Intersections

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by Chris Wright

THE BLACKSMITH HOUSE: Schwartz calls it his "poetry home."

The Blacksmith House

It's a sunny Tuesday afternoon, and Schwartz is seated at one of the outside tables at the Blacksmith House in Harvard Square, wiping bird shit off his sleeve. By his own account, he's had moments more auspicious than this at the Blacksmith, a place he calls "my poetry home."

It was here, in 1972, that the local poet Gail Mazur launched the Blacksmith House Poetry Series, which has since served as a kind of potting shed for local talent. The list of poets who have read here includes Frank Bidart, Mark Strand, Louise Glück, Phillip Levine, Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall, Seamus Heaney, and Robert Pinsky, who went on to become poet laureate of the United States.

The Blacksmith's early days were far from ostentatious. For one thing, the reader's podium faced the bathroom, so the poet could look to the left and to the right, but never straight ahead. "We got paid by passing the hat," Schwartz says. "I remember Mark Strand sitting there counting his cash to see if he did better than whoever had read the month before. It's more money now, but there was something incredibly sweet about Gail passing a basket around. You might make $40 or $15. A few quarters."

Even today, after many years of accomplishment, Schwartz's generation doesn't revel in the kind of glory or literary celebrity awarded to figures like Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, who loomed over the local literary community of Schwartz's youth with a kind of Olympian stature.

"There are wonderful poets here today," Schwartz says, "and though some of them have become extraordinarily successful, this is no longer an age of the towering cultural figures. This is a culture of the ordinary. Gail Mazur has a poem in The Pose of Happiness that ends, `I'm ordinary, my fears are ordinary,' which is the way we think about ourselves. We're not extraordinary, our lives aren't extraordinary. Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, they led these archetypal, mythic lives, and nobody would say that about any of us."

THE BRATTLE ARMS: Elizabeth Bishop slept here.

The Brattle Arms

Next door to the Blacksmith is a modest red brick apartment building, the Brattle Arms, the onetime home of Elizabeth Bishop. "She had a ping-pong table in the front hall," says Schwartz. "It was the first thing you saw when you walked in the door." In the early '70s, Schwartz was a regular visitor to the Brattle Arms, where he and Bishop forged a lifelong friendship.

Schwartz's first meeting with his literary hero, though, was not what you'd call an unmitigated success. "She had just come to Cambridge, it was the fall of '70," he says, "and I had been to hear her read. I was in awe of her. Frank Bidart introduced us after the reading, and I told her I loved her poems, and she said `Oh, thank you,' then turned her back and went to talk to someone else."

Over the next couple of years, Schwartz ran into Bishop at various events, with similar results. "She was always perfectly cordial," he says, "but there were no sparks. There was always that kind of invisible shield, that glass wall. It was all very polite, but nothing more than that."

Then one day Schwartz's phone rang. On the other end was Bishop. Schwartz was amazed -- more so when he found out why she was calling. She had fallen down a flight of stairs at the Casablanca bar and broken her collarbone, and was calling to ask if Schwartz would bring her mail to the hospital. "She was extremely, excessively apologetic," he says. " `I'm sorry, I hate to bother you, I'm really sorry, would you mind terribly, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.' I, of course, was thrilled to be able to do something. I would have done anything for her."

That week, Schwartz visited Bishop at the hospital every day. "That was how we became friends," he says. "The guards were down -- we could actually just talk, and not have to talk about poetry. By the end of the week we were talking about movies and records we liked and people we knew."

In 1975, Schwartz switched the topic of his doctoral thesis from the poetry of Yeats to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, a project that would evolve into a major article for the New Yorker and lead to his current role as co-editor of a Library of America volume on Bishop's work.

Then, in the fall of 1979, Schwartz received another phone call, this one informing him that Bishop, 68, had died suddenly. "She was getting ready to go out to dinner, putting on her shoes," Schwartz says, "and she had a brain hemorrhage. I was shocked. She had these ailments all her life, and she had been afraid, morbidly afraid, that she was going to have a slow, lingering death, that she would lose her memory and lose her faculties, be hospitalized. I thought afterwards that if she'd only known how she was going to die, she would have been so much happier, because it was painless and instant. But she was too young. She was at the height of her career."

The Agassiz Theater

"I love this place," Schwartz says, looking around Radcliffe's tiny yet elegant Agassiz Theater. It was here, in the late '60s and early '70s, that Schwartz cut his teeth in theater, acting in a company that included Stockard Channing, John Lithgow, Tommy Lee Jones, and "a talented kid from MIT called James Woods."

"Acting was one of my ambitions as a child," Schwartz says, the excitement still in his voice. "I always had this deeply intense feeling about doing theater."

For a long time, he satisfied his cravings by writing theater reviews for student publications. Then, in 1968, he auditioned for a Timothy Mayer production of Aristophanes's Peace. Earlier, he had written a patchy review of another Mayer production, and he was sure he wouldn't get the job. "I went to this audition," Schwartz says, "and there was Timothy Mayer, who said, `Oh, didn't you write that review?' He'd practically memorized it, and in revenge he cast me in a couple of very small parts that were designed to humiliate me."

"There I was," he laughs, "in this ridiculous costume, a very skimpy toga with a gold ribbon on the side, six feet tall, gangly, all skin and bones, and the hero is flying to Heaven on the back of a dung beetle to ask the gods to establish peace in the world -- he's on this swing over the Agassiz stage on his way to Heaven, and I've been told to `do a Nureyev' across the stage. So I'm leaping across the stage, at which the hero says, `This must be Heaven.' Got a big laugh. That was my revenge."

After this dubious triumph, Schwartz became a regular on the Agassiz stage. "I had some plum roles," he says. "I was always a fool, a Russian, or a newspaper reporter. I was in a Brecht play, In the Jungle of Cities, in which I played a character known as `The Worm.' "

For Schwartz, acting the fool became a kind of catharsis. "At the time, I hated the way I looked, hated the way I sounded," he says. "So in a way, doing plays meant making something horrible in my life sort of useful. Getting applause for being ridiculous was a way of making myself useful, or at least amusing or interesting."

Eventually, professional pressures -- namely, the disinclination to wait tables -- led Schwartz to quit acting. "This was a crisis," he says, "a real conflict. I hated having to make that decision." And yet, in some sense, he never really left the theater behind.

"I can see it so clearly now," he says, "I don't know why I couldn't see it at the time, but an amazing thing happened to my poetry. I had been writing personal, confessional, lyric poetry. I was a formalist -- my ambition was to write a sonnet sequence based on The Odyssey. But during that year, that first year of not acting, I channeled that into my poems, writing in the voices of other people, doing dramatic monologues. Later on, when I started doing readings, the poems became vehicles for me as a performer."

"Performer" is right. Though generally there are no togas involved, Schwartz's readings are often uproarious affairs. Even so, mingling poetry and drama is by no means a frivolous matter for Schwartz. "This is a central issue in my life," he says. "What drew me to acting is that it is both an escape from the self and an extension of the self. To be a really good actor you have to have a capacity to extend your own nature, to find where you connect with other lives. This is exactly what I wanted to do with my poems. It was that impulse of getting away from yourself and going deeper into yourself that led me to write poems in the voices of other people. I started writing that way practically the minute I couldn't do live acting again."

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Chris Wright can be reached at cwright[a]phx.com.