| Local Poets
Speak The Faith: Interview by Suzie D.
This article appeared in two parts in the Jewish Advocate
in April 2001. The Advocate is a Boston-based New England Jewish newspaper
with a 30,000 circulation plus newsstand sales. Subscribers also include
ex-Bostonians now in New York, Florida and elsewhere. Susie Davidson, who
goes by poetry name Susie D, is a regular at Stone Soup Poetry. She is a
correspondent and other publications; her poems appear monthly in "Susie
D's Corner" in the Massachusetts Mensa magazine The Beacon. Local Poets Speak the Faith By Susie Davidson Advocate Correspondent On any given Monday evening, the sweet sounds of the spoken word emanate from the caverns of the Middle East complex in Central Square, Cambridge. Here, denizens of the art of poetry gather under the auspices of Jack Powers' 30-years' running institution, Stone Soup Poetry. Poetry in America is always a tough sell. But for those who listen and delight in its beauty and depth, nothing is finer. The late US Poet Laureate Joseph Brodsky, who set the American poetry audience at 1 percent, nonetheless waxed that this equaled 2.4 million, very fortunate people. "The last century and a half of American poetry," he enthused, "dwarfs even jazz and cinema, in my view." "To live in this city at this time," says author and Boston Globe columnist James Carroll, "is to be surrounded by guardians of the shocked angels, our host of poets. Who are we to let nothing come of their art? Who are we not to feel their presence as our city's treasure?" At Stone Soup, anything goes, from unhewed street to prosaic, academic writing. Poets of all ages and stripes ascend the podium and bequeath their most personal and heartfelt offerings to the respectful listeners. The bases for their declarations encompass all aspects of their multicolored existences. Ian Thal, Doug Holder, Marc Widershein and Larry Lewis are among the regulars. Each persona, shaped by distinct sociological influences, solidly contributes to the scene. All, perhaps surprisingly in this secular hodgepodge of a literary underground, profoundly and proudly assert their Judaic core. "I consider myself to be an American artist," says Thal, a 30-year old D.C. native who holds an M.A. in Philosophy from Boston College. "As an American, I take part in many cultures that inhabit the continent, but it is also a matter of putting one's own culture within that context. One of the missions I face and will face is how do I become both a Jewish artist and an American artist?" Raised by secular, politically oriented parents, he was ingrained with a social consciousness early on. "My first mentor was a Black philosophy professor who lived across the street," he recalls. "She was very interested in the parallels between the Black and Jewish experience." A board member of Stone Soup, he is characterized by his hat fetish. "Hey, maybe that's the Orthodox in me," he quips. Thal's Jewish identity is assuredly evident. He created a stir in 1993 when, after a Holocaust-denying ad ran in BC's The Heights, he took 16 bales of the paper and arranged them into a swastika in the main quad. This act was noted in the Globe and on 60 Minutes, and resulted in much public debate on the subject. Today, Thal substitute teaches in the Boston School System in urban,underprivileged schools. Thal recently attended a presentation on Yiddish poetry, which he plans to study. "One aspect of Jewish thought that shapes my poetry," he muses, "is the richness of meaning contained in words. Kabalistic, Midrashic and even Talmudic thought comes from a deep meditation on meaning and openness to interpretation -- a practice that contemporary philosophers call 'hermeneutics.' Though a secular Jew, I find that that care for the richness of words is central to my love of poetry and my Jewish identity." Thal's "Creator's Manifesto" was inspired by poet and musician Patti Smith's performance of Allen Ginsberg's "Footnote to Howl" which, he says, proclaims the whole world holy. "The 'bet' ", he continues, "is the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet and of course the first letter of the Torah. 'Scision' is 'to cut' as in 'scissor' or 'incision', but it also implies decisions. The piece was inspired by the Kabalistic notion of mitzvah as furthering the creation." "And in my mind, the act of poetry is a mitzvah." Doug Holder came to Boston University in 1973 from Long Island, and he holds an M.A. in Literature from the Harvard Extension School. "Poetry was a natural evolution from my journal writing, " he recounts. "I have a creative family; my Brother Donald won a Tony award for lighting in The Lion King." Holder's poetry involvements are expansive. He is Assistant to the Poetry Editor at Spare Change magazine, serves as the Boston editor for Poesy magazine, is the President of Stone Soup Poets, was recently nominated at the Cambridge Poetry