Things changed, as things do. First sign was the Bick’s new policy of closing at 4 am, to keep out the people who were using it for their overnight accommodations. Mike’s closed and Hazen’s moved over from Mass Ave into Mike’s old space, before it closed too. Zum-Zum, with its astonishing variety of wurst hanging in the window, came and went.
Not all the changes were for the worse. In 1973, Gail Mazur started the Blacksmith House Poetry Series, the first serious poetry-reading series in town. We’d go for Welsh rabbit at Cardell’s on Brattle Street (not to be confused with grocery boutique Cardullo’s, which is still there) and browse the latest quarterlies at Reading International, on the corner of Church Street, where browsing was actually encouraged (it’s gone too, and so is its health-food-store replacement). Then we’d cross the street and sit in the Blacksmith’s awkwardly spaced coffee house (two branches at right angles, the poet in the middle), where we had a more direct view of the bathrooms than of the readers, but where the readers were invariably interesting. Elizabeth Bishop replaced Robert Lowell at Harvard, then Seamus Heaney replaced Bishop.
Boston was missing its own literary magazine until a bunch of writers and people who loved writing met at the Plough & Stars and decided to start their own magazine: Ploughshares (which just celebrated its 100th issue at — where else? — the newly refurbished Plough & Stars). Every issue had a different editor. Michael Mazur and Ralph Hamilton were among the cover artists. The poetry cooperative Alice James Books started in Cambridge. Askold Melnyczuk founded the more politically oriented Agni (now housed at BU, with Sven Birkerts as editor). Novelist Anne Bernays started PEN New England, a branch of New York’s PEN American Center. Freedom-to-write panels and Discovery evenings (Sue Miller, Ha Jin, Susan Orlean, and poets Tom Sleigh and Mark Halliday were among the discoverees) continue to this day. Gail Mazur, Martha Collins, Ellen Wilbur, and the late Beatrice Hawley organized round-the-clock anti-nuclear readings.
Nostalgia comes easy. Yet when I walk through Harvard Square, go to the opera, or try to find a book or a record, I can’t help thinking about what’s missing, and that the few things that are still around are more precious to me than ever.
Lloyd Schwartz is a contributing editor for the Boston Phoenix.
