Mark Wunderlich - Provincetown, MA
Provincetown is at the end of the world, the tip of Cape Cod, a tiny windswept collection of B&Bs and fudge shops. We get there a day early so see the entire town, pretty clapboard houses on the water, bigger places out toward the point. We see four lighthouses, stand on frigid beaches (with tufts of snow mixed in with the wet winter sand), talk to couples with dogs wet from the surf. We even see two guys emerge from the Atlantic side hauling surboards, dressed like sea lions in matching black scuba suits.
It is peaceful, but it is also February. Our B&B is creaky and quaint and they have cider and wine when we come in that night. Jaunty French ballads play on the stereo, with the occasional track from Dido or Mel Torme. We sleep on a rock hard bed and wake to a howling wind threatening to blow in the rattling windows of our room that open to the Cape itself. We eat breakfast in the morning with several couples, Mary and Mary (who are next to us in the King Charles Suite), Rob and Amber (who are likely from Boston and who don't bother putting on socks or shoes in the morning), and Tina and Helen (one very tall, one very short). We have homemade Portugese muffins and hard boiled eggs, and try to see one of the small whippets that the owners keep behind the half-door that leads to the kitchen. Every time the owner sneaks out to bring more juice or coffee, the dogs try to negotiate their way into the main room. Each time, the whole table of guests peer over, hoping the dogs will make it.
It's dreary all morning, but about the time I get to Mark Wunderlich's apartment, the sun is out and Provincetown is bathed in light. He meets me outside and I'm glad to see him. Of all of the poets I've met, he's the one who admits the most freely to knowing about the trip. He checks in on the website from time to time and often tells me that he has the same RV fantasy we had. I think about telling him 5 bad things about RV life - because I am a stinker, after all - but that'd be sour grapes. RVers have to learn. I hope he joins the club soon.
We go into his bright apartment - filled, I must say, with some nutty touches: some kind of skinned rug, a large animal head adorned with beads and baubles, some kind of circa 1950s couch that might be something very hip that I'm too much of a boor to know about, and a fishing rod against one wall with eyelets the size of a pocketwatch.
We sit across a table and, as always, I give some kind of overview of why on earth my wife and I are doing what we're doing. We talk about a poet I've seen recently who Mark knows well, and we share some stories.
Provincetown has a long history of supporting artists and writers. Mark knows this first hand, having won two fellowships with Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center over the years. After the last one he just stayed and likely would remain except for the continuing skyrocketing cost of living. So instead, he and his partner have made an offer on a giant stone house in the Hudson River Valley, much closer to Mark's teaching gig at Sarah Lawrence, and pastoral like the town in which he grew up in Wisconsin.
Mark talks beautifully about living in New York City's East Village in the early 90s - the night life and the solitary hours of writing in his apartment combining. He tells me about his California years in both San Francisco and L.A., but he's a self-professed lover of the country, and he's eager to get to his new home. We go outside his place and shoot some shots of him on the stairs, up above me, looking over the shingled roofs toward the Cape.
David Lehman - New York, NY
It's 28 degrees in lower Manhattan and we're eating gigantic chicken wraps inside our rented Ford Escape (where it's a balmy 38 degrees). We got the wraps at a funky convenience store where I mostly am amazed to see cigarettes selling for $7. Where are we, on the moon?
I can see my breath as I open my mouth to finish off the wrap. We're here an hour and a half early because I'm a gigantic boob who insists on driving everywhere, even Greenwich Village. I'm a westerner. I love cars. I love pushing the tin back and forth. And besides, this whole trip has hinged on a manic devotion to living on the highways and roads of America. So instead of taking everyone's advice about the A train, F train, whatever, the 6, the 4, etc., I've circled the soda-straw-narrow streets near Washington Square Park for forty minutes before finding a perfect parking spot right near the Blue Note - a decades old jazz landmark that I go up to and touch with my frosted bare hand.
I'm here to see David Lehman, the man who - I'm willing to bet - reads more poetry than anyone else in the country. For more than a decade he's been the series editor (the only series editor) of Best American Poetry, a sprawling and crucial collection of the year's best work (chosen in concert with a guest editor).
