John Holmes, "Map of my Country" in Map Of My Country, 1943

It would be wonderfully tempting to sit back in an easy chair of the mind, stare into an imaginary fireplace, bring my fingertips together up to my mock-serious, pursed lips and declare, profoundly, "Ah, yes, Poetry and Harvard Square in the Fifties -- significant you know. Theatre and folk music too, to a great degree, but poetry was my beat, so to speak. Why, in that time and place, two, almost three, generations of American and British poets crossed and recrossed one another's paths. Frost, representing an older generation, would come and go from his Brewster Street residence, addressing the wider world at large. A few of the post-war "University Wits," as they were sometimes called, either taught at Harvard or hosted many of the Richard Wilbur generation. And the soon-to-be-major figures of the "Confessional Poets," Lowell, Plath and Sexton, were moving back and forth in literary orbit between Cambridge and Boston. One might even say, Ahem, (scholarly throat-clearing) that I thought of the greater Boston area as a theatre of the mind as much as I did an urban landscape."

Well, come off it, Olson -- that's hindsight and you know it. The truth is, too close up to see what was really happening, I, along with most of my young poet friends, thought the real action in modern poetry was happening in San Francisco, the Midwest and, inevitably, England. If we thought about Boston at all, it was as a city somewhat at pains trying to be more and more provincial and backwater, and worst of all, losing its last few sources of book (and poetry) publication.

In reality, I was having such a fine time with a group of young poets living about Cambridge and the backside of Beacon Hill that I didn't give a damn about the artistic state of mind of greater Boston; we were having too much excitement presenting ourselves as poets, workshopping together, trading off literary contacts and publishing possibilities, listening to the local readings of our favorite established poets, or trying to wheedle opportunities to read ourselves. It was a kind of elastic moveable feast that swelled in numbers according to the occasion, or that reduced itself to the intensely interrelated two's, three's, or four's, some of whom leaving a mythos in the history of contemporary poetry that was passionate, poignant and, to my memory, entirely true.

Much of this wove around the figures of John Holmes, Robert Lowell, and the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge. To a lesser degree, the then more recently established residing poets, Peter Davison, W.S. Merwin, Philip Booth, Donald Hall and Adrienne Cecile Rich were often very much part of the action as well. John Holmes had been my friend and mentor at Tufts University during the early Fifties; through his legendary kindness and introductions I made contact with many of his friends in this group.

Holmes's workshop sessions (and his home on Medford Hillside) served as a locus for any number of established and novice poets. In my undergraduate years I had met John Ciardi, Richard Eberhart and Richard Wilbur (the latter two, "Dick," to John) and several others, in and around these sessions, and I was pleased to be informally invited along when he took these techniques to the Boston Center for Adult Education early in 1957. It was there that I met Anne Sexton, Sam Albert, Maxine Kumin and several other young/older poets. When I met George Starbuck, again through John later, as well as Donald Hall, the dramatis personae of that time had pretty much begun to form for me. To complete the somewhat loose analogy, John was amused to find himself teaching at the Boston Center for Adult Education while I was starting in 1958 - 1959 to teach at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education on Brattle Street in Harvard Square. Which is a very long way around to tell you about some of the people that I knew in and out of the Square, way back in the Fifties.

As most of us were in and out of Harvard Square to class, or to read, or for domicile or employment, the atmosphere and events there became a kind of common, experienced climate that we enjoyed, or took for granted, as an important gathering ground for our activities. I enjoyed the Square thoroughly. My memories, when I force them, are colorful, sharp-relief pictures: red brick sidewalks and buildings and the near-green of lush bushes and maples; orange MTA Mass. Ave. buses grinding up from the underground station with the snap and flash of electric blue in the overhead black weave of trolley lines; high, spreading green of the vanishing elms before the classical 18th and 19th century building facades; trimmed houses; trimmed gardens and trimmed graveyards.

My Harvard Square was the other one anyway, the slightly disheveled one that exists parallel to the University, and while it could not exist without the presence of that heavenly body, it runs its own course, halo a bit askew. The Poets' Theatre was one shining point on the compass in that particular galaxy. I "joined" the Poets' Theatre sometime in 1957, at the suggestion of Don Hall and, I believe, through an acquaintance with Harold Gaardner. I was immediately outclassed in creativity by the talent passing through and became an instant face-in-the-crowd, fiddling around with sound gear and "goffa" details. But it was a great place to be, even in the crowd, because of the rich variety of people, poets and playwrights, who were writing, directing, and performing there. The Palmer Street Theatre was off Church Street, right around the corner from the Square; it consisted of two-and-a-half floors of small rooms that I remember mostly as storage with one central, odd-shaped performance room that held fifty people -- sixty, if no one breathed deeply.

Don Hall, Dick Eberhart (who played Fairy Godfather for several quixotic poetry projects in the area), Robert Bly, Frank O'Hara and others had contributed to the founding of the Poets' Theatre at the start of the decade. There had been a great deal of interest in T.S. Eliot's plays and verse plays in general at that time, and while this was one of the considerations in forming the group, it was not necessarily the direction the Theatre took in the later Fifties.
 

