not only through sponsors at A.A. but through the poetry scene of San Francisco (A city he moved to from New York). He frequented the poetry venues in North Beach, and walked in the steps of the poets of a generation before like Di Prima, Ginsberg, Michelene, etc... Kaufman was led to the real core of what he really was about by a wizened old A.A. sponsor by the name of Ray. In this excerpt Ray gives it to Kaufman straight with no chaser:

 " A writer is someone who writes. When you write, when your pens moves on the page, you're a writer. When you talk about writing without doing the work, it is called being a phony."  Ray adds: " The world has...more than enough phonies and critics. But there are too few writers. So why don't you be one?"

And with this clear-eyed insight , Kaufman writes.

As a literary work the book is hugely successful. The detail, whether about his paranoid delusions, his psychosis, his family, the people that made up his tortured milieu is stunning. He gets into the mind of a self-destructing alcoholic that he was and is never far from becoming again. The dialogue was sharp and authentic--for the most part the characters were fully fleshed. Sometimes however I thought his characterization of his female characters was thin--either stock raving mad, or sex addicts. But his description of his relationship with his first true love Ana was masterful.

In any piece of writing there should be universality. And I think all of us have a piece of Kaufman inside us--unless you want to bullshit yourself and deny it. Few of us could survived a life like this--few of us could write a memoir like this--and few us can create art like this.   Highly Recommended.


--Doug Holder/ Somerville, Mass./July 2013

Somerville Artist Jesa Damora Creates and Works in an ‘Asylum’

Somerville Artist Jesa Damora Creates and Works in an ‘Asylum’

By Doug Holder

 Jesa Damora works in an asylum. No, not in a psychiatric hospital like McLean Hospital, where I have labored for thirty or so years. She works in the Artisan's Asylum a huge open space for artists of all stripes, that is located here in Somerville. She is also a consultant for other artists, as well as creating her own acclaimed prints and drawings. Like many Somerville artists of my acquaintance Damora is a refuge from the Republic of Cambridge. She and her husband moved from the rarefied environs of Appian Way in Cambridge to the more egalitarian territory of Prospect Hill in Somerville. Now she owns a home, and has a small carriage house that acts as her art studio. Of our town Damora told me: “We moved from Cambridge because it was so expensive. I love the multicultural aspect of Somerville. I mean in Cambridge where we lived, it was all rich, white doctors and lawyers.” Damora is also excited by the subway coming to Union Square and the changes it will bring. She is a member of the Mystic Valley Task Force and feels that in the end this will help the creative economy in the Square. Damora, by her own description, is not a political animal but hopes that there will be advocacy for low income and moderate income housing so Union Square will not just be a home for high income young urban professionals. She wants Union Square to retain its unique flavor—a very hard task if you examine other neighborhoods that went through similar transformations.

Damora is known for her drawings and limited edition of flowers and seedpods.  Her work according to the website of the Somerville Open Studios consists of "vital, luminous immensely detailed drawings. They are about the wildness both in nature and ourselves, that we think we have tamed."But Damora is not only about flowers; she is also known for her drawings of men's testicles. Damora feels the penis has overshadowed the testicle--so to speak, and she has given it more...well...exposure. And after all, isn't the sacred sac a sort of seedpod...huh?

Damora attended Harvard University and majored in General Studies. She said Harvard was not a good place to study to be an artist because it was too traditional. But Damora came from a rather unconventional family. Her father was a noted architectural photographer, and was friends with Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus Art Movement. The house Damora lived in when she was a child was designed by Philip Johnson. Her life was filled with unconventional and creative people that has influenced her rather unconventional life.

Because of some physical problems Damora was unable to paint and draw as much as she would of liked. So after browsing Facebook she realized that a lot of artists do not really know how to market their work properly. So she started an artist consulting business titled FunnelCake. Because of her extensive background in the arts and the connections she has, she helps the artist to get the word out about their work, and teaches them how to connect to the markets that best serve them.

Damora is also involved with the Artisan's Asylum  located right outside of Union Square off of Somerville Ave. This is a huge open space that rents sections to any number of artists. Damora is the unofficial tour guide and is heavily involved in the promotion of the facility. She told me: “ We have 3D printers there, a jewelry school, glass work artists, plasma cutters, etc…There is a great cross- pollination of artists here.” The venue was founded by Gui Cavalcanti. Damora added: “There a lot of incredible but unassuming people here.”

Damora is married to John Bailes—a poet of some note, and a protege of the late bard Philip Whalen.  As Damora left the Bloc11, she seemed to be swept away by some creative breeze that graced Bow St- and then out to the wilds of the Paris of New England.  