Lehman also is widely known for an experiment he started in the late 90s of writing and finishing a poem every day. This experiment yielded two phenomenal and well-received collections, The Daily Mirror and The Evening Sun.
A lifetime New Yorker, Lehman sometimes splits the city for his house in Ithaca. But he spends the majority of his time right here, in a tiny book and manuscript-filled apartment. While we chat, Lehman shows me a dozen scraps of paper with ideas and lines for new poems, some on the back of envelopes, some on the back of a memo, even some in a small orange notebook he carries in his back pocket.
He opens a door to a small patio to let refreshing but chilly air in. Then we talk about his work and he takes on my questions. At one point, Lehman picks up one of his books and starts flipping pages, reading out lines that reinforce his answers. He gets into one that I love and he reads the whole thing. Halfway through, the phone rings, so I ask him to start again so I can - selfishly - get it all on tape for myself.
His work can be sharp and snappy, tight lines, no punctuation, vital, moving. But other poems stretch out, become floating narratives. Lots of women and men and the troubles therein. Always quietly, subtly funny. Crack across the knuckle realiztions abound.
He teaches, advises his students, is putting together the new edition of Best American Poetry, and completing a new book of his own. He confesses that he's a workaholic, but says it with a grin. I ask him if I can get some pictures of him on the street before I go.
We head out into the cold, Lehman walking behind me. When I turn to start shooting, I'm delighted by a jaunty hat that Lehman has put on. I get him lined up with MacDougal street behind him. Some guys are replacing a window beside us. Ten feet away some workers are carrying boxes of lettuces into a small restaurant. As always, I'm just a little breathless in New York's energy. A cop car brushes so close past me that I can feel the wind of it. Someone is hollering at the UPS guy. Tourists click cameras at the distant Empire State Building.
In front of me, Lehman looks right at me, gives a charming lopsided grin. I figure I better start shooting before he goes back to work.
Nicole Cooley - Glen Ridge, NJ
Nicole Cooley's oldest daughter has something to tell me when I first arrive: "MY NAME IS MINNIE MOUSE!" She later amends her name to "Snoop," but she says the former with real conviction and it's still in my head several hours later. I meet the whole family right away, Nicole's husband Alex, the new baby Arcadia, and of course Minnie Mouse (who sometimes is called Meridian by her folks.)
Nicole and I climb two sets of steep stairs to her study at the top of their delightful home in suburban Glen Ridge, a pretty and homey town a little east of New York City. I'm carrying the ever-present bag of cameras and recorders, and that plus my own formidable belly make the climb something akin to going up K2 for a regular guy. But it's worth the trip. It's a light and airy room with purple walls and two desks. An easel is set up to the side of Nicole's computer; this is where Meridian does her drawing sometimes while Mom works on her own creations. On the large drawing pad are two versions of Glinda the Good Witch. It appears below this paragraph, but I must confess that it has been electonically enhanced by this author with one of the many pieces of software I keep around just for this purpose.
The easel and the drawing is important to me because it represents something imporant about this visit. Nicole remembers watching her father write when she was little, Meridian's age or younger. Nicole's dad is Peter Cooley, a poet we visited last month, one who appears in the 01/18/2004 archive to the left. Just as Nicole grew up with a poet in the house, so will Meridian.
Nicole tells me about attending poetry readings when she was little, crayoning away in the back row. By the time she was in high school, she and her dad took to doing their "mall poetry," small assignments they would give each other while slurping bad coffee at a donut shop or eating bad something else at a rundown food court in a dilapitated (and now closed) shopping mall. As Nicole tells me about this, I see the light of recognition in her eye as she sees the easel and realizes that Meridian is getting the same start she did.
Nicole has lived the life of an academic nomad already. Her schooling and teaching have taken her from Louisiana to Rhode Island to Iowa to Georgia to Pennsylvania, and now to New Jersey where she lives while teaching at Queens College in the city. But she's comfortable here, and part of that comfort has enabled her to put a world of research into her second collection of poems, The Afflicted Girls, a collection of poems about the Salem witch trials that is already pulling in raves.
All during our conversation I hear happy noises downstairs. Even the baby sounds content when she bellows for more food or more Daddy. Nicole and I talk about her work a while longer and then head downstairs and outside into the 20 degree weather for some last photos.
