Friday in the East Village: Taino Brigs at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe

(Video courtesy Marilyn Perez)

Saturday Night in Crown Heights: The Hoover Dam Collective presents "Falalalaloft" at Mister Rogers

(Video courtesy Hoover Dam Collective)

Tuesday Evening in Chelsea: Denise Duhamel and Amy Lemmon reading at Barnes and Noble at Fashion Institute of Technology

Early this evening we went over to the fabulous Fashion Institute of Technology's Barnes and Noble college bookstore to see two of our favorite poets, Denise Duhamel and Amy Lemmon, read from their collaborative books, ABBA: The Poems and the just-published Enjoy Hot or Iced: Poems in Conversation and a Conversation.

Denise Duhamel is an old friend, and we were glad to see her photo in the New York Times on Saturday although the story of her reading at Horace Mann with another old friend from Miami, Maureen Seaton, was a little discomfiting. It was great to see her in person again as well as hear her read. We've enjoyed Denise's poetry since the 1980s although we didn't meet her until November 1993, when we did a reading together, along with others, for the anthology Mondo Barbie (coincidentally, it got a nice writeup by Dave Housley at The Lit Pub just this past weekend) at the Miami Book Fair International. And it was great to see her with Amy Lemmon, whom we've had the pleasure of knowing since she hired us to teach business writing at FIT in the fall of 2006.

Their joint reading from their collaborative books was a terrific hour of poetry, probably the best reading we've gone to this year. It had an intimate feel, and the poets -- as they do in their texts -- play off one another expertly. Denise has done a great deal of collaborative work, and both the playful ABBA poems and the somewhat more elegant Enjoy Hot or Iced (beautifully designed by the publisher) gave us, and the others in the audience, a great deal of excitement and fun.

Take this collaboration, "Ex Post Facto":

"Remember me?" the subject line. My college beau
was now HUGGYBEAR3@yahoo.com and a VIP at Sysco.
He'd worn tie-dye and Birks on our first tryst. "Oh
you're in a sorority?" he'd said. I'd just made a pledge, though

I couldn't afford the dues. "Um, I joined Chi-O,"
I lied. "It's not Greek at all. We sit around and discuss Tao
and the benefits of soy." "Cool," he said. "Let's go
figure out our charts." I was a Gemini. He was a Leo.

Back at his place, he put on Elvis Costello,
lit vanilla candles, and unwrapped his Tarot
deck and ceramic bong. "In a past life, I was a Pharoah,"
I said, showing him my spread: a sword, a wand, and a fellow

with cups, dead ringer for Benny from ABBA. "Bingo!"
he teased until I became defensive. "Hey, I belong to the AFL-CIO
and NOW." "Not bad for a girl from Ohio,"
he whispered. He was from Miami, land of flamingo-

colored hotels and retirees in low-slung Speedos.
His kisses were sweet, a mixture of grass and Gallo.
In the mornings, we would eat marshmallow
clovers and hearts, Lucky Charms inciting our libidos

and sending us back to the lumpy futon. "Presto!"
I'd say, waving the sheets, beginning my strip show
to Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon." Crypto-
karaoke was at the core of our love-manifesto,

"You Spin Me Round" by Dead or Alive. Ergo,
I traded in my shit-kickers for lime green stilettos
and my Tom Robbins novels for Brecht librettos.
Would he recognize me now? My clothes hamper so

clogged with black, my closet full of faux
Fendi and knock-off Manolo Blahniks? Apropos
or no, humming Schubert's allegro ma non troppo,
I typed "Refresh my memory!" and sipped Bordeaux.

Here's Amy's title poem from Enjoy Hot or Iced:

You’ve brewed this stuff, now drink it—
these dreggy-dregs, this filter-silt,
the tiny bits that cling to tongue.
You always liked it strong and now
you’ve got it at its darkest, split
us at the core to brew a full bold flavor,
so each must shoulder/bear the double-weight
of everything except the other’s body.
I hope you have your fun and drink it, too,
iced now as much as it was hot. I don’t. I didn’t
order it this way. I wanted café au lait,
and when the waiter brought it and I asked for water,
he said flat “No” and mugged—a joke, I thought,
but sure enough, he never brought a glass, left me
to fend with froth and squeeze a dollar tip. He thought
he was funny. You think you’re kind, you think
you’re sensible, you think you’re something
I can’t quite imagine. What of the Monet’s
lily-pads of mold on Earl Grey cooling in the jar?
The brown scrub-nulling scum that clings
to the worn Picasso mug? The ghosts of shattered crockery,
the cartoon souls of slain French press carafes?
Yours, yours, mine, ours. It’s a tossup,
so you clay-pigeon it again and pull! Shoot! A hit!
My heart, I mean, that flat and battered thing
you had and lately thought so little of.

And Denise's "Boxed Set Sestina":

I hid my hopes in a cigar box on Christmas, but you gave them away on Boxing Day (in Canada). I clipped box tops for coupons while you gobbled an expensive Bento box lunch. You were a noshow as I waited in line at the box office in the satin pillbox hat I bought at the thrift shop. I collected hatboxes while you flew your box kite wearing only your boxers. Our lovemaking once wore out the box springs, but now you said you felt boxed in. I slumped in the last row while you glowed with someone else in our box seats. You slept in first class while I shivered in the boxcar. I never got your love letter because you forgot to put it in the mailbox. I felt so neglected I ate fistfuls of croutons right from the box in my boxy, unflattering housedress. My shadow box was filled with ceramic figurines of you. Your toolbox was as empty as our icebox. I stayed home, blaring my boom box, while you drank at the bar, wasting quarters on a dusty jukebox. You told me to get off my soapbox. Were our problems bigger than a breadbox? Yes! Especially when I caught you peeing in the sandbox or dipping into the cashbox while you thought I wasn’t looking. It’s true I was a chatterbox, but you can’t deny you put your affection in a lockbox while you played with your vintage Matchbox cars. It was up to me to open the fuse box and fix the problem—up to me to take kickboxing to defend myself. I thought outside the box when I played your favorite song, Daddy Cool’s “Baby, Let Me Bang Your Box,” on my squeezebox. I was hoping to win you back after our most vicious boxing match—thirtynine rounds of screaming that made the German boxer nextdoor growl. It had all started when your word “boxwallah” wasn’t in the Scrabble dictionary; then I won with “carboxyl.” You snatched up your ebony snuffbox while I tore the boxberries from our flowerbox. I stuffed a shoebox with regret. You packed up your Hot Wheels lunchbox and left.

After the reading, the poets signed our books. We're really grateful for the work of Amy Lemmon and Denise Duhamel, and even more grateful to have them as friends.

