Categories: News Article
      Date: Mar  1, 2007
     Title: Poems That Bind

Poems that bind: The Recorder talks with 3 Montague poets who are on the verge of becoming first-time authors

They hadn’t made it past the little rosemary bush serving as a Christmas tree in the funky, Turners Falls apartment before the two poets began talking shop.

“So, have you decided on an image for your cover?” asked Elizabeth Hughey.

No, replied Kristin Bock, she hadn’t yet. Among the different images she was considering were a number of photographs of doll heads. They seemed appropriate to the poems in her manuscript, because they reflected a certain gothic undertone beneath a surface of innocence.

But Bock had talked to a photographer friend who said that dolls were frequent subjects among beginning photography students, so the doll head images hadn’t struck him as fresh or original. As Bock related to Hughey, the photographer had told her, “Just take a regular woman and cut her in half.”

Their interview with The Recorder hadn’t even started yet and the conversation had already begun striking bone.

Bock’s book, “Cloisters,” is due from Tupelo Press of Dorset, Vt., in the fall. Hughey’s book, “Sunday Houses the Sunday House,” is scheduled to be published by the University of Iowa Press in April.

(Editor’s note: Since this story was written, Bock learned Tuesday that her book publication has been pushed to 2008. “I was promised the fall, but you know how things go in the world of publishing. But somewhere, sometime in the year of 2008,” she said.)

Bock and Hughey live just down the street from each other in Montague Center and in both of their cases, the books will be their first. Christopher Janke, whose apartment in Turners Falls houses the rosemary bush they were passing, is also a poet. His first book, “The Structure of an Embryonic Rat Brain,” published by Fence Books of New York, N.Y., should ship to bookstores this week.

According to the Poets House, an organization in New York City that started displaying an annual collection of new American poetry books in 1993, about 2,000 poetry books are now published in the U.S. each year. Given that fact, having three Montague poets with first books in the works is quite a coincidence. On top of that, the three of them all belong to the same poets’ group that gathers about once a month to critique each other’s work. (In the spirit of full disclosure, the author of this article is also in the same poets’ group.)

To explore this, The Recorder gathered Bock, Hughey and Janke in Janke’s Turners Falls apartment on a winter day to talk about poetry, poetry books and living in Montague.

Blurbed and everything

Gathered around the table over coffee and tea, the poets began comparing notes.

“Is yours out yet?” Janke asked Hughey.

“No,” Hughey answered. “April 1.”

“It’s up on Amazon already, so I kind of expect it,” Janke said, talking about the Internet bookstore.

Janke and Hughey are both fairly far along in the publication process. The day after the interview, