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A memoir in poetry: fifty years of writing

Hank Hoffman

Charlotte Garrett Currier. Photo by Matthew Garrett.

When Charlotte Garrett Currier turned 80 in 2007, she didn’t want the party that her family suggested. She wanted a book. A beautiful book that would be a summation of her work as a poet and a teacher of writing.

Currier got her birthday wish. Shadow and Light: A Retrospective was published last year in an edition of 300 on her own imprint, Trefoil Arts. Circumstances intervened to prevent giving the volume a proper rollout then. With some local readings, Currier is now giving the book some low-key promotion.

Currier has long been interested in the presentation of poetry. In the 1990s she published Poem Box, a stylish box containing a display stand, matted, folded, and enveloped poems, and photographs by her son Matthew Garrett. She wanted Shadow and Light to be beautiful. Designed by Daphne Geismar, the collection is elegant and wonderfully readable.

Shadow and Light, for Currier, is in some sense a “memoir” encompassing “50 years of writing and 80 years of living.” Her poetic journey began in earnest when she moved to New York City in 1951, several years after graduating from Dickinson College. In the postwar years, New York City — and Greenwich Village in particular — was alive with cultural ferment. Writers hobnobbed with visual artists; new trends in music provided a soundtrack.

“Dylan Thomas was giving poetry readings at the New School. There was a whole series of poetry readings there,” Currier recalls, in an interview at the Guilford home she shares with husband Donald Currier, a classical pianist who taught at the Yale School of Music for 39 years. “And we would adjourn to the White Horse Tavern after and watch Dylan Thomas drink himself under the table.” The legendary Welsh poet served as both an inspiration and cautionary tale.

Perhaps most liberating for Currier was the freedom of free verse or, as she tells me, “I discovered I didn’t have to rhyme. I couldn’t fit into any form. We had to write 30 lines of Miltonic blank verse in college. It was the worst assignment I ever had.”

Currier started taking classes in poetry taught by Stanley Kunitz at The New School for Social Research in the Village. There she found a community of writers and artists with whom she remains friends to the present. In the latter part of the 1950s, Currier worked at the Cold Spring Institute of the Walt Foundation. It was a residential program for men and women over 55, designed, Currier says, “to show them that they too could grow and develop past the age of 55.” Then in her late 20s, she was administrative assistant to the director and “essentially a housemother as well.” The “great gift” of the job was that it offered exposure to a broad world of ideas and culture. Art and music teachers came by on a weekly basis. Every Friday night well-known thinkers would visit for dinner, cocktails, and a lecture or talk. A discussion would follow the next morning. Among the guests were Eleanor Roosevelt, the psychologist and art theorist Rudolf Arnheim, and poet William Carlos Williams, whom Currier got to know. At the same time, Currier was undergoing Jungian analysis.

“All that came together and I got bolder about my feeling that I could write,” says Currier. Kunitz was supportive of her efforts, encouraging her to submit a poem for publication in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the premier venue for poetry at the time. Currier’s “Poem” was accepted. (Retitled “University Hospital,” it is included as part of her “New York City Suite” in Shadow and Light.)

Its publication in 1959 (under her maiden name Charlotte Wilson) gave her the courage to apply for a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony for artists in Peterborough, New Hampshire. William Carlos Williams was by then quite ill but asked his friend, the writer and political activist Kay Boyle, to recommend Currier. Boyle was in residence at MacDowell when Currier was there in 1961.

The rural setting of the MacDowell Colony impacted Currier beyond just offering an opportunity to concentrate on her writing. Along with summer stays at the artist-friendly Bay Street Studio in Boothbay Harbor, Maine (starting in 1956), her New Hampshire residency opened Currier up to an appreciation and awareness of nature.

“I had grown up in a suburban compound outside Philadelphia. My family did not do anything outdoorsy. I had never been particularly conscious of what was out there,” says Currier. The summers in Maine and long walks at MacDowell were revelatory. “The imagery has stayed throughout. It became a resource for visual imagery in my poems.”

After marrying the sculptor Sidney Garrett — whom she had met during one of her summers in Maine — Currier moved with him to south Texas where he had an academic posting and then to Baton Rouge and Louisiana State University. At LSU, she taught freshman composition and earned a master’s degree under the tutelage of her thesis adviser Stanley Plumly. Plumly, also a poet, was supportive of Currier’s efforts. LSU had a strong English department. New Critic Cleanth Brooks, who had taught at LSU from 1934-1947 before moving on to Yale, taught a semester during Currier’s tenure. Novelist Walker Percy was on the faculty. The office of the influential literary journal The Southern Review was down the hall from Currier’s office. Lewis P. Simpson, one of the journal’s editors, “took me under his wing,” Currier says, and published her poems regularly (under her married name Charlotte Garrett; the new book is the first work published under the last name Currier).

