By: Michael Yockel

Poetry is blossoming again in Baltimore. Why?


In the introduction to the 2003 book Mortification—a hilarious collection of recollections by writers who have suffered sundry humiliations and indignities during readings—editor Robin Robertson notes the disproportionate number of poets among his seventy contributors. “The whole enterprise of writing poetry is a de facto folly,” observes Robertson. “These people devote days to single lines and years to preparing each slim collection, and then publish their work into a yawning maw of indifference.”

While no rational poet (an oxymoron, perhaps) would contest Robertson’s jibe, most nonetheless persevere at their craft. This certainly holds true for the passel of poets now active in town, whether decorously ensconced in the academy or seizing the stage for open-mike readings. Poetry thrives in Baltimore—and, to varying degrees, it always has, dating to the early 1830s, when Edgar Allan Poe cranked out verses here. In his 1985 book Maryland Wits & Baltimore Bards, local historian Frank Shivers Jr. chronicled a cavalcade of eminences who have toiled in the city, some settling in for the long haul (Ogden Nash, Josephine Jacobsen), some passing through (Andrei Codrescu), and some relocating elsewhere after growing up here (Adrienne Rich, Karl Shapiro). “I think Baltimore is a propitious place for writers,” observed Jacobsen, who died in 2003 and whose very early and very late poems were published in April 2008 in the chapbook Contents of a Minute. “It has a distinct personality, does not seem as impersonal as many other cities, and has a heavily mixed ethnic population.”

In modern times, Baltimore’s poetry culture has gone through what poet David Beaudouin, founder of Tropos Press and the lit journal The Pearl, calls a series of “waves and troughs,” periods of frenzy and quiescence. After erupting in the late 1970s/early 1980s and again in the early 1990s, the city’s poetry landscape has evolved into something of a Balkan nation, with pockets of activity coexisting but seldom intersecting. “In terms of neighborhoods and cultures and races and literary preferences,” notes Beaudouin, “people tend to hang out in their little groups.”

These include Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars program (featuring professors/poets Dave Smith, Mary Jo Salter, Greg Williamson); a churning hip-hop/spoken word scene (The 5th L, Olu Butterfly Woods); the prankster, outré element represented by the Shattered Wig Review (ringmastered by Rupert Wondolowski); the elegant verse of formalists such as Joseph Harrison and JHU’s Williamson, who, together, established a U.S. beachhead in the city for U.K.-based Waywiser Press in 2004; and Michael Ball’s i.e. series, which offers readings by what Beaudouin terms “academic rebels from the postmodern language school.”

For the past three years, poet and stay-at-home Parkville mom Julie Fisher has attempted to bridge these islands of poetry through her website, www.poetryinbaltimore.com, and regular readings at Minás Gallery in Hampden, inviting writers to post their work online while corralling disparate representatives from the city’s mini-scenes onto the same bill. Last year, she inaugurated a monthly reading series, Load of Poetry, at Load of Fun in the Station North district. Fisher’s two series include an open-microphone component, wherein attendees sign up to read before or after the event’s featured poets. “I thought, ‘If we find each other, maybe we can make it a stronger community,’” she says. “It’s fun to mix it up.”

A scene’s strength “hinges on the ability of poets to get out into the open and read, because that’s really their only public forum,” says Beaudouin, who has read at the i.e., Load of Poetry, and Minás series in recent months. “I think that there is a genuine quality of writing-where-you’re-from here. In terms of the raw versus the cooked, they may tend to be more of the raw type—less tutored in the ways of poetry than their academic peers. But sometimes I find that preferable to listening to the drone of perfectly formed poetry in the academy.”

Joseph Harrison, a Baltimore resident for twenty-five years, doesn’t drone: He recites his work from memory in an engaging, un-dramatic, clearly enunciated voice accented with a Southern twang (he was raised in Virginia and Alabama). Both he and Williamson offered poems from new collections published by Waywiser—Identity Theft and A Most Marvelous Piece of Luck, respectively—earlier this year at several local venues.

While Beaudouin suggests that Waywiser’s Baltimore connection can only enhance the city’s poetry bona fides, Harrison allows that the publisher likely has more of a national impact than a local one, given that one of its principal endeavors—and Harrison’s role with the house—is conducting the annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Awarded since 2005 in honor of the celebrated American poet who died in 2004, the Hecht Prize was copped in 2007 by Gaithersburg’s Rose Kelleher, whose work was selected by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur. Kelleher won $3,000, and Waywiser will publish her collection Bundle o’ Tinder on both sides of the Atlantic this fall.

