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Poetic Symposiums, Screenings from the Frozen North
Poets unite in Harvard, Canadian filmmakers fly south, and more


Big-name poets gather to support the Grolier Book Shop

The Boston poetry establishment is for all intents and purposes headquartered in Harvard Square straddling a golden triangle of institutions: the Blacksmith House Poetry Series, on Brattle Street (it’s administered by the Cambridge Center for Adult Education); the George Edward Woodberry Poetry Room, in Lamont Library in Harvard Yard; and the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, on Plympton Street.

Founded in 1927 by Gordon Cairnie, a Canadian who came to Harvard to study landscape architecture, the Grolier was run for many years almost like a down-at-the-heels but nevertheless exclusive club, with Conrad Aiken living upstairs many years ago and Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Frank Bidart, and Robert Creeley hanging about in their day. When the mastership of Harvard’s Quincy House (which is just down the street) came open, Robert Lowell — perhaps on the brink of one of his manic episodes — enthusiastically suggested Cairnie for the job.

Although the Grolier is nominally a for-profit institution, it’s never been what accountants would call a cash cow. In many ways the business flourished in spite of Cairnie, who was capable of grand gestures like selling once-banned books like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, but wasn’t very good at ordering books if his customers requested them. It didn’t hurt that his wife had money.

Much of that changed in 1974, when Louisa Solano bought the shop after Cairnie’s death. Today the Grolier is less like a clubhouse and more like a salon. Although it occupies the space of a commercial thumbprint, a mere 404 square feet, Solano manages to stock nearly 16,000 titles in 29 categories; as far as we know, this is the nation’s only bookstore devoted exclusively to poetry. Solano is fierce in her dedication to serving both the poets — dead and alive — whose work she stocks and the customers who pass through her doors Tuesday through Saturday from noon to around 6 p.m.

The Grolier, former US poet laureate Robert Pinsky told the Christian Science Monitor, " is valuable for the same reason poetry is so terribly important: human scale . . . [its] intimacy has a power, an appeal that cannot be matched by any mass marketing. " Intimacy, however, has a price. The Grolier is regularly on the verge of going out of business. Its landlord — Harvard, the richest university in the world — raises the rent with every new lease. And though Harvard says the Grolier is paying less than other tenants, that doesn’t keep Solano any farther away from commercial starvation.

Yet as much as Solano has to stay focused on her tiny bottom line, she’s really more of a crusader than a capitalist. Her cause: to bring poetry to the broadest possible audience. Among her weapons: sponsoring autograph parties and readings, founding the 11-year-old Intercollegiate Undergraduate Poetry Reading, and administering the annual Grolier Poetry Prize.

In the hope of bolstering Solano’s fortunes, some of the nation’s leading poets will speak at a symposium to benefit the Grolier next Friday, November 8, at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Among the luminaries will be Frank Bidart, the editor of Robert Lowell’s forthcoming collected poems; Pulitzer Prize winner Jorie Graham, Harvard’s Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory; Peter Sacks, also of Harvard; Forrest Gander of Brown; and Robert Pinsky.

The benefit also aims to celebrate some of the greatest poets of the 19th and 20th centuries. Audio clips drawn from the best-selling anthology Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Ports Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath will be played, and the participating poets will offer their own thoughts on those performances. Among the dead whom the living will salute: William Carlos Williams, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, and Laura Riding Jackson.

Poetry Speaks co-editor Elise Paschen will moderate. Tickets are $25 and are available from the Grolier, 6 Plympton Street in Harvard Square. Call (617) 547-4648.