William Alfred, the Harvard professor, later of Hogan's Goat fame, was active then, and I remember some short pieces by him. He certainly was the moderator of the landmark March 1, 1959 reading at the Theatre when Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, Arthur Freeman and George Starbuck brought the house to its feet. I applauded mightily with the rest of the audience because I had recently met three of the four poets, and I believed with that performance they had "arrived," and they had.

With this occasion and some previous readings at the Paul Schuster Gallery, also in the 24 Palmer Street building (I had heard Philip Booth whom I knew from Tufts, and Paul Engel, a well-recognized poet from the Midwest who'd visited Holmes at the time of the reading), a new standard for poetic readings was set for the Boston area. Large numbers of people enthusiastically attended the reading, cheering loudly and often. Before, people had usually attended in small numbers -- devotees who politely clapped in all the right places. Much of what we have come to expect in literary readings, the intimate atmosphere, the dramatic presentation, the off-hand dialogue between the reader and the audience near the end of the program, all developed from the success of these readings. They were a high point of both my involvement with young artists in the Boston area and my term as observer at the Poets' Theatre. With the end of the decade my interest in drama waned, and my interest in poetry took me in other directions.

William Alfred, John Ciardi, and my favorite short monologist on the Widener Library stairs, Archibald MacLeish, stayed at Harvard for the time being. MacLeish's contribution to the literary Fifties was the religious verse play, J.B., this play alone being successful enough to admit the famed poet into the ranks of major 20th century American dramatists.

Ashbery, Bly and O'Hara went back to New York and points west. Peter Davison entered a notable career in publishing. Sylvia Plath's death, in 1963, was ahead to shake Davison and many of Sylvia's friends in the Boston area, including three of my workshop friends, George Starbuck, Maxine Kumin, and, most threateningly, Anne Sexton. (I had not met Plath often, and when I did, like many others, I was more interested in her British poet husband, Ted Hughes.) John Holmes himself was to die earlier, in 1962, at the height of his powers and the literary recognition that he so often had hoped for. His death saddened an innumerable body of his students and friends. Starbuck went on to a university career, as did Maxine Kumin ("the best head and heart of them all," as Holmes had once put it to me), and Anne Sexton, as John Holmes's initial poetry fragment intimated, went early on before us to explore the Undiscovered Country. As Davison pointed out on the suicide of John Berryman, "...Poetry is one of the dangerous trades."

Towards the end of my Fifties tenure in Harvard Square (I left in 1961), a startling, out-of-the-Square-mold event happened that puzzled me greatly. It was really a harbinger of the future that wouldn't make sense until I could view it later in historical perspective. On the basis of my credentials as a "stringer" for the old The Reporter magazine, I wangled a seat close to the facade of Dillon Field House beside Soldier's Field stadium in the press section for Fidel Castro's April 25, 1959 visit to Harvard University. Everything went off swimmingly, from a roaring motorcycle escort to the smiling, uniformed and bearded 26 July arm-banded military guard of Castro, strutting around with what I assumed were unloaded .30 caliber carbines. My position on the edge of the press barrier earned me a push from a port-arms rifle when I ventured too close to the Great One, but Fidel's bearded smile told me it was all in fun. (Actually, I could have reached out and shook his hand or shot him, or some such foolishness, except I noticed that the clips to the escort's carbines were in, and when a trooper caught his bolt on the stair-railing, a live round popped out.)

Castro started his speech slowly, to little applause, but he continued, in deliberately broken English, into a real, passionate delivery. Pretty soon the Harvard audience behind me began to respond to his words with echoed cheering. Now, you have to understand that this was a Harvard crowd, cool and laid-back to the nines, before such phrases had been applied, with over three hundred years of studied indifference and all the practice it takes to appear that way. Well, I turned around and stared into rows of Harvard types, a few of whom I recognized, screaming and waving their right fists at Fidel! Some were waving Cuban flags, jumping in the air and waving both arms. Their faces were distorted with open, yelling mouths and wide, angry, hard eyes riveted on the speaker. The roaring din continued up in volume as Castro concluded. A sizable mob of flag-waving enthusiasts followed the cavalcade as it exited the stadium grounds. An open-mouth reporter from the Boston Record American stared after them. "Well," he said, shaking his head, "I'll be a son-of-a-bitch."

Ten years later I would see those same expressions mirrored on college campuses throughout the nation; then I understood. There were several inner Harvard Squares during the Fifties as I was coming of age, other realities: that of the classical university scholar, that of the world of the emigres and their Central European culture, that of music, of Joan Baez singing folk songs thinly in the coffee houses, that of art and architecture -- I know I touched them all, lightly. But on that day in Soldier's Field, my post-war world of Harvard Square started to come to an end. By 1963, the death of another Harvard man in Texas would end that post-war world for all of us.