Hugh Fox, RIP

We were saddened to learn from Richard Kostelanetz that another of our old friends from the early small press days, a legend and a great writer, Hugh Fox, died yesterday at a hospice near his home in East Lansing, Michigan.

When we started publishing in little mags in the mid-1970s and reading them before that, one name we kept seeing over and over again was Hugh Fox. Everything he wrote -- and he was both a master of multiple genres and someone who gave a young kid like us encouragement and hope as well as a role model in the small press ("indie press," in today's parlance) world -- seemed fresh and exciting. Hugh's own litmag Ghost Dance was required reading. We also remember fondly his female alter ego, writer Connie Fox.

Hugh Fox was personable, warm, quirky and funny. And he knew everything and everyone, it seemed to us. We used to think he might be a collective writing under one name, except he had such a distinctive personality. We'll never forget his work, nor his kindness and generosity.

Here's a little from his Wikipedia entry:

Hugh Fox, born in Chicago in 1932, is a writer, novelist, poet and anthropologist and one of the founders (with Ralph Ellison, Anais Nin, Paul Bowles, Joyce Carol Oates, Buckminster Fuller and others) of the Pushcart Prize for literature. He has been published in numerous literary magazines and was the first writer to publish a critical study of Charles Bukowski.

Fox was raised in Chicago as a devout Catholic, but converted to Judaism in later life. He has a Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was a professor at Michigan State University in the Department of American Thought and Language from 1968 until his retirement in 1999.

Fox is the author of over sixty-two books, including six books on anthropology, he wrote over fifty-four books on poetry and many volumes on short fiction, and published many novels. He also wrote a number of books on pre-Columbian American cultures, catastrophism, which would fit into the pseudoarchaeological category, such as his book Gods of the Cataclysm: A Revolutionary Investigation of Man and his Gods Before and After the Great Cataclysm (1976). Some of his books with these themes in have been compared to the work of Ignatius Donnelly.

His book Gods of the Cataclysm received a number of positive reviews, Curt Johnson an editor praised the book claiming “Hugh Fox’s Gods of the Cataclysm...ought to be required reading for cultural historians of all disciplines.”

The Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville, Mass. published Way, Way Off the Road: The Memoirs of an Invisible Man by Hugh Fox with an introduction by Doug Holder in 2006. This book recounts Fox's life and the people he knew in the small press over the years such as Charles Bukowski, A.D. Winans, Sam Cornish, Len Fulton, etc.

Here's a piece done for Literary Kicks (LitKicks) by Doug Holder, the founder of Ibbetson Press and the publisher of Way, Way Off The Road ... by Hugh Fox, edited by S.R. Glines:

When you whisper "small press" in the ears of many 60's era poets and publishers, one of the first responses you will get is "Hugh Fox." Fox was a founding board member of the Pushcart Prize, a publisher of a well-regarded avant-garde literary magazine Ghost Dance founder of the seminal organization for little magazines and small presses COSMEP, a reviewer of thousand of chapbooks, magazines and books, and the author of the first critical study of Charles Bukowski. In his memoir of the small press movement, Way, Way off the Road, Fox quotes Charles Plymell, a City Lights-published jazz poet and the first printer of ZAP Comics:

"... the generation that came after the Beats, was overpowered by the Beats themselves. All that media hype. My god, the media fell in love with them. They were practically rock stars. And the post-Beats, the Hippie-Yippies, whatever you want to call them, were lost in the Beat's shadow. They were and still are invisible!"

Plymell defined the group of poets Fox feels he was part of. Fox was solidly in his 30's, a nerdy academic, equipped with a Ph.D and a foundation grant, when he picked up a copy of Crucifix in a Death Hand by the "dirty old man" of poetry Charles Bukowski. Fox was thrilled by the Buk's use of language and felt a new door was opened for him outside the stagnant air of the academy. Fox wound up doing a critical study of the man. Here is an account of his first meeting with Bukowski:

"So I'd gone over and found him in this motel-hotel place in Hollywood. You know, the usual tattered, potted palms out in front, everything kind of run down."

Fox told Bukowski that he wanted to do a critical study of his work. Fox was sick of Eliot and Pound, and wanted a taste of the wild side. Here is Bukowski's response according to Fox:

"... Nothing wrong with Eliot and Pound, they're some of my best friends, he answered, got up and started emptying the wall of bookcases that contained all of his printed work, all the books, all the magazines. Went into a closet and started taking out suitcases and throwing the books and mags inside."

Bukowski said: "Ok I can trust you. I'm gonna give you the whole schmear. And if you find any duplicates, keep them."

Fox wound up writing the first critical study of the man, as well as studies of A. D. Winans and Lyn Lifshin, and began his life as a wandering-Jewish scribe, recording the comings, goings, happenings and personalities in the small press for the last 40 years.

Fox recounts his years at COSMEP, a seminal press organization, that he was a founding board member of, and his years of publishing the avant-garde lit mag Ghost Dance. Fox, who admits he has a very manic side, has written literally thousands of reviews of poetry books, chaps, and small press publications, as well has edited the groundbreaking anthology The Living Underground.

Way, Way Off The Road ... is not a straight narrative. It reads the way Fox talks. It is written in a rapid fire stream of consciousness style, so that often the reader has to catch his or her breath. His description of fellow writers is often inspired. Here is a portrait of a down-at-the-heels Richard Nason, a movie critic for TIME magazine:

"And when he'd come into the office out of the Captain Midnight dark, you always smelled the booze on him. Pickled full time. Fedora. Sports jacket. Topcoat. Remnants of former glory. Only when he pulled his topcoat off there would be five pens in the front pockets of his sports coat, all of them uncapped, leaking into the coat itself, another uncapped pen in his shirt pocket also leaking, so it looked like he had been harpooned and was bleeding blue blood.'"

Fox has an inquisitive, fascinating, and hungry mind, and he covers a wide range of subjects from drug-induced writing, ancient Indian cultures, men's sexual prowess and perversions, you name it. In the books there are countless anecdotes about personages from the world of the small press like Harry Smith, Len Fulton, Richard Kostelantz, Allen Ginsberg, "The Boston Underground," Bill Costley, Sam Cornish , Bill Blatty and Donald Hall. Fox has an original take on them all.

In ways Fox's literary history reminds me of Howard Zinn's writing. He gives you a view of the outsider, and how the outsider views things. This is a history you won't find in the classrooms, although it should be there. Fox makes darkness visible, with this iconoclastic, zany and compelling memoir.

Here's a beautiful article Ellaraine Lockie published about Hugh Fox in Centrifugal Eve:

I didn't know which gender would arrive at the train station. He could have come as either: Hugh Fox, small press legend and renowned anthropologist for over thirty years, or Connie Fox, his alter ego and author in her own right who often appeared in the flesh. Slightly nervous, hoping a year's worth of e-mails would enable me to recognize the inner Fox either way, I arrived an hour early. As I waited by the passenger entrance door, I found myself getting more and more curious about Connie and hoping it was she who would walk off the train. I also reflected on the week ahead when Fox would be collecting information for his book, Portraits, in which I'm one of four female West Coast poets he studies.