Abba redux

Spot quiz: protean rock talent Elvis Costello was a fan of what bubblegummish pop band? That’s right, Abba. No prize for guessing right, but we do have good news: the hit musical that Abba’s two guys, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, created using 22 of the band’s best known tunes returns next year to the Colonial Theatre from January 25 to March 16. When Mamma Mia! played the Colonial last year to sold-out houses, it broke box-office records for 12 weeks. Among the Abba hits in Mamma: " Winner Takes All, " " Dancing Queen, " " Knowing Me, Knowing You, " " Take a Chance on Me, " " I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, " " Super Trouper, " and, of course, " Mamma Mia. "

Canadian invasion

The eighth Annual Northampton Film Festival, which this year rechristened itself the Northampton Independent Film Festival, has brokered a deal with Canadian independent filmmakers from the Toronto International Film Festival to show three features: Denis Villeneuve’s Maelström, in which a dying fish narrates the story of a drug-crazed young woman who kills an aging fishmonger in a hit-and-run accident; André Turpin’s Un crabe dans la tête/Soft Shell Man, in which an amiable young underwater photographer lusts after every passing young woman; and Asghar Massombagi’s Khaled, in which a 10-year-old boy tries to cover-up his ex-junkie mother’s sudden death in a Toronto housing project to avoid being placed in a foster home. Also playing will be Bill Haney’s The Gift of the Game, in which Bill " Spaceman " Lee and assorted baseball fanatics try to revive the children’s baseball league that Ernest Hemingway started in pre-Castro Cuba; it took the " Best in Fest " award at this year’s Woods Hole Film Festival.

Brookline native wins literary bucks

Danzy Senna, a Brookline native now living in — where else? — New York has been named one of the 10 recipients of the 2002 Whiting Writers’ Awards. These grants, $35,000 each, have been given annually since 1985 by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation to emerging writers of talent and promise; previous winners include Jorie Graham, Mona Simpson, Padgett Powell, David Foster Wallace, Darryl Pinckney, Jonathan Franzen, Tobias Wolfe, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Michel Cunningham. Senna’s first novel, Caucasia, was published in 1998 by Riverhead Books; the story of a bi-racial family living in — where else? — Brookline, it earned her the Book of the Month Club Stephen Crane Award for the Best New Fiction, the ALA’s Alex Award, and an LA Times Best Books of the Year mention, and it was a finalist for the International PMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Orange Prize. Senna, who studied at Sanford and the University of California at Irvine, is now at work on a second novel.

Arts volunteers needed

for AIDS installation

On World AIDS Day this year, the Boston Center of the Arts is going to burn. For the last 10 years, the Cyclorama at the Boston Center for the Arts has been host to Medicine Wheel, a massive art-installation project conceived by Boston-based installation artist Michael Dowling. Each year on December 1, the Cyclorama is filled with a circle of 36 shrines and a sculptural environment to honor World AIDS Day. Artists and community members bring offerings to these shrines — which range from blood bags to performances of Bach sonatas. The themes in past years have included fog and light, earth (piles of sod filled the Cyclorama), and water (there was a moat). This year’s theme is fire, and the flames will spread outside the walls of the Cyclorama.

Besides a fire pit in the sidewalk outside the Cyclorama, four locations throughout Boston — City Hall Plaza, South Boston, Roxbury Community College, and the Jamaica Plain Boathouse — will observe this 24-hour vigil with cauldrons of fire. On the evening of November 30, the community is invited to gather at these cauldrons and to begin a lantern procession culminating at midnight at the BCA.

Inside the Cyclorama, 200 painted panels, 300 feet long and 12 feet high, will enclose the circle of shrines. A repeating map of the world, this mural follows the history of the AIDS epidemic. For every 1000 cases of AIDS, there’s a burn mark. In 1979, the year of the first recorded case of AIDS, " the map is pristine, " says Betty Glick, production manager for Medicine Wheel. " By 2002, whole continents are burned. "

But Medicine Wheel Productions needs help with its mural and its flames. In the days leading up to December 1, the organization will looking for volunteers to be fire tenders in the various locations, as well as help construct the panels, a job that will entail burning, varnishing, shellacking, and mounting. " It’s dirty work, and there’s a lot of labor, but being part of this is a major life experience, " says Glick.

To find out more about volunteering, call (617) 268-6700. You can also send tax-deductible donations to Medicine Wheel Productions, 28 Damrell Street, Boston 02127.

Marty scores

The Huntington Theatre Company production of the world-premiere musical Marty has enjoyed the highest single-ticket pre-sell in the company’s history. Through the first preview weekend (which ended Sunday October 20), the musical broke all previous advance-sell records with non-subscription sales of $154,471. It runs through November 24.


Issue Date: October 31 - November 7, 2002
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