Awards, and has conducted poetry workshops for Newton Community Education, Arlington Arts Association and at McLean Hospital. He also promotes the works of other poets. Ibbetson St. Press, which he co-founded, puts out a twice-yearly poetry collection as well as "chapbooks," and he runs a small publishing house, Singing Bone Press, which recently released "City of Poets: 18 Boston Voices." "You can't help the fact that your past, your ethnic background informs your work," Holder maintains. "I am not a religious Jew per se, but my poetry has many references to Jewish culture. I think the only way to understand yourself as a person, or poet, etc., is to know where you came from, where your roots are firmly planted." Holder wrote his master's thesis on Henry Roth; he wished to explore the generation before him: "The secrets, the conflicts that were hidden behind a mask of obscure Yiddish utterances. From studying the man and his work, I learned to use my Jewish background as a rich vein of material." He wrote a series on ethnic foods. "That evoked a whole universe of thoughts and emotions from a simple taste or a smell. A darkened delicatessen under the elevated tracks in the Bronx in the early 60's, with my father, was a perfect setting for a poem about my childhood. The last bite a dying Uncle took from a kosher hotdog was a great focal point to define the life of the man." "The conflicts of Jewish assimilation in a Gentile world, the children's revolt against the immigrant parents, the anti-semitism or self-hatred of Jews themselves, these were things I always wanted to explore. I may not go to Temple on a regular basis, but deep in me is that sense of myself as a Jew. It comes out in my work as naturally as my next breath. I remember in one poem I wrote, I AM A JEW, I dealt with the problem of trying to deny your true identity": During the day/ you down the white bread/ secretly savor the dark rye and know in the dead of night/ the blood doesn't lie "You can't repress in writing that which is intrinsic to your sensibility." NEXT WEEK: Larry Lewis and Marc Widershein Creator's Manifesto (For Patti Smith) by Ian Thal Poets, believe your poems are for dwelling within. Poets, believe your words are worlds, walls, windows and the wind. Poets, believe your lines to mark your lands, your stanzas to be your cities. Poets, believe your readers wish to be led by you to the dwelling words you have scisioned from that first violently elegant bet. Gefilte Fish by Doug Holder Suspended In your jellied texture. A mish'n clumps of sweet fish. With a slice such pungency nostrils receptive to the primal aroma. The taste a perfect template to my memory. Then... the horse radish- I won't complain such joy but such pain! appeared in the Bay State Echo A Dream of Minnie Baum by Doug Holder I sit in the deep creases of her sun dress a purple flourish of fabric flowers stunned by the musty cabal of her perfume my head resting on her soft deflated breasts she exchanges Yiddish for English with mother tit for tat. I am trapped... my stomach leaden with chicken fat Bronx cheers from the pavement below I'm in familial ground nesting in the lap of a long dead grandmother with my mother's jealous eyes fixed on me. appeared in the Harvard Mosaic. Local Poets Speak the Faith - Part II By Susie Davidson Advocate Correspondent Stone Soup Poetry, led for 30 years by Jack Powers and occurring on Monday evenings at Cambridge's Middle East Restaurant, was last week's setting in an exploration of work presented by local Jewish poets Ian Thal and Doug Holder. Thal and Holder's remarkable personal and literary complexities are no less apparent in this week's valued and respected "Soup" regulars, Marc Widershien and Larry Lewis. Widershien grew up with his extended family in a triple decker in Franklin Field in the 50's. Piano and song filled the house, "but pop tunes in those days included '"Old Man River"' and '"You'll Never Walk Alone!"', he jokes. His father Samuel, a civil engineer, helped design the Central Artery. His mother and aunt edited Chai Odom Synagogue's Bulletin. "It was there that I, in a most inscrutable way, found my love of writing, and my earliest political fervency," Marc recalls. "Chai Odom was a refuge and social meeting place whose denizens were the material of fiction," he continues. "A highly intense and meaningful place, it inspired me because it embodied the sense of real community, where people experienced one another in the most empathetic way." Marc studied painting, poetry (with John Malcolm Brinnin and Samuel French Morse) and violin. Robert Lowell, Ezra Pound the BSO were influential. He has published poetry, translations, articles and book reviews for over 25 years, and serves on the boards of several magazines. Poet Lawrence Murphy introduces Marc's memoir of old Boston, "The Life of All Worlds" (2001, Ibbetson/Stone Soup Press): "What Marc Widershien