My slight disappointment at not meeting the corseted, red-lipsticked, stilettoed, big-haired beautiful woman I'd seen in a photo gave way immediately to concern when the tweed-coated and hatted mountain man before me mumbled (as he enfolded me in a bear hug), "Bad news, Pal . . . mouth's half paralyzed." Visions of a mad drive to an emergency ward and of a stroke or Bell's Palsy blinded me momentarily to the man who resembled a mischievous Santa Claus with no beard but with grey/white flowing hair, rosy cheeks, skin that would make a young woman jealous and a little-boy "foxy" twinkle in his eyes. His laugh was a sound that would resonate through my world for the next week, as would his well-acted charades.

Driving to my home in Sunnyvale, California, Foxy told me about how his mother enrolled him in endless acting, piano and singing lessons as a boy, and how he performed roles in Chicago's All Children's Grand Opera Company – once with the Metropolitan Opera. His young life was filled with ballet, concerts, the study of violin and composition and art lessons at the Chicago Art Institute.

At bedtime that first night, Foxy emerged from the guest bedroom wearing a bright red undershirt and red checkered pajamas. He said, "How about we go for a walk?" Off we went, him glowing like a fire hydrant and with a tendency to veer to the center of the streets, me black as the night in the sweats I sleep in and preferring to skirt the sidewalks. This became a nightly ritual, neighbors be damned.

The next morning, Foxy sat down at the breakfast table in his tweed hat and blazer, pen and notebook in hand ready to get right to work. When I told him hats weren't required for breakfast, he responded, "My Irish grandfather said, ‘Always wear a tweed hat, me boy,' and I do." He was incredulous about the healthy breakfast I fed him (one I have every morning), and I later heard him tell one of his wives on the phone that I'd forced three pounds of oatmeal down him. It was my first live experience with Foxy's zany ability to exaggerate, although I'd had many an e-mail bursting with this trait.

No, he's not a polygamist; he just stays emotionally close to his two ex-wives, as well as to the one to whom he's been married for eighteen years and together with for twenty-seven. Ex-wife Two lives in his second house three blocks from him in East Lansing, Michigan, and Number One comes to visit often from Kansas City. I could never tell by the adoring tone of voice (that always concluded with a bit of baby talk, like what I say to my cat) just which wife or which of his six kids were on the other end of the line.

After breakfast that first morning, we engaged in one of my rituals – one or two hours of writing at the local Starbucks. Here is where I learned that Foxy talks to EVERYBODY – people in coffee shops and restaurants, shoppers, streetwalkers... He'd try out all the many languages he speaks on each person, and if there was no response, he'd revert to English and say something different each time like: "How old do you think I am?" or "As your priest, I want you to get down on your knees and thank God for this beautiful woman you're with."

People reacted in vastly diverse ways: some picked up immediately that he was just having fun and would reciprocate. Others were polite but firm, like the woman who told him that her husband, who was in the bathroom, was very jealous so no, Foxy shouldn't pretend that he was an old boyfriend. Still others looked around for a fast escape route.

His favorite audiences were people of ethnicities different than his, and he'd always try to guess their nationalities. One extremely thin, dark-skinned woman (Foxy was sure she was Ethiopian) ran out of Trader Joe's after he said she should follow him around and buy what he did if she wanted to be skinny. He was so bothered by her reaction that he talked to the store manager about her, imparting his suspicion that she ran away because, maybe, she was an illegal immigrant or a shoplifter. She was still on his mind the next morning and, with almost childlike befuddlement, he considered her behavior strange.

He saved his best antics, though, for my friends and acquaintances when I introduced him. He would become suddenly both blind and mute, staring straight ahead and putting his limp hand out for my help, much like a puppy's paw-shake. Or he'd have some other less-definable-but-serious ailment. It was always a surprise.

Lunch on that first day was at a deli en route to the Hakoni Gardens in Saratoga where we were going to write haiku. Foxy said to the waitress, "This is my daughter. We have to eat out because I'm afraid she'll poison me to get my money." When she looked over at me sternly, I rolled my eyes. Still, by the end of lunch the girl felt so sorry for him that she'd pat him on the back every time she walked by.

Later in the Gardens' Zen-like gift shop, two women employees were loudly and brashly discussing inventory. Foxy turned to me and asked if he should tell them they'd just ruined the whole peaceful experience of the Gardens, and I said no. He told them anyway. No joking this time.

He was also serious over dinner that night when he emerged as Professor Hugo Fox, Ph.D. in American Literature, and discussed the eighty-plus books he's published (including the first book written about Charles Bukowski and Lyn Lifshin) and detailed his numerous archeological discoveries. The Professor stayed around for the evening, sharing his life story in immaculate detail: a mother who at times dressed him in girls' clothes and immersed him in the arts before demanding later that he become a physician like his father.

The teen-aged Hugh wore nothing but English and Harris tweeds that his mother had tailor-made: pants, suit coat and cap (all scratchy). He always carried a leather briefcase and later smoked a pipe. A regular Sherlock Holmes. This elicited taunting from the other boys at school. He developed a stutter at fifteen that lasted for years, which is now hard to believe he ever had, given his extremely extroverted personality.

He purposely flunked out of medical school to pursue what would eventually be a professorship at Loyola University and University of Michigan, with interspersed Fulbright Fellowships taking him to Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil. He received grants to study in Argentina and Chile. He lived in Spain, made yearly trips to Peru and visited ruins in every South American country.

He was the first person to recognize Phoenician writing on pots in Peru and statues in Bolivia, Sumerian writing on other Bolivian statues and pictures of Lebanese goddesses on pots from tribes in Mexico. Then he correlated all these discoveries into one theory that rocked the world of archeology. While here with me, he found twenty-some of his books at Stanford University Library.

He also talked freely about his late conversion to Judaism and about Connie: Connie didn't survive the castration surgery that Hugh chose to have in an extreme effort to combat prostate cancer. Her clothing and personal effects lay boxed in Hugh's garage, and she is, for all practical purposes, dead. But her stories live on through Hugh and her books, one of which was released in 2005 by Presa Press. I believe Connie's story should be written by him, rather than me. I'm sorry I missed out on this her part of him; I would have liked her.

Now that he's in his seventies, Foxy said his preoccupation is with "death and how to get the maximum out of the little time we have above ground." I can attest that he lived this philosophy for the week we were together. Every following day resembled the first one in its serendipitous and often outrageous course.