To find out more about FunnelCake Marketing  contact Damora at jsdamora@gmail.com

Belmont Poems by Stephen Burt

Belmont

Poems by

Stephen Burt

Graywolf Press

Minneapolis MN

Copyright © 2013 by Stephen Burt

96 pages, softbound, $15

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Stephen Burt is known for his poetry criticism and he is the quintessential poet as this book proves. For the most part readers do not seek information when reading poetry. What they do seek is something deeper – insight into something taken as ordinary or every day.  Sought also is the conversion of the ordinary into the memorable.  The true poet does this.

Then of course, there is the not-so-ordinary and the poet who will title a poem Prothalamion With Laocoӧn Simulacrum, well, he should become a favorite of mine. I read this book of poems and Stephen Burt became one of my favorites.  Not only because of the poem so titled, not only because of his poems of the Boston area, not only because of the sly humor, but because Stephen Burt’s writing has every element that makes poetry a pleasure to read. 

His poems bring fresh approaches to worn subjects, a personal passion that infects the readers with a gasp of recognition as in Poem of Six A.M :

One child wakes up when the other has gone

back to bed, if not to sleep. One more false dawn

or

Lead, lead on,

fortissimo washer and dryer, mechanical train                 

in our unfinished basement: who else could play for me

your wild snare, your floor tom and your gong,

their rough polyrhythms, subordinate quarter and main

beat? Who keeps the darks from turning gray for me?

and this one:

There is also a song

made of Cheerios, honey nut and multigrain,

oats, rice, wheat, corn;

and barley. Nobody should pay for me

we can afford it. Soon I will enter a zone

of bananas and yogurt and plastic forks, propane

tanks and cheese wheels wrapped and set out on a tray for me.

Burt’s poetry is worth the time for those who are tired of intellectualized

poems with hidden meanings or secret messages, who hunger for more direct communication with which they can associate.

In “when the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees” the final stanza is like a punch to the midsection, hitting us where we recognize ourselves:

you don’t just decide/to become a different person,/but realize that you have become the person you are—/not who you were, not who you want to be,/but something close to them,/in exactly the way/ the new low-intensity streetlights come close to the moon.

It has often been said that poets need be storytellers and Burt’s understanding of that is evident and compelling.  Augmenting the tenderness of his poetry is a degree of irony,  playfulness, sexiness and always devotion to his craft.

To close let us look at the first eight lines of Belmont Overture (Poem of Eight A.M.):

It’s about settling down and settling in

            and trying not to settle for,

about three miles from the urban core,

            where the not-quite-wild bald turkey, looking so lost

and inquisitive next to the stop for the 74,

            peers into the roseless rosebush, up at the pointless or

above one townhouse’s steps, and the US

            and floral and nautical flags flaunt their calm semaphore.

The lines embody the attributes of storytelling, irony and the devotion to the craft of making poetry sing to the reader.  As for the playfulness and sexiness of Burt’s work,

you will have to read the whole book to discover an American author who leads the way in accessible poetry for the thinking person.

J.D. Scrimgeour: A Writer Who Struggles to Find Just The Right Words.




JD SCRIMGEOUR

 


J.D. Scrimgeour: A Writer Who Struggles to Find Just The Right Words.






Interview with Doug Holder




I think any serious writer who claims he or she doesn’t spend a lot of time and effort to find just the right word, is either telling a lie or is in serious denial. Poet/Writer/Salem St. University professor J.D. Scrimgeour fits this bill. Whether he is writing a poem about a badly disfigured woman or a passage about a basketball game, he makes sure the words make the writing come to life.

Scrimgeour teaches at Salem State University. He recently published the poetry collection Territories (Last Automat Press). He has published another book of poetry, The Last Miles, and two books of creative nonfiction, Spin Moves and Themes For English B: A Professor’s Education In and Out of Class. With musician Philip Swanson he formed the performance group, Confluence, and released a CD of poetry and music, Ogunquit & Other Works.

I had the pleasure to interview him on my Somerville Community Access TV show  " Poet to Poet: Writer to Writer."






Doug Holder: You collaborated with composer Philip Swanson, etc… to put your poetry to music. Can you tell me about this—the dynamics—difficulties, etc…



J.D .Scrimgeour: I met Phil at some sort of campus event. He is a professor at Salem State University in the music department. We talked about getting our students together to collaborate on something. And we decided to try it first ourselves to see what happened. And so I gave him a couple of pieces of writing and he looked them over. He got really interested in a long poem that I wrote titled: “Ogunquit.” We just started meeting and figuring out things. And we started taking his music and attaching it to my words. He composed some new music. I didn’t actually change my words but I did have to figure out timing—when to come in and when to come out. We talked a lot about when we wanted the music to fade out. A lot of our discussions were about sound and rhythm actually. It was incredibly rewarding.