celebrates in this book is as dead as most of the people who fill its pages with life: beloved community." Larry Lewis' Ashkenazic upbringing in Larchmont, NY was traditional; holidays, Shabbas, Bar Mitzvah. "The Jewish 'love of learning' applied in spades," Larry relates. "My sister and I were read to from day 1. Art, music, literature, travel and politics were discussed. Rather than by parental fiat à la Joseph Kennedy, this seemed to flow naturally." Lewis wound up in London for 18 years, studying French recording artists, French and English poetry at London University, and teaching French, English and Italian in London and Italy. "I was so taken by the music of Leo Ferre that I began to transcribe the lyrics. I later learned that Ferré, Jacques Brel, Jean-Roger Caussimon and George Brassens had long had their lyrics published as poems without the music." Beaudlaire and Verlaine captivated him as well. Childhood memories of enjoyable Boston seders with his mother's family led to his choosing this area upon his return. Larry taught in Cambridge schools for several years, and is now a multilingual tour guide for the City of Boston and the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum. "My ex-wife introduced me to Stone Soup," Larry remembers. "At age 11, my son Mitch was writing poetry. She said, 'you're the poet of the family, why don't you take him?'" Though Larry's mother, sister, niece and son were poets, "it took the most circuitous peregrinations for me to discover that perhaps poetry had always been in my blood!" Larry often reads his translations of French poem-songs ("syllable for syllable and rhyme for rhyme") there, adding a rich flavor to the unique bouillabaisse that is Stone Soup Poetry. The Samovar The samovar: glints of tarnished gold seen with borrowed eyes, a samovar never used just left on a sitting room table next to an old TV. I wanted to taste the tea of the old country, even with its red stains of decades, but the dents-- was it wrapped in a blanket on the choppy journey in steerage? Russian tea of what is its taste the urn darkened within? I've never had tea in a samovar. I yearn for the taste. --Marc Widershien AT MY MOTHER'S GRAVE Leap year Poems and deaths in leap year, love and death in this Piscine month. Maybe my mother chose to die today. Credences of light cleanse us this February AM, and we can rely on this one truth: taproots will weave down through the earth, through bone and sinew, branches spreading out to bring us the radiant yellow daffodil. While the earth batters me to stone and rivulet, the whiteness of language is greater, greater still than the constructs I have celebrated for years: the rotted out green girders of Charles Street Station built in 1910, still in use, dissembling time and change. Still, this resplendent day brings continuation: the children of all worlds, unmindful of our language whose speech, once our own, we try to steal, but cannot. Kindergarten--a child's garden in the city, just outside the cemetery gate. A day can bring continuation, though we try to be unmindful even of passion. Yet life is the animus incarnate above peril where the days call out in a whisper bordering silence. Sylvia Widershien 1910-2000 IT'S SPRING Nature lifts high its glass of ale To the health of the nightingale 'Cause it's Spring Wine labels show their name and face And Plain Jane thinks she's Princess Grace 'Cause it's Spring Islands float in the Seine with ease All Paris walks along the quais 'Cause it's Spring Look at the summer start to sprout And the fools who never found out That it was Spring. --Larry Lewis Sam, The Old Black Pianist Jean-Roger Caussimon Translated by Larry Lewis One night I met by chance within the London mist A guy whose name was Sam, and old dark pianist Upon his head he wore a violet top hat Inside the Soho pub that he was playing at And I became a friend within the London mist A friend of this guy Sam, the old dark pianist When I'm at the piano, he said, playing an air What goes on around me, what the hell, I don't care I see lovely gardens blooming in springtime light And I stand in the middle all dressed up in white When I'm at the piano, he said, playing an air What goes on around me, what the hell, I don't care There is often a brawl, a pistol shot or two Dunno how I do it but somehow I get through I'm not the bravest guy, I'd get out if I could But I'm so blasted drunk, my legs are blocks of wood There is often a brawl, a pistol shot or two Don't know how I do it but somehow I get through There are often old dames hugging me with a sigh So that I'll play a tune, a tune of times gone by Their hearts begin to pound and their faces turn sweet Remembering the days when their looks were a treat There are often old dames hugging me with a sigh So that I'll play a tune, a tune of times gone by HOME PAGE & ARCHIVES
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