At Starbucks Foxy wrote twenty poems and a long essay over the week, while I worked on one poem, looking for that killer ending (It's easy to see how he has thirty unpublished novels, short stories, plays and poem collections). He tired quickly of my healthy breakfasts and turned to oatmeal cookies, Starbucks' maple strudel muffins and Butterfingers from a near-by store.

New interests and talents radiated from this Renaissance Man. There was nothing he wasn't interested in learning, and more than a week with him would have been required to even skim what he already knows. One evening I demonstrated my Yamaha player piano with its renditions of Chopin. After one of the Preludes, Foxy said, "Turn it off," and he sat down to play a virtuoso Chopin-like piece that he had composed. There are dozens of tapes of his original piano pieces at home.

We saw and loved a matinee movie of The Queen. On the way home in the car on his cell phone, Foxy told one of his wives that I "ate popcorn like a horse eating hay." (I had to; he was stealing it.) He later declined an evening movie invitation from me . . . something about the popcorn. I went anyway (and ate popcorn).

We took day trips to Monterey/Carmel, where his joy at being alive took the form of impromptu hugs on sidewalks and the holding of my hand as we walked. We visited and were visited by his friends and relatives in the Bay area. His dear friend and poet of many years, Karla Andersdatter, came to spend a couple of days with us and to attend Foxy's featured poetry reading in Santa Cruz, hosted by Brian Morissey (Poesy Magazine) and Christopher Robin (Zen Baby). Foxy is the only poet I've ever heard who can get away with stopping in the middle of a poem to chat or talk about the poem, then finish it and still have his audience's rapt attention. A true entertainer.

We then drove to San Francisco to meet A. D. Winans, another small press icon and long-time friend of Foxy's. We arrived early, and while waiting, Foxy shimmied up to many a female bystander listening to street music and asked her to dance. The only one who would have accepted (me), he didn't ask. I was becoming a friend with whom he treated with no pretense, as he did also A. D. Their meeting was a pleasure to witness, like watching two bull elk from the same herd come to terms after locking horns (After a thirty-year friendship, the two had a recent falling-out over contents in Fox's most recent book). Foxy asked first thing, as we all sat down for coffee, "So do you forgive me?"

"I'm thinking about it," came from A. D.

It was clear to this observer that things are copasetic with the herd leaders once again. Honesty and, yes, affection that goes way back was unmistakable, albeit behind a mask of maleness. Besides, staying mad at Fox might just be impossible for anyone.

He and I had only one confrontation. It happened right before his formal interview of me, which he had wanted to film with his new camera to be on a DVD that would accompany Portraits. I had told him previously that I wouldn't allow the interview to be photographed. He reluctantly agreed but then changed his mind as the interview in my living room was beginning. There was a fierce display of willfulness on both our parts. Readers will have to wait for the book/DVD set to see how it was resolved.

Leaving for the airport on day eight held a sadness for both of us, lightened only slightly as we were going out the front door when Foxy said, "Wait, I forgot my cane."

"You don't have a cane, Foxy," I said.

In its tribute earlier today, the publishers Haggard & Halloo reprinted this poem, "Bringing," one of many wonderful poems written by Hugh Fox over decades:

Bringing them all back, the right Andean
chemicals, prayers to the Underground
spirits, Great-Great-Great-Grandmother
Adeline Fox coming out of the Red Cedar
River, Great-Great-Great Grandfather
Sean walking over the mountains toward
our stone cabin with a pitchfork in his
hands praising Jesus, “Not long now and
He’ll be back,” The Inquisition hovering
around in the clouds as the Great-Great-
Great-Greaters make their way north into
Celticism, the latest womb-escaper, Beatrice,
coming into my workroom, “I want colored
paper, violet, I’m making violets,” as the
Weather Devil drolls on “Tomorrow, tomorrow,
tomorrow you’ll see, see, see…..,” feeling
existentially ONE as the rest of the antiquities
slither through the cracks in the windows and
drop down the chimney into the flames that
can’t/won’t touch them.

Richard Kostelanetz once wrote, "Hugh B. Fox is the most distinguished man of alternative letters of our time." The world of literature will miss him. Along with countless others, we're really going to miss Hugh Fox.

Edwin Honig, RIP

We had a nice time this morning at Dobson Ranch Park but felt sorrow upon reading there an obituary notice for the great poet and translator Edwin Honig, who was not only a first-rate writer but someone we liked and deeply admired from the time we met him at The MacDowell Colony in the summer of 1980.

Actually, we'd appreciated Edwin Honig's writing before that because we'd discovered his work in the late 1970s when it appeared in some of the little magazines we read (and sometimes appeared in ourselves). He was then the age we are now, and he'd had a long and productive career both behind him and still ahead of him.

We took walks and talked about growing up in Brooklyn -- Ed's mother was still living in Brownsville then -- and discussed literature and other subjects. He was working with another MacDowell fellow, the talented (and extremely nice) composer Anne LeBaron for whom he produced the text for Lamentation/Invocation, for baritone, clarinet, cello and harp.

Here is the full obituary by Richard C. Dujardin from the Providence Journal:

Edwin Honig, a poet, playwright and translator who taught at Brown University for a quarter century before retiring in 1983, died at his home on the East Side Wednesday after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 91.

Honig once told former Providence Journal columnist Wanda Howard that he was 13 when an alert teacher at the high school he was attending in Brooklyn, N.Y., introduced him to poetry, putting him under the influence of such writers as Hart Crane, T.S. Eliot, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. [Our note: it was Abraham Lincoln H.S., where his early poetry appeared in the 1935 literary magazine and year book.]

Thanks to his grandmother who spoke Spanish, Arabic and Yiddish but little English, he said, he also developed an intense lifelong interest in Spanish and Portuguese.

All together, he wrote 10 books of poetry, 3 plays, 5 books of criticism and 8 translations, one of the earliest of which was on Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet murdered by Franco’s fascists in Granada. It was published in 1944. Four decades, later he was knighted by the president of Portugal for helping to introduce Fernando Pessoa to the English-speaking world and was similarly honored in 1996 by the king of Spain for his translations of Spanish poets and playwrights.

Honig, who taught at Harvard University before going to Brown, received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mishkenot Sha’Ananim in Jerusalem, the National Endowment of the Arts and the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

He would later compile nearly a half-century of his poems in a volume titled “Time and Again,” and was working on a second volume, “Over Time,” when he became ill.

In “To Restore a Dead Child,” he released decades of sorrow over the death of his 3-year-old brother who was run over by a truck when Honig was just 5.

“Honig has been a poet whose sorrow is always coming home ... No poet of our time has more fiercely presented man’s tragic mortality even as he finds an impressive variety of means by which that mortality is admitted and sublimed,” wrote Daniel Hughes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.