It was at LSU where Currier became prolific in her writing of poetry. One summer she was asked to work as the medical student adviser. But she never saw a medical student. In an air-conditioned office with an electric typewriter and a stack of blue paper, “I had nothing to do so I wrote poetry. I would start with a line that went through my head and say, ‘Where can we go with this?’ It was wonderful and very freeing,” remembers Currier.

After the breakup of her first marriage, Currier moved to Connecticut to marry Donald Currier. They had first met at his Town Hall debut recital in New York City in 1956 and remained friends through the years. From 1989 to 2002, Charlotte Currier taught the writing of poetry at Wesleyan University’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program (GLSP). The teaching of the craft of poetry impacted her writing.

“In trying to put into words what I knew instinctively about the writing of poetry or about how a poem should be, I was teaching myself at the same time,” Currier explains. “There is a physicality about writing poetry, a sense of opening up, breathing and letting the line go. It’s the hardest thing to teach and the hardest thing to do.”

When I ask her how she chose the included poems, she says, “It was a matter of selecting ones that continue to be meaningful.” Many have been previously published; Currier says they “were acknowledged, in a sense vetted.” The “memoir” unfolds over five sections. The first section features poems written during her time in Baton Rouge. Personal poems — including several dealing with the breakup of her first marriage — comprise the second section. Following the emotional directness of the second section is the unnumbered “Memory Album” in the middle of the book, which Currier terms “comic relief.” On black pages, there is the “New York City Suite,” a selection of short poems from Currier’s 1950s Manhattan sojourn. These “skinny poems,” written under the influence of Williams, are typeset in white rectangles bordered by black, evoking the Gotham skyline. “Snapshots,” a potpourri of short poems important to her, are typeset in white on black within white triangles reminiscent of brackets in a photo album. The third and fourth sections, respectively, feature poems written after she came to Connecticut and poems written in response to exercises given to her Wesleyan GLSP students.

Currier sees an analogy between visual art and music. The years spent listening to her husband perform and practice has affected her thinking about poetry. Beyond establishing rhythm, there is a “physicality that the words create just by their sounds.” In an e-mail to me after our interview, Currier recalls a class in which she played the final quartet scene from the Richard Strauss opera Der Rosenkavalier. None of the students knew the opera or German. When the scene ended, Currier asked them what it was about. One student stood up, “put her hand over her heart and said, ‘Love and loss!’”

“She was absolutely on target. And it was the rhythms and pulse of the music that spoke to her, not the words,” says Currier. “How to meld that into writing a poem has, I suppose, been my challenge as a writer and a teacher.”

Shadow and Light: A Retrospective is $25 plus $1.50 state sales tax. It is available at Breakwater Books in Guilford or can be ordered directly from Trefoil Arts, 12 Long Hill Farm, Guilford, CT 06437 (203) 453-5472 or trefoilarts@gmail.com (invoice will be included with book). Shipping charges in-state of $4.95 include tax. Local delivery and pick-up can be arranged.

Thinking globally, performing locally
International Festival of Arts & Ideas celebrates cultural connections

Lucile Bruce

	Barabbas Theatre Company performes Circus. Photo by Pat Redmond.

In June, the International Festival of Arts & Ideas returns in full force, dizzying in its scope, defiant in its insistence on celebration.

Through works of dance, music, and theater, from Ireland, Hungary, Dakar, Sierra Leone, the United States, and other locales, this year’s Festival celebrates humanity: who we are, where we come from, and the connections we have with one another.

“We have loosely draped words in the form of a theme around the programming,” says the Festival’s Executive Director Mary Lou Aleskie. The Festival’s theme, “Global Identities/Local Heroes,” exists, Aleskie says, not to create rigid categories, but rather to spark exploration and interpretation. In an age of “self-selected news, self-selected culture, self-selected experience,” she explains, “the idea is to provide enough content for you to be your own curator.”

Indeed, there is not one International Festival of Arts & Ideas, but thousands of them. It’s impossible, by design, to see everything this year’s program offers. But that’s part of the point: good festivals are about making choices.

“The Festival is a participatory endeavor that celebrates many artists and voices from around the world,” says the Festival’s Artistic Director Cathy Edwards. “It also celebrates a curious and adventurous audience. We want to give people the tools and the time to build the experience that will most energize them.”

To this end, the Festival’s Web site offers several platforms that make the experience more interactive, including video, a user-friendly blog, and “Daisy,” an animated feature that clusters events by theme.

As usual, this year’s Festival offers a variety of free and ticketed events, punctuated by weekend concerts on the New Haven Green. And while there will be fewer concerts on the Green this year, organizers are putting more muscle into them.