Harrison says that Waywiser attracts mostly serious, formalist work—but that doesn’t mean “rigid or stiff,” he emphasizes. “We’re interested in whatever we get, as long as it seems to us to be well-written and original …  particularly if it has a sound that we haven’t quite heard before.

“There’s increasing interest these days in meter and rhyme,” Harrison adds. “The worm does turn. [Formalist poetry] has been out of style for so long that some of its virtues—rhythmic structure and artistic rigor—are felt to be missing by many readers and writers of contemporary poetry. If you can show younger poets how to do these things, they feel that they’re being taught a definite skill that they can use, rather than just [telling them] something vague like, ‘Put more bodily fluids in your poem.’”

Bodily fluids swirled through the work and, often, the lives of the city’s poetry scenesters in the late 1970s and early ’80s. “It was pretty Wild West,” recalls Beaudouin. Back then, Andrei Codrescu, Anselm Hollo, Daniel Mark Epstein, Sandie Castle, and Joe Cardarelli presented their work at MICA’s station building, the Maryland Writers Council headquarters on Franklin Street, and Second Story Books on Charles Street in Mount Vernon. Augmenting these Baltimore-based poets were regular readings by imported heavyweights such as Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Alice Notley. (I once saw/heard Ed Sanders, best known as one-third of the satirical 1960s rock band the Fugs, recite poetry at MICA while accompanying himself on a mini-keyboard he’d built into his necktie.)

The poetry scene that blossomed in coffeehouses and galleries during the early ’90s featured “a different flavor, a cultural richness,” Beaudouin remembers. “It brought in more of the spoken-word element and a little bit of performance. But the most exciting part of it was the fact that it was the first time—and, really, the only time—that there was a crossover between black and white poetry in this town. It was an extraordinary opportunity to broach that self-prescribed separateness, these invisible boundaries in our city.”

Those boundaries between the African American and white scenes persist today, but for David “Native Son” Ross and Femi “The Dri Fish” Lawal, who front the poetry/spoken-word/hip-hop group The 5th L, the clannish nature of Baltimore’s poetry culture stems more from stylistic preferences than any other factor. “There is some [racial] division,” notes Ross, “but I think it’s because people are either unaware that there are other things going on, or they’ve found a spot that they are comfortable with, and they stick there.”

Lawal concurs, theorizing that various poetry styles have developed and become entrenched at individual venues as the number of spaces offering verse has increased. “People have created their own environments,” he asserts. “Everybody has their own clique, even within the black community. White poets might not feel as accepted in a black venue because the [poetic] language is slightly different.”
 
Now, after hunkering down for more than a decade, the city’s poetry scene might finally be poised for a wavelet, if not a tsunami, of activity, with the various tribes gradually—glacially—bleeding into each other. A few months ago, for example, Load of Fun hosted a gathering co-headlined by Clarinda Harriss, reading feisty yet frolicsome feminist-tinged work, and J.R. Shorter, who suffuses his achingly personal poems with a palpable poignancy. Before the readings by the featured poets (white woman, black man), a veritable Benetton Nation of open-mikers held forth, with attendees pulling their chairs together into a circle, support-group style.

The quality of the non-billed poets’ work, not surprisingly, veered hither and thither. A young black woman recited verse that earnestly recounted her personal stumbles while brimming with optimism for the future; a young white guy who would have blended in seamlessly at a Star Trek convention graphically chronicled his physical relationship with his girlfriend (unembarrassed, she beamed adoringly from an adjacent seat); and a middle-aged white man strode determinedly around the circle as he recited the lyrics to the haunting Billie Holiday song “Strange Fruit.” Each elicited polite-to-enthusiastic responses. 

Poet Kendra Kopelke, program director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing Arts program in the University of Baltimore’s School of Communications Design, interprets such diverse assemblies as indicative of an improving atmosphere, detecting something of a positive disturbance in the city’s poetry force. “It seems more accepting to me, right now,” she observes. “There’s more variety—ages, styles—and part of that is because of the Internet. There’s a greater ability to let people know, instantly, about readings. I don’t get much of a sense of attitude here; the slam poets, the academic poets, spoken word artists, formalists, language poets—I think everyone accepts everyone else. Which, really, is the way it ought to be.”

—Michael Yockel wrote about duckpin bowling in the June Urbanite.



Full Photo Caption: Chapter and verse: Baltimore poets Femi “The Dri Fish” Lawal, David Beaudouin, Joseph Harrison, and Olu Butterfly Woods (standing, left to right) gather with David “Native Son” Ross, Kendra Kopelke, and Julie Fisher (seated) at Gaslight Square in southwest Baltimore.



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