He was the husband of the late Charlotte Gilchrest, who died of cancer in 1962, and the ex-spouse of Margot Dennes, from whom he was divorced. He is survived by a sister in Colorado, Lila Putnam, and by two sons, Daniel and Jeremy, and was cremated in a private service Thursday. Brown University said it plans a memorial service in Honig’s honor in the fall.

When we first met Edwin Honig, he was working on what would become the poem of his we treasure most. We reprint it here:

To Restore a Dead Child

1

1925
Sometimes while I sleep
I hear the single cry and tire screek
that never end.
My blond and foolish brown-eyed brother
lugging his fretful love
shambles after me
as the cunning Mack truck
lurching out of nowhere
cuts him down.

He's a long dead almost-three.
I'm a long lived five
just turned sixty-one
still running in a dead heat
with the rolling cab that swooped him up
heading for the vanished hospital.

It's then on waking
I feel the snot of infant faces
leak into my mouth.


2

Hearing it wake, we feel
the windy calling to each other
of the kindred sleep and death
in the morning opening
of the eyes of country horses,
the odor of earth's dampness
in the crystal tree light,
and the touch of rough bark
on fingertips.

Seeing it, we feel again
the worn heart welcoming
the slow envelopment of dark,
the falling off of sight
in the old gray house,
when sun's heat passes
and the first breeze
lifts a faint dust
along the hedges.

Remembering, again we see
the embers crumbling in the grate,
the fire flaring up again,
the pause before the turning shadow
spans the polished floor
and drifts into the open world,
a street that wanders
endless as a silent grief
that will never know itself.


3

We walked out of time
into the woods of pain
and never seemed
the same again.
We tilted with the hope
of finding ourself
in another skin,
and bent on recovering,
turned with open eyes
to find welcome in the arms
of a dead brother --
sleeping his dream of being,
a dream so long unfulfilled
there was no time
even to begin to live it,
till in his own hope
we lived what we believed
may have been
reserved for him.


4

Watching the immense self scattering ocean
ruffle out before us,
our wonder stirred and time became
an intricately formal mating,
night on day on night,
a repeated wave flash
signaling the act and its abating,
and the last long rolling into shore
turned into a fresh aspiring
of newborn creatures
to join the greater mating
sky and ocean,
and the creatures reeling beyond our wonder
mingled with the lifetimes
of our aged parents, each one apart,
our cheerful sister's pregnant daughter,
also apart,
and this briefly sunlit reawakening
stung alive the still unanswered
black and blueness
we never would be clear of --
though no longer cherishing
the old bruised core,
no longer poised against
the battering disablements,
we simply gazed again
and let our wonder live again,
and die.


5

For everyone the call of light,
seeing figures of the creatures
from the mountain and the sea:
an eagle flying and a snake
whipping past the chicken coop,
a horse neighing in a flash
of meadow, with wayward water there
to slake the thirst a moment.
As light descends,
following the slow shapes
bulking briefly in their place,
it makes as if to stop
and give them way and cause,
as if to stroke
and praise their substance fully
before each creature
passes into its own remove
with rapid smile print
(as on your face and mine appears
held there by heads soon to be
no longer yours or mine)
till it lets the shadow quicken,
overtake the bobbing bulks,
and rise immensely over
like a mercy to devour them.


6

As we would have it,
it would be nothing simple
or profound,
nothing easily attained,
long worked for or perfected.
It would be of a wholeness,
full and large and figured
in its substance.
It would be all engrossing
to itself and others --
like the playing of a mindless tune
between a richer music
and a silence:
a peaked and dribbling sound,
a sound wavering in descent
but kept in measure,
and in that measure
letting all know
how deeply it could love
the silence following.


7

Not to be listening
yet to be heard
in the huge inconsequences
of the heart,
where having conveyed
the full measure of our hate
as a gesture of belief
in something worse than ourself
is barely to have escaped
self murder,
the intended sacrifice
become the bound body of love
in a younger self --
wearing a brother's features
still scored through
the dead boy's memory --
forever jammed between
the tonnage of his death
and self hate's last convulsions,
like the lost deserter
fixed in an ice cake
some intruder yells up
early one spring.


8

As the light descended
the night was pierced a moment
and there was seen
in the vagueness of a shadow
a form more his
than our idea of him,
and the shadow wobbled
into a figure merging
with the hope of his lost being
come to be again,
as we tried swiftly to put on
the dark loose patches
fallen from him in the light --
trying to fill and fill
all that was left
of his living clothes
before his body vanished


9

No longer would he have to run
each time we left him
before our mindless going
struck him
as needing to be answered,
and the need make him
fly to us
and press his body
on us briefly.

For now, if again we left
without a smile or hand wave,
he would no longer need to fret
or wonder how to weight the meaning
since as last reminder
he had left
his body printed on us.

Here is a clip of this great poet in the 2010 film by his cousin Alan Berliner, Edwin Honig: A Poet's Alzheimer:

We will miss him and always treasure his work.

Monday Morning in Greenpoint: "Poles on Poles" on Manhattan Avenue

We took the B48 bus from Dumbo Books HQ this morning

to Lorimer and Bedford and then walked up Manhattan Avenue to make our first stop at one of the two Rite-Aid stores a block apart (the one that used to be The Meserole Theatre, where you can still discern the location of the old balcony and stage)

when we spotted the first sign of "Poles on Poles," a series of Polish poems put up along the shopping district.

As we made our way, we saw more:

They are a project of [v]vital[ny] (in Polish, witalny means "vital"), which

looks to the ephemeral to challenge positions of privilege and encourage interactions between groups that occupy the same space. Keeping with the idea of the city as transitional, our installations are temporary and non-colonizing of space.

Poets up include Edward Hirsch, above (ten wiersz w języku angielskim), C.K. Williams, Jane Hirshfield, Yusef Komunyakaa, Jack Gilbert, and Robert Haas, although we couldn't find them all and suspect that some may have been taken as souvenirs.

In unrelated (or maybe not) Polish cultural news, we see the Polish Film Festival is coming soon.

We were heading up to C Town and then to the India Street entrance to the G train to get our drugstore supplies and groceries home, but we'd like to express our gratitude to [v]vital[ny] for brightening our walk up Manhattan Avenue with poetry.

Dziękuję!

Thursday Afternoon in Tribeca: Sheryl St. Germain at Borough of Manhattan Community College

This afternoon we had the privilege of attending a poetry reading at Borough of Manhattan Community College featuring Sheryl St. Germain, a poet whose work we've admired for decades.

She connected incredibly well with the audience of community college students, something not every writer can do. (At other community colleges we've taught at, some who also connected really well are our friends Peter Meinke, Geoffrey Philp and Judith Ortiz Cofer at Broward Community College and Kate Gale at Mesa Community College.) The BMCC students asked highly intelligent questions, maybe two dozen of them: it was probably the best Q & A period we've seen after a reading in our last four years in New York.