“What’s great about the Festival is that there are benchmark activities that bring everyone together,” Edwards says, referring to such free concert events on the Green as Opening Night on the Green: Global Dance Party Featuring Buckwheat Zydeco & Slavic Soul Party, an evening with R&B/gospel singer Mavis Staples, and the Festival Grand Finale: Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars & Bio Ritmo. New this year is a family concert on the Green featuring the Grammy Award-winning pop band They Might Be Giants.

As for ticketed events, the Festival opens with the U.S. premiere of Circus. Created and performed by the Barabbas Theatre Company of Ireland and inspired by Italian director Federico Fellini’s classic film La Strada, Circus is a piece of theater (not an actual circus) about an unlucky “clown” who tries to get someone in the audience to join the circus. A huge hit in Ireland, Circus incorporates movement, vignettes, and music, and explores sophisticated themes of love and loss (best suited for viewers age 8 and older).

Like Circus, virtually everything in this year’s Festival program crosses artistic and geographic boundaries in some way.

The Good Dance — dakar/brooklyn, a work created by Andréya Ouamba, a Congolese choreographer based Dakar and Brooklyn-based choreographer Reggie Wilson, examines what Wilson calls “the moral base” of cultures.

“In predominantly Western cultures,” Wilson explains, “we get our moral guidance from books — the Bible, Torah, Koran. But in African cultures, the moral base is grounded in the body and how the body is organized.”

An African American artist who creates dances that focus on the African diaspora, Wilson has thought a lot about the nexus of global and local experiences. His Brooklyn-based company, Fist & Heel, diverse by design, consists of widely traveled dancers from all over the world.

“Everybody is who they are and we gain from interacting,” says Wilson. “By working together, we don’t become less of who we are. We become more of who we are.”

For Aleskie, the artists in this year’s Courtyard Concert series, held in the picturesque courtyard of Yale Law School, clearly embody the theme of global identities: Puerto Rico-born Miguel Zenón re-imagines his musical roots in the context of contemporary jazz; Mexico-based Tania Libertad, who was born in Peru, incorporates many dimensions of Latin music into her vocal universe; and Rupa, of Rupa and the April Fishes, who grew up in France, India, and San Francisco, sings songs in English, French, Hindi, and Spanish in a style that ranges, Aleskie says, “anywhere from Deborah Harry to Marlene Dietrich.”

Twenty years after its premiere, the Festival stages Mark Morris’ Dido & Aeneas, the choreographer’s turn at Henry Purcell’s 17th century opera of the same name, which, in turn, is based on Virgil’s Aeneid. In Dido & Aeneas, Morris marries artistic forms, blends the classical and the contemporary, and juxtaposes myth and modern themes. Danced by the Mark Morris Dance Group, Dido & Aeneas also features the Yale Collegium Players and guest soloists, with the choreographer conducting.

Revisiting another seminal moment, pianist Jason Moran performs IN MY MIND: Monk at Town Hall 1959, a multimedia concert combining live and recorded music and video projection that reflects on Thelonius Monk’s legendary big band concert at Town Hall in New York City, after which he became an international jazz star.

Theater lovers, too, will find reason to celebrate at this year’s festival. The Katona József Theatre of Hungary stages Anton Chekhov’s iconic late-19th century drama Ivanov in an acclaimed production set in rural Hungary, during the 1960s, a few years after the Hungarian Revolution was brutally crushed by the Soviets. And, in yet another fresh, vital look at an older text, actor Conor Lovett, regarded as one of the greatest living Beckett interpreters, performs an adaptation, presented by Gare St. Lazare Players of Ireland, of the Nobel Prize-winning writer’s novella, First Love.

Prepare to laugh, say Aleskie and Edwards. Ivanov and First Love “are spiked with anxiety and horrible stuff,” explain Edwards, “but on the other hand, they offer a cathartic release by taking these things to the breaking point, where they just become so funny.”

The Festival’s Ideas Program this year features several artists reflecting on their work, talks by such creative luminaries as author Frank McCourt and music critic Alex Ross, and panel discussions on topics ranging from food to civil rights to the global economic crisis.

Community engagement is alive and well at the Festival. Look for master classes by the Mark Morris Dance Group and others, a “community shout-out” with choreographer Reggie Wilson, and the Favorite Poem Project: Community Reading with Robert Pinsky, former U.S. poet laureate.

Really Real, a dance work created by choreographer Wally Cardona with music by Phil Kline, is the Festival’s most comprehensive community engagement project this year. The project culminates with the world premier performance of the piece featuring Cardona’s company, local dancers, singers from the Betsy Ross Arts Magnet School choir, and others.