DH: In your mini-memoir “Spin Moves” basketball seems to be the focal point. You examine your life through your involvement with the game. I have interviewed poets who used boxing and baseball as poetic subjects. Poet Philip Burnham, Jr., described baseball as ripe for poetry of failure. He said if you get 3 hits every for every 10 at bats you are considered doing well. What is it about basketball that allures you?







JS: I was always involved with sports. I played basketball and baseball in high school. Early on I was attracted to the speed of the game. There is also a lot of deception in basketball that is very interesting. As much as it is about grace and power, it is also about setting people up so you are a step ahead of them. I remember the poet Charles Simic came to Salem State and talked about how chess is sort of similar to poetry because you are thinking 3 or 4 moves ahead and setting something up. I am not sure this correlation is exactly for me in poetry but there is an appreciation that the mental and physical are working at a high level, all at once.







DH: In your memoir you wrote that John McPhee’s basetball writing was stilted, too polite, lacking the gusto, the very words that would bring the game to life.







JS: You are picking up on a passage that I feel a little embarrassed about. Probably because I was such a Young Turk at the time. So I brought McPhee down a peg. But McPhee wrote a good book about basketball. I was especially interested in trying to come up with how could language capture the energy, the surprise that is available to a basketball player. How do you set the game on the page? I think the game may need a soundtrack behind the writing to make it come alive. I am also interested with what the writer does with punctuation and how the words are going to sound. So I use sentence fragments, dashes, etc… Punctuation is so valuable to set pacing. What a difference in the feeling between a colon and a dash!







DH: You are interested in the genre of Creative Non-Fiction. This is a relative new category. What exactly is it?







JS: It captures so many genres. It may be a memoir that does not follow a conventional narrative structure. It can be like a prose poem. It is non-fiction that you don’t feel you need a fact checker. You may “expand” the truth. I always indicate to the reader if I am going a bit beyond the exact truth however. Some writers don’t feel the need to.







DH: Charlotte Gordon, a colleague of mine at Endicott College wrote that she believes you mission is similar to that of Walt Whitman, in that you celebrate the common man.







JS: There is no way that I can compare myself to Whitman. I think what she is picking up on is that I’ve always had an interest in writing about other people. My poetry deals with the psychological and the sociological. In my new book “Territories” the first half of the book contains two long dramatic monologues in the voice of a student. The voice is a composite of various students I have known.







DSH “ Terrortories” first half is about a gay man—and at times very graphic. How did you research this? It sounded very authentic.







JS: I had a student that I knew pretty well, that I worked with. And I took a few facts of his life and other students and integrated them. Being involved with the arts you become aware and have to be sensitive to sexual orientation issue. I did informal research. I talked to people. I sent out writing to people to see if it sounded right. There were certain words and phrases that I went back and changed. I once asked a student about how he felt about the term "gay boys" instead of "queens." A couple of students from Salem State performed these monologues under the direction of a Salem State theatre professor. People were compelled by the performance.







DH: I was reading the poem " After the Fire" that deals with a woman's zen-like acceptance of her disfiguring facial burns and her subsequent loses. Can you talk a bit about this powerful piece?







JS: I really like that poem. It was the voice of a woman that was horribly scared by a fire and bad things continued to happen during her life. Her husband leaves her. It is based on someone I knew from my life. She was a friend of my wife's and she was on Oprah. And she said " I want to live." I used that line and the poem came from these things I experienced. Two things were happening in my life at the time. We were having our first child, and if you remember the speaker of that poem, she sort of imagines the children she might of had. Also at the same time a friend of ours Mary discovered that her cancer came back. The possibilities of not surviving colored the poem.






UNDER THE GHOST





If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his

dark shadow followed me even there.

~Harriet Jacobs





Why should a piece of property

kneel at another’s grave?

The whole earth

is red clay. Master won’t stop

slipping me notes.

“I can’t read,” I lied.

He was at the window yesterday,

white shirt a ghost. Some things

don’t even have to be bought.

I’m fifteen. He has a beard,

his shoes are quiet as weeds.

Momma died a long time ago.

She had one dress,

blue. I wear it

when I come here.

Ants crawl up the blank stone—

searching for a name?

Tonight, I will sleep

with grandmother. The stone’s

shadow slowly draws back.

Does it really disappear at noon?

White people are under crosses.

Jesus used to be white.

Property. “You must be subject

to my will in all things.”

To sleep always under a stone.

Brush an ant off my leg. Is

Momma a ghost? To sleep

with Momma, like I used to—

a shadow. To be under a ghost.


---- J. D. Scrimgeour