A native of New Orleans, Sheryl St. Germain has taught creative writing at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Knox College and Iowa State University. She currently directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Chatham University where she also teaches poetry and creative nonfiction. Her work has received several awards, including two NEA Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship, the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, the Ki Davis Award from the Aspen Writers Foundation, and most recently the William Faulkner Award for the personal essay.

Her books include Going Home, The Mask of Medusa, Making Bread at Midnight, How Heavy the Breath of God, and The Journals of Scheherazade. She has also published a book of translations of the Cajun poet Jean Arceneaux, Je Suis Cadien. A book of lyric essays, Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman, was published in 2003 by The University of Utah Press. Her most recent book is Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems, published by Autumn House Press in 2007.

Sheryl was incredibly personable and both eloquent and plain-spoken. Her first reading was of an essay about her girlhood in her native city, a city we loved from our many visits from 1981 to about 1995 as a guest teacher in Tom Whalen's superb creative writing program for gifted high school students at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts. Here's an excerpt from Sheryl's essay:

Our parish, our church and school were named after St. Lawrence the Martyr, one of the Roman Church deacons who fell victim to the persecution of Valarian in the year 258. The nuns told us different stories about how St. Lawrence met his death, most of which involved eventual decapitation, but the one I liked best was the story about how, when commanded to surrender the church's treasures to Valerian, he distributed the wealth to the poor instead, and at the end presented those poor to Valerian as the wealth of the church. Valerian, infuriated, initiated a series of tortures, the last of which was to roast him on a gridiron. It is said that during his roasting he joked with his torturer, saying "One side has been roasted, turn me over and eat it."

In addition to teaching us the stories about the lives of the saints and having us memorize the appropriate answers to questions of faith, once we hit fifth grade the nuns also taught us about sex , or rather how to avoid it. Sister Gisela, a big, red-faced nun of an indeterminate age would lecture us on sex during religion class, pacing the hot, unairconditioned classroom, huffing, her face getting redder and redder, as she spoke, her black habit flying out behind her when she turned as if to whip into shape any kid who might have been behind her.

"Your body is the holy temple of the Holy Ghost," she'd say. She had a sometimes stiff way of speaking, and an accent I later learned was Cuban. "This means no kissing until you marry and no touching the holiest parts of your body until you marry!" At this point she would turn and glare at us, one by one, and I swear it seemed as if she could see right into my rotten, sex-crazed young soul. When she looked at me like that I knew that she knew those thoughts I had during Mass while I was pretending to pay attention.

Sometimes she would separate the boys from the girls. Father Schutten, our pastor, would talk to the boys, and she would talk to us.

"No wearing of shiny shoes!" she proclaimed one day. "The boys are looking into the shine of the shoes and seeing what is under there, that which they should not see until you are married." She was sweating on the day she told us this, and I remember how flushed her face was, how drenched she was. She wiped her forehead with a handkerchief. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," she whispered under her breath.

"And girls, you must look before you walk down the stairs in this building. I have discovered that the boys are waiting underneath the stairs to look up the skirts of the girls as they descend. This is a sin and it causes the Virgin Mary great sorrow when these sins are committed." We squirmed in our seats and my friend Maggie whispered to me "It's the boys' sin, not ours!"

Although I don't think it was the nuns' aim to teach us that our bodies were sinful-they meant to teach us they were holy-that was how we came to understand their lectures. The unclothed body was an unholy body, and anything we did with that body that felt good was probably a sin. We learned that lesson well, but that didn't mean we didn't still take pleasure in seduction. After all, sins of the flesh were not mortal sins.

My friend Maggie gave the first slumber party my mother ever allowed me to attend. We were both in seventh grade. St. Lawrence, not to mention Sister Gisela or Father Shutten, would have been displeased to know that we spent much of the night playing strip-tease music and undressing.

We spent the early part of the evening calling boys on the phone and hanging up. We made several calls to Brian Tizzard, the quiet, dark-haired boy we all had a crush on. At one point we snuck out of Maggie's bedroom window and ran the few blocks down the street to Brian's house where we threw rocks against a window we hoped was his bedroom window. When his mother's head appeared at the window we shrieked and ran back to Maggie's. By midnight Maggie's parents were asleep and we could begin our stripping. I had never seen my mother's naked body, or the unclothed body of any mature woman, for that matter. My breasts were just barely beginning to grow, but Maggie's were fully developed, and I wondered what they would look like.

Maggie went first; she had been practicing, she said. Setting the needle of her pink record player to the beginning of "The Stripper," which she had as a 45, she jumped up on top of her bed and threw her thick, dark hair back, looking at us with a look that reminded me of Sister Gisela's look, but this one knew something else. As the music began she pranced around the bed, tossing her hair this way and that, slowly unbuttoning the buttons of her cotton pajama top, which had, as I recall, blue elephants on it. Her breasts bounced as she danced. She turned away from us, dropped her pajama top, looked back at us and grinned, and with the music as loud as we dared (we didn't want to wake her parents) she jumped and turned toward us revealing herself to us in all her bounty. Hair falling over her face, olive skin glowing in the lamplight, she grabbed her breasts and held them out to us, kicking her legs out from side to side to the music. She represented at that moment all I knew of desire and its mysteries, and all I wanted. With her full brown breasts and their darker areolas and even darker nipples, Maggie's body was both enticing and frightening. Her gutsiness infected us all and soon we were all gyrating hips and waists, throwing our hair about and tossing off our pajamas.

We were fascinated with the strippers on Bourbon Street whom we'd only seen glimpses of thus far. During trips to the Quarter, set up by the church or our family to introduce us to its "history" and "architecture" we always wound up walking down Bourbon street, which I guess the adults thought was ok as long as it was day time. But the strip clubs rarely closed, and sometimes we'd get a peek when the men guarding the doors held them open briefly to entice passersby. The strippers, it seemed to me then, had a power over men I wanted to have. Years later, as a young woman, I would try to get a job as a dancer in a Fat City club, but when I learned stripping was expected I couldn't go through with it. By then I preferred a more intimate form of power and pleasure. I loved the way an orgasm would wash through my body like a flood, filling me, swelling me from my ear lobes down to the very spaces between my toes. To reach orgasm was to reach that place so like a swamp, to be filled in that way with such a diversity of flora and fauna and still, still water, to be awash with desire-this was what it was to be alive, I thought. At once swamped and lifted up above it all.