“It’s a great thing for an arts festival to be able to make investments in new projects and premiers,” Edwards says. “We balance that with projects that we have seen and are intimately familiar with. But I think this is the most adventurous thing we can do.”

Really Real will be performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in the fall.

Cardona says he and Kline will rehearse with the “movers and singers” for 10 “extremely intense” days before the premiere of Really Real on June 19. Cardona has worked out the choreography but says it could change depending on the local performers. Aesthetically, Cardona aims for honest, open interactions between performers onstage.

“I’m dealing with people — how they perceive their difference and how they respond to it,” he explains. “I hope the audience will begin to travel in their imaginations, and wonder who they are and how they are with each other.”

Visit www.artidea.org for complete event listings.



In the Write...
The written word: from bookshelves to cyberspace

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie —
True Poems flee —
— Emily Dickinson

As the rains and dews of May pass into the luxuriant heat of summer, the trees of the Elm City burst into leaf, tennis players mob courts, and air conditioners click on at night.

Summer, like any season of the year, brings its own species of the written word into our lives — words that in the 21st century live in the humming computers on our desks as they have in the pages of the books on our shelves.

Literature is a cognitive experience of mind and language. The material portion of that experience — the touch of a page, the feel of a leather binding — while significant, is not necessarily essential, as Emily Dickinson herself suggests (“… though never in a Book it lie”). An Internet Age has made that apparent with a steady flow of new digital ventures entering the literary agora over the last decade and a half. While print still holds something of an edge in providing an imprimatur of legitimacy, there is little doubt that writers for the Web who can — with confidence — point to sites that draw traffic (and therefore readers) and post a high ranking in a Google search will eventually come to the conclusion that Web publishing can perform a literary function as well as any printed work.

Today, lovers of literature can find good work at any number of excellent sites including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency (www.mcsweeneys.net ), n+1 (www.nplusonemag.com), and Bookslut (www.bookslut.com). And these are only the better known of the hundreds operating within the Internet universe. And the Elm City has not been exempt from getting into the act.

Of particular interest is Daniel Casey’s Gently Read Literature (gentlyread.wordpress.com). Casey is a New Haven resident and an instructor at Southern Connecticut State University and Manchester Community College. Dating from April 2008, GRL is an internet journal that appears once a month. Its mission is to create “a forum for criticism and analysis of contemporary literature, specifically contemporary poetry and literary fiction.” According to Casey, “there are too few outlets that take the time to scrutinize literature, to explain how and why we value poetry and fictive prose the way we do.” GRL does that by inviting reviewers to explore works — often from small presses — that are less likely to receive much coverage in mainstream venues. As a result, GRL is an ideal starting point for exploring the world of small presses and chapbook publishers of poetry and literary fiction, as evidenced by the site’s list of links and titles under review from such shops as Coffee House Press, Canarium Books, Wings Press, Soft Skull Press, Fugue State Press, and more.

New Haven Review is a local literary blog (and print journal) founded in early 2008 that has been mentioned previously in this column. Its editors, in addition to printing a semiannual publication, produce a single weekly book review that also focuses on small press publications. The New Haven Review’s editorial team is about to make dramatic changes to its Web site (www.newhavenreview.com).

“We wanted to increase the flow of content and expand our reach into the literary community,” notes editor and founder, Mark Oppenheimer, “so we decided to invite several local writers to join the editors in contributing on a regular basis so we would have something to offer every day of the week.”

Participants see this transition to a “group blog” as an opportunity to expand not only the Review’s impact but the literary coverage of the Greater New Haven area. In addition to Oppenheimer and his fellow editors Brian Slattery and Tom Gogola, contributions will also appear now from Bennett Lovett-Graff (New Haven Review’s publisher), Allison Moncrief, Jonathan Kiefer, Donald Brown, Stephen Ornes, Eva Geertz, and others from within the New Haven community. The only expectation of contributors is that their contributions stay in the realm of the arts and culture, but, as a recent e-mail to them pointed out, “when there is a New Haven angle (a show you saw here, a book that mentions New Haven, a cool conversation you had at Willoughby’s), all the better.”

Of course, there is probably no dearth of additional sites in the Greater New Haven area for the literarily inclined to search out, from poet Greg Santos’ Moondoggy’s Pad (www.moondoggy.blogspot.com/) to Christopher Arnott’s New Haven Advocate articles (www.newhavenadvocate.com/blogs/arnott/). If you know of others that In the Write should cover, please contact us.

Bennett Lovett-Graff is publisher of the New Haven Review, a literary journal and Web site that hosts parties, sponsors speakers, and supports and celebrates the literary activities of the Elm City. For more information, visit www.newhavenreview.com or contact Bennett Lovett-Graff at publisher@newhavenreview.com.

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