For Bill Corbett, friend, publisher, poet, critic, memoirist, and teacher

                                           October 11, 1942-August 10, 2018

"We love to be with us."
      -- Bill Corbett, "Columbus Square Journal"


Begin in Blue

The blue of her robe . . . reads above all as a flat silhouetted shape—a deep infinite midnight blue, large enough to lose ourselves in . . . this very dark blue creates unparalleled effects . . . almost of hypnotic trance; it is as though we are being invited to worship not so much the Madonna as the Blue. - Timothy Hyman, Sienese Painting

I’m reading John Wieners' chapbook, Pressed Wafer, upstairs at one of the giant tables in the Bancroft when a visiting scholar asks for help with research in the archives where I work. And that’s how I learn that, in 1882, landscape architects at the University of California designed a eucalyptus grove for the Berkeley campus (a grove through which I walk once a week). Tasmanian blue gum trees were planted as a windbreak for the cinder running track. They grew and grew, non-natives making themselves at home. To those who’d never seen a eucalyptus tree, the grove smelled like cough drops.

            *

Wieners was a Boston boy. Later, in San Francisco he wore blue eye shadow and sold heroin packed in matchboxes the size of a palette of eye shadow—false eyelashes, glued one above the other on his forehead—cockeyed Caucasian—eyelids the color and shape of the leaves of the blue eucalyptus near the track where the beautiful athlete, also a Joseph, also a John, breathing hard after a sprint, does not look up at the plane from Boston passing over the track.

Boys in California know nothing of priests in long skirts shoveling snow, winters invented by Emily Dickinson.

            *

The Blacks and the blues,

the grove as artifice

          

In Berkeley, Robert Creeley recorded a version of “A Poem for Painters”:

            “With want of it”—

            “despair is on my face”—

            “showered by the scent of the finish line”—

           

The golden boys protected by tall trees

blue blood—blue eucalyptus—blue-lined paper

“beginning with violet. I begin in blue”

“My middle name is Joseph”

            *

Sanskrit “vaka”

“wat” (temple)

“grove” (copse, thicket)

A coppice—spinney—brake—for the broken

A grove: a stand of trees with little or no undergrowth—So here’s the floor, all clear and still, a thicket—“cold hell”

  Grave   Love   Leaves

       

Torn tickets in the eucalyptus leaves, pants in the trees

Who walks through the grove in winter rain? Pants decomposing in the decomposing leaves— pants and a dog

      

This was after the picturesque era, before Free Speech— “Books in the running brooks,” books in the trees

            *

Strawberry Creek roars with the snowmelt coming down from Truckee. The train back to Boston leaves at 3:00.

Across the “enormous” country—passing a car filled with Beats, ascending, going where Beats don’t go.

         

Climbing into the mountains he leans out the window, his ears pasted back like a dog’s—like a dog, submissively free— submission is different when there’s no force.

In the Rockies they close the windows now because so many travelers have been decapitated leaning out to see the trees—but the windows were open then, so he looked—looked—looked—

Added September 3, 2018: Stan Mir's recollections of Bill in Hyperallergic.

For more about Bill and his work, check out Patrick Pritchett's essay, and listen to Jackson Braider's PRX interview with Bill. 

August 17, 2018: Here's Fanny Howe's portrait of Bill (and Bill's Paris Review interview with her); and here Jim Behrle and other writers remember Bill (at WBUR).

August 19, 2018: "There's no one I learned more from, not only about poetry, but also about how to live and how to be a good person,' said Fred Moten, a poet and critic who teaches at NYU."  Boston Globe obituary

Here you can read Thomas Devaney's Rain Taxi interview with Bill. 

And: "'Every day is poetry day': Remembering Bill Corbett," Sean Cole / pretty radio / WBUR. 

You can find books that Bill wrote and published at Small Press Distribution and at Pressed Wafer.

"Already fall's harsher / light cuts blown / leaf shadows into / sharp patterns. / There are fewer mornings / attending to the all / important loss column." - William Corbett, "September Song"

"Begin in Blue" was published in Ambush, a literary magazine, in 2014. 

For my poet (from Wite-Out; originally published in Hanging Loose magazine)

My Mystic

My mystic isn't old enough to be my mother.