Her poems did for us what she told the students Kafka said writing should do, that famous line about "break[ing] the frozen sea within us." The first poem she read was "Getting Rid of the Accent," which her audience could relate to since the New York and New Orleans accents are so similar (our Brooklynese got mistaken there for Yat). Here's Sheryl's poem in full:

I thought I had gotten rid of it
after I moved to Texas; speech classes
and twelve years in another state--but I'd
still fall back into it like into the gutter
whenever I visited, even on the phone,
whenever my mother called, forgetting
I was a college graduate, forgetting
I was an English major, saying things
like wheah ya at sweethawt, or
dat doan mean nuttn, ya awta seen
da way she pawks dat caw, the sounds
I was fed like milk as a child, the aw
sound predominating as if it was just
too much work to pronounce the r.

I tried hard to get rid of it,
to make my voice sound
as if I had nothing to do with
the black smell of the Lake,
nothing to do with my mother's
beans and rice,
nothing to do with my father's breath,
my brother's track marks.

Once, after listening to me speak,
a friend snickered, "I can tell
you're from New Orleans
by the way you say room and leg."
I couldn't hear it at first, couldn't hear
that I was saying rum for room, and layg
for leg. It was the hardest part
of getting rid of the accent,
rum still sounds more right than room,
gets the job done quicker,
with less effort. Leg was hard too
because layg was in me like blood.
It was a word my mother used a lot,
get your laygs off there, Sheryl,
close your laygs, Sheryl, wash
out the tub when you shave your
laygs, Sheryl, but I practiced
and practiced it, the short e
of leg and the long o of room,
squinching my mouth
into the unnatural positions,
working my way from
the voice of my father,
the blood of my brother.

I was not going to sink
as my mother had, lower
and lower into this spongy
land, I would not have my words
sound like the drunken streets,
the ditch-water
that runs by our house still,
infectious, addictive,

when I sing of this place I love
unreasonably more than life
itself, I want the words to rise
strong and true, separate.

Sheryl also read poems about her family, her Cajun roots, and an "ars poetica" poem about her reasons for becoming a poet. Then came the enlightening question-and-answer session that was so fascinating that it was hard to believe the time had passed so quickly (not the norm, in our experience, at poetry readings). It was a wonderful event and we're grateful we got a chance to attend.

Jeffrey Knapp, RIP

We are very sorry to hear of the passing of our old friend from Florida, Jeffrey Knapp, a writer, teacher, artist and gentleman of extraordinary character and grace. Here is his obituary from the Miami Herald:

After 9 years of a most courageous battle with cancer, Jeffrey Ira Knapp passed away on Wednesday, February 17, in his home, with his family at his bedside. Jeffrey was born on March 2, 1949, in Elizabeth, NJ, the son of the late Sam and Roz Knapp. He attended Emerson College, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and University of Miami, where, as a Samuel Beckett scholar, he received his Masters Degree in Literature and was a recent graduate of the Florence Melton Center for Jewish Education.

Jeffrey lived on Miami Beach for thirty-five years and was a fixture in the city's art and literary communities. He was an avid art collector specializing in Haitian and Outsider folk art. He co-created many art installations and his poetry was brought to life through his wife, Dina's, illustrations.

Jeffrey was a connoisseur of life and celebrated travel, music, fashion, food, art and literature. He spoke fluent Hebrew, French, Arabic, and Creole, wrote and translated poetry, including the poetry of the estimable Haitian poet Felix Morriseau-Leroy.

He founded Florida's Poetry in the Schools program, and was one of three itinerant "Bicycle Poets" who brought poetry to students throughout the State. He served on the Board of Tigertail Productions. He also founded and edited Dial-a-Poem.

His Dada-Surrealist poems appeared in many prestigious literary journals including Ploughshares and Boston Review of the Arts.

Jeffrey held a position at Florida International University since 1989, first as a composition instructor in the English Department. He became Director of the First-Year Interest Groups Program, and in 2002 was named Director of the Academy for the Art of Teaching.

He was a Faculty Senator, the Chair of the University Core Curriculum Oversight Committee, co-chair of the Teaching and Learning with Technology Roundtable, a member of the Access and Equity Committee and the Academic Learning Compacts Committee, and a coordinator for the Title V project.

Jeffrey presented pedagogical papers at a number of leading international and national conferences on learning communities and on teaching and learning with technology. In 2009 Jeffrey was very honored to be the recipient of the President's Access & Equity Award at FIU, presented to a full- time employee who has consistently gone above and beyond his or her job responsibilities to promote and ensure diversity and inclusiveness.

Jeffrey also was a Hebrew School teacher, member of the Board of Education and the Board of Trustees at Temple Beth Shalom and shared the love of his heritage with many students. His wife, the artist Dina Knapp, his daughters Ariel Knapp of Los Angeles, Astra Schwartz Dorf of New York, a grandchild, Athena Dorf, and his two loving poodles, Paris and Colette, survive him.

We first met Jeffrey in the winter or spring of 1981, at one of the weekend monthly Poetry in a Pub events that met at Fort Lauderdale locations back then. We think he used to come with Mitch Kaplan (best known as the owner of the great Books & Books and the big macher behind the Miami International Book Festival) and Jim Hall, then teaching poetry writing at FIU (now best known as James W. Hall, author of the terrific Thorn thrillers).

We liked Jeffrey right away; he had a great sense of humor always and was really smart about poetry and about people. With his wife Dina and others, he created many whimsical yet profound works of visual and literary art. Jeffrey seemed to know a lot about everything, be it practical or undeservedly obscure; we remember the revelation back in the early 1980s when he showed us his translations of the great Haitian Creole poet Felix Morriseau-Leroy. We fondly recall a fun reading together, all humorous poetry and fiction, for the Miami Waves Festival at Miami-Dade Community College's Inter-American Center in Little Havana in the spring of 1983.

A reviewer attending a 2005 reading wrote in Miami Poetry Review:

Jeffrey Knapp: He's the one that offered up that great phrase about reading one poem too few, etc. Jeffrey is the living embodiment of poetic realism. His ability to offer up concrete details and his simple and direct style was a breath of fresh air... Listening to his poetry was like watching a home movie; there was little fluff, but a lot of reality. He also managed to be funny, a feat which is rarely accomplished by your run of the mill poet.

Being with Jeffrey was always fun. In 1996 we once again served with him on the Literature Organizations grant panel for the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, and he made those meetings and the days we spent in Tallahassee, a pleasure. We were working as a staff attorney at the University of Florida in those days, and Jeffrey hitched a ride with us as far as Lake City (where I-10 meets I-75) so that a friend from Jacksonville could pick him up. (Jeffrey had friends everywhere.)

Lake City was, in those days, pretty dumpy, and we had time to kill before his friend came, so we walked around a nearly-deserted forlorn mall and found one of those photo booths where they take a strip of paper and put four photos on it. Jeffrey had us pose for the first two, quickly changed places for the third one, and then we rushed back into the photo booth for the fourth pic. When the strip came out, it looked startling: as if one person were, suddenly and momentarily, turned into another. Jeffrey had taken a number of these with other people before, he told us.

It was so like him. He startled people with joy everywhere he went:

"Poetry on wheels" is how Jeffrey Knapp describes his new band of cycling troubadours. He hopes they can stir enthusiasm for verse in the young crowd.
The Bicycle Poets, a group of five local poets, will pedal into two North Central Dade schools and surprise student bodies with a bit of poetry. The group makes its debut Friday.

Knapp worked for 15 years with the Poets-in-Schools program in Dade County Public Schools, in which accomplished poets lead workshops in grade schools. Other Bicycle Poets include Jamaican-born poet Geoffrey Philp, Afro-Cuban poet Adrian Castro and Campbell McGrath, recently arrived from Chicago.

"You'd be amazed how excited the kids get," Knapp says. "Some of them want to stay and write their own poetry. Some even want to skip lunch or P.E. to keep on writing."

He has published more than a dozen books filled with poetry from the children he has visited in Dade, Broward and Monroe county schools. The books bear titles such as Imitations of Immortality, Notes from the Other Ground and Daughter of Notes from the Other Ground.

To find new ways of reaching children, Knapp developed the concept of bicycle poets. Knapp, an avid bicyclist, thought cycling into the poetry readings would add spontaneity.

"I wanted to just get there and say, 'Here we are,'" he says. . .So bent are they on surprising their audiences that they've instructed the schools to not tell the children why they're being brought outside in the middle of the day.

- "Pedaling Poetry to School Kids," Miami Herald, March 10, 1994

Volcanos erupting popcorn, glass grasshoppers, dishpans that revolt and chickens laying square eggs.

Strange notions these kids in Erma Carter's fifth-grade classroom at North Miami Beach Elementary have.

And there's this guy in a short denim jacket and earth shoes with tousled black hair and beard padding around the room, waving a Coke can, bantering back and forth with the kids, and he's actually eliciting all this "square-egged" "glass grasshopper" nonsense from the kids.

Well, it's not nonsense at all. It's poetry. And Jeffrey Knapp...is a poet teaching elementary school kids that poetry isn't necessarily about daisies and sunsets and staring out the window at rain pelt-pelting down.

He's teaching those kids that they too can write poetry, and that it can be fun. "I wouldn't say kids like us more than recess," Knapp confides. "But we're up there on the list."

- "Kids and Poetry Mix in Classroom," Miami News, February 10, 1976

Jeffrey Knapp was up there on a lot of people's lists. We'll miss him a lot. Our heartfelt sympathies go out to Dina, his daughters and his granddaughter.

(Thanks to Steve Malagodi for the old photos.)

Thursday Night in Williamsburg: Donald Breckenridge, Susan Bernofsky and Lewis Warsh at Spoonbill and Sugartown

On this lovely early October evening, we walked over to Bedford Avenue for a 7:00 p.m. reading at the wonderful Spoonbill and Sugartown, Booksellers. The event featured three top-notch writers: Donald Breckenridge, fiction editor of The Brooklyn Rail; our old friend Susan Bernofsky, an extraordinarily fine translator of an exquisite and under-appreciated major writer, Robert Walser; and Lewis Warsh, now a grand not-so-old man of literature, a brilliant poet whom we last heard read circa 1976.

It was an enjoyable evening. First up was Donald, who is also editor of The Brooklyn Rail Fiction Anthology (Hanging Loose Press, 2006) and co-editor of the Intranslation web site. In addition, he is the author of more than a dozen plays as well as the novella Rockaway Wherein and the novel 6/2/95. His novel This Young Girl Passing is forthcoming from Autonomedia.

He read several passages from his novel You Are Here, about the relationship of various New York couples; the parts Donald read were about one particular couple, Janet and James, from the start of their romance to its inevitable dissolution, set around the time of the 2004 presidential election.

As Bookforum noted, the novel is

very much about New York and its inimitable inhabitants—not the Upper East Side soirees and anecdotal Central Park moments that so entrance filmmakers, aging novelists, and the New Yorker, but Lower East Side bodegas, nighttime baseball games at McCarren Park, and dingy Queens apartments . . . much more than just an exquisite exercise in form.

All tonight's writers were enjoyable to listen to, but for us, the highlight came in the middle of the program with Susan Bernofsky, who, as The Brooklyn Rail said, is "widely considered to be one of the best English translators of German literature today." Perhaps best known for her translations of the great Walser, she's also translated Hesse and other writers, is a terrific fiction writer herself, a brilliant scholar who can write with equal precision grace on the nuances of translation or Donald Duck's German popularity.

We've known Susan since she was a high school student at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts in the early 1980s, when we were a guest in her creative writing class, and we've followed her spectacular career as a scholar, translator, author and teacher, but tonight was the first time we'd seen her since she visited us at our summer apartment on the Upper West Side around 1988. So it was great to see her (afterwards she greeted us by saying we looked just like our Facebook pic).

Susan read a couple of wonderfully quirky passages from her latest Walser translation, The Tanners, which the Village Voice justly called "a contender for Funniest Book of the Year" and Time Out New York selected as a "top pick" for this summer's reading.

She also read from her novel-in-progress, a beautiful passage set in wartime Dresden where the grandmother of one of the book's New Orleans characters is hiding her Jewish identity as she makes her way as an art student. Susan has always been one of the smartest and most productive people we've known; we're looking forward to the full novel as well as her forthcoming biography of Walser.

We've known Lewis Warsh's work since the early 1970s; later in the decade, we were honored to appear in a couple of the same little magazines with him.

Born in 1944 in the Bronx, Lewis is co-founder, with Anne Waldman, of Angel Hair magazine and books, and co-editor, with Bernadette Mayer, of United Artists magazine and books. He is the author of over twenty-five books of poetry, fiction and autobiography, most recently Inseparable: Poems 1995-2005 and the forthcoming A Place in the Sun. He is director of the MFA program in creative writing at Long Island University (a great school where we began our teaching career from 1975 to 1978).

The last reading we saw Lewis at was somewhere in SoHo sometime in the Ford administration. He looks remarkably youthful and his recent poems are as crisply crafted and sparkling as the ones we loved decades ago. No surprise that The Brooklyn Rail, in reviewing Inseparable, wrote:

You can get wonderfully lost in these poems where “We float out past the reef & the rocks.” Present and past commingle, propelling the words into the future. Memories, places, people and experiences are banked. The poet’s steady voice kindles them as he breathes through the lines.

To give you an idea of the pleasures of Lewis Warsh's poetry read aloud, here he is with "Eye Contact":

Thanks to tonight's wonderful readers and to Spoonbill & Sugartown for a great evening.