She yells “No!” when she laughs at my jokes.

She can’t keep anything down and doesn’t drink, except for whiskey, wine, and water.

My mystic is her father’s daughter.

My mystic has her own monk, a hermit who had his own monk.

Out on a boat on the Atlantic with a friend, tossed around, my mystic screams with laughter when they don’t drown.

My mystic has an early edition of Proust in a closet with her sheets and towels. Any house sitter could steal it, but no one does.

My mystic picks at her croissant in the dark, Swann’s Way in her lap.

My mystic wants to know all about my men, so I tell her. She groans, and then we talk about the new Pope. She thinks he has a humble face.

From her apartment we can see an orange neon sign across the Cambridge green. At dusk it tints the dirty snow. My mystic used to run in and out of that hotel lobby with her best friend, stealing candy.

Now children crawl all over my mystic. In the pockets of her vest (the color of their red toboggan) they find hard candy.

My mystic is a sister. Is lilacs. Is toast.

My mystic has already bought her plot.

My mystic is both the crone and the infant in the fairy tale.

My mystic is a fairy. She flies everywhere but leaves no carbon footprint.

My mystic has a device. Children text my mystic from L. A., Dubai, Oxford, Paris.

My mystic might have been named Affliction or Delight if born at sea in 1620.

Or, two centuries later, out of Cobh and mad in steerage: perhaps Theresa.

My mystic has lips the color of a rose named for the Cathars, who had but one sacrament: consolation.

For You

For you--particularly the students in C. D. Wright's
 class today. Thank you.

"What good am I / heaven only knows" 

                                    - DINAH WASHINGTON

"A Playpen in the Democracy of Art"

Sebastian Smee profiles Bill Corbett, "The Man Who Nourished Boston's Literary Scene"

     "Jhumpa Lahiri wasn’t sure she could be a writer. Although as a child she had harbored dreams of doing just that, they had gradually been eaten away by self-doubt — she could scarcely believe the books she loved had been written by real people.  “At twenty-one,” she recalled in a 2011 New Yorker essay, “the writer in me was like a fly in the room — alive but insignificant, aimless, something that unsettled me whenever I grew aware of it, and which, for the most part, left me alone. After graduating Barnard in 1989 with a degree in English literature, Lahiri moved to Massachusetts to take classics courses at Harvard. She also found work at the cash register in a Harvard Square bookstore with a friend of a friend, Marni Corbett, a daughter of poet William Corbett and his wife, Beverly, Marni’s father, a tall man with a commanding, jowly face and mischievous eyes, used to visit the store to say hello to his daughter and to buy books. Big armloads of books. . . . "

continue reading Smee's Boston Globe profile here

How many of us has Bill supported, encouraged, published, celebrated? Read this long and interesting profile to get a sense of the legacy he is leaving as he and his wife Beverly Corbett head to Brooklyn after forty-something years in their South End townhouse in Boston.

Here's a link to WBUR's interview:

Bill Corbett is Taking His Legendary Literary Salon to Brooklyn

Go here and here to see some of the books Bill has written, edited, and published.

John Wieners, Lee Harwood, Lewis Warsh, Bill Corbett at Walden Pond.
(Photo: Jud Walker)

Sebastian Smee's Boston Globe Mag profile

Love and Work / bio / updated April 15th, 2021

Linda Norton 

 

  

  

LINDA NORTON is the author of The Public Gardens: Poems and History (Pressed Wafer, 2011; introduction by Fanny Howe), a hybrid work of poetry and memoir and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry, and a sequel, Wite Out: Love and Work, a memoir with poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2020). She is also the author of two chap-books, Hesitation Kit (EtherDome, 2007) and Dark White (Omerta, 2019). 

D. Scot Miller, in the East Bay Express, reviewed Wite Out with new books by Ishmael Reed and other Oakland writers, calling it "a must for anyone trying to understand the nuanced aggression of systemic oppression and how it affects the afflictor and the afflicted in equal measure." Wite Out was #2 on Small Press Distribution's list of nonfiction bestsellers for spring 2020 (right behind Marguerite Duras!), and is also on SPD's list of non-fiction bestsellers for July-September 2020. The book was an SPD August staff pick; you can read Liam Curly's review and others here, and Anthony Domestico's Commonweal review here.  Find Marcella Durand's thoughtful Hyperallergic review of Wite Out, "Using Language to Investigate Whiteness," here.  

In December 2020 PPOW Gallery in New York hosted a reading and "book party" for Wite Out, where Eileen Myles and John Keene read with Linda Norton. Click here for the video of that warm and wonderful event. Click here for a February 2021 reading and conversation with Fanny Howe (emceed by Norma Cole) at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State.  And here's a panel discussion at the April 2021 New Orleans Poetry Festival, convened by Tyrone Williams, in which Linda Norton, Gabriel, Gudding, Jeanne Heuving, and Williams discuss issues of appropriation, inspired by Zadie Smith's essay about [not]staying in your own lane.

You can read excerpts from Wite Out here and at SFMoMA's Open Space. Poet and professor Katie Peterson created an incisive and bracing podcast about the book when she taught it to her grad students at UC Davis in spring 2020. 

The prequel to Wite Out, The Public Gardens, was just reprinted for the fourth time; both books are available from SPD, or from your online behemoth retailer, or from your local bookstore (Moe's at Bookshop.org is mine, and they will ship to you too). 

Norton's poems, essays, collages, and interviews have appeared in many magazines and in several anthologies. In 2014, Irish writer Dermot Healy chose her memoir "Pearl Paint" (part of Wite Out) for inclusion in the annual Fish anthology (published in Cork, Ireland).

In 2014 Norton's visual art (a series of collages called “Dark White”) was exhibited, with a grant from the US Embassy in Dublin, at the Dock Arts Centre in Carrick-on-Shannon, Ireland. Her collages have appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly and other magazines, and on the covers of books by Claudia Rankine, Julie Carr, and other poets. She is also a lyricist, registered with ASCAP. "Landscaping for Privacy" and “Wet Psalm,” her collaborations with composer Eve Beglarian, are available on iTunes, etc., and on CD. Norton’s interview with Belgarian is on the Herb Alpert Award site.

Norton was a resident at the Guthrie Centre in Ireland in 2015 and at the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Texas, in the summer of 2002. In 2014, she was awarded a William Dickey Fellowship at San Francisco State University and a Creative Work Fund award. In 2018, Norton was awarded a Ucross Foundation residency (with a Whiting Foundation travel grant) in Wyoming.

She has given talks and has been a guest writer at the Oakland Book Festival, Brown University (in C. D. Wright’s class), Harvard, UC Riverside (Fred Moten’s class), SFSU and CCA, the Athenian School, the Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn, the LA Times Book Festival, Moe's Books, the SoundEye Festival in Cork, the American Literature Association (Amiri Baraka Society), and many other places. She has conducted interviews for NPR's Storycorps Griot series and has an IMDB credit for her work as a researcher and writer for a documentary about the Alley, Oakland's last remaining piano bar.

Norton grew up in Boston and spent many years in New York. She has lived in Oakland, California, for more than twenty years. In 2017, she became a dual citizen of Ireland/EU and the U.S.A.

She is currently a writing instructor at the Yeats Academy, IT Sligo, in Ireland. From 2018-2020, she was a writing consultant/tutor for labor organizers in the Unite Here LEAD Project. She has also worked as an instructor at SFSU, where she received her MFA and Certificate in the Teaching in Composition in 2018, and a columnist at SFMoMA’s Open Space.

Starting with jobs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and at Yale University Press, Norton has had a long career in book publishing, archives, libraries, and oral history. At the University of California Press, in the New York office, she was publicist for books by Oliver Sacks, William Finnegan, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Robert Creeley, and many other authors. In Berkeley as an acquisitions editor, she founded the New California Poetry series with Calvin Bedient, Robert Hass, and Brenda Hillman, and published books by Rebecca Solnit, Lyn Hejinian, Alan Lomax and Jelly Roll Morton, Wallace Stevens, Lorine Niedecker, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Janet McDonald, Carlo Rotella, Fanny Howe, Yunte Huang, Harryette Mullen, Donald Allen, and many other authors in a variety of fields.

Here you can find excerpts from reviews of Wite Out.

From reviews of The Public Gardens: Poems and History

A memoir of place (Boston, New York, Oakland and San Francisco) and of the commons—gardens and libraries, streets and subways, marriage and family—and a hybrid work of poetry and prose, The Public Gardens is a documentary (with lyrics) of a life lived in, around, and for books. 

EILEEN MYLES: "The Public Gardens is a brilliant, wonderful book, a sort of a wild institution, intense and readable. Linda Norton looks at the world like a dog who likes to tear apart couches—repressed but not for long. Though full of shame, this book is shameless. A life is freely divulged as are the multitude of homeopathic bits from the author's reading list. The overall experience of moving through The Public Gardens’s shuttling prose and poetry is quietly breathtaking. I have felt and learned much from this book! Her 'Gardens' are both organized and entirely disorderly—anything and anyone from any point in history might saunter through, and that's the meaning of public, isn't it? I find myself loving this writer's mind, light touch, and generous heart and I, reader, didn't want to go when it was done. My bowl is out. More!"

FANNY HOWE: “Have you ever heard Dinah Washington sing ‘This Bitter Earth’? Have you ever seen the movie by Charles Burnett called Killer of Sheep? This little book, The Public Gardens, conjures up the experience of that movie and that song, the fate of families and neighborhoods in 20th-century America. Although the title of the book shows that its ultimate point of reference is Boston, the work inside travels through New York and Oakland. Part poetry, part notebooks, it is a model of the camera made human, made humanist, a part of arm, leg, hand, a moving-picture taker pregnant with literature. What she sees, we have all seen and passed by. But she has paused to note it. 

“Steeped in the language of Scripture and Emerson, the poetry here is fresh and wild, cultivated and desperate. Linda is Sicilian but everything in her is modern. She hates what she loves. This makes her lonely, inspired, uprooted, still hunting, and blissed out whenever possible. She documents her losses and loves, both as a free person and a mother, and every word she writes has the bittersweet taste of Dinah Washington."

PATRICK JAMES DUNAGAN, Galatea Resurrects “She looks back on her personal history with tough self-reckoning which she then crystal cuts to near sparkling perfection. Her bearing down on experience to yield the truths of life lived has no fluff.  . . . Norton shares her losses: at the death of brother, the unfolding of her marriage, historical readings/visions of society in her visits home to family in Boston, and finally her relocation to California for work. She's found what abides is observing moments of one's life, being aware of what's happening as it happens. There's joy to be found round daily business.” 

ELIZABETH ROBINSON, Otis Review “Norton’s rejoinder to suffering, shame, loss, and the drudge of economic necessity is to encounter the world with a keen interest that is by turns plaintive and robustly humorous. . . . Right inside [the] gap of transition and loss, Norton locates a site of empathy and mystery.”

STAN MIR, Jacket2 “[Norton] prefers the communal to the individual, a preference that provides shelter to work without the burden of attention. Without a doubt, this communal impulse shapes the interrogative quality of Norton’s writing . . . Norton’s skillful writing in her journals shows the complexity of the AIDS legacy, and more acutely, how layered Norton’s difficult memories are concerning her family. The ability to weave these layers as honestly as Norton does in The Public Gardens is rare. How often is one willing to look hard at one’s family and milieu, write about them, and then publish it? Certainly, there are acres of memoirs published every year that proclaim penetrating introspection, but few are as probing as Norton’s.

“It’s startling how continually aware Norton is of her past, and impressive to see her determination to help shape a life that’s distinct to [her daughter], perhaps one less burdened by class anxiety and built-in Catholic guilt. The care that Norton takes with each of her subjects in The Public Gardens — the feminine, art making, and family life to name a few — ought to have much influence on her audience . . . Her book is an achievement built on her years of quietly working in the background, which is to say this book is a testament to patience.”

Interviews: With Kate Greenstreet; and Evan Karp; and Andrew David King.

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The Public Gardens went through three printings and appeared three times on Small Press Distribution’s bestseller list. In 2012, it was one of five finalists, along with books by Carl Phillips and Dawn Lundy Martin, for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry (though it’s half prose). John Keene wrote about The Public Gardens (and excerpts from Wite Out) on his blog. C. D. Wright included a quote from the title poem, “The Public Gardens,” in her last book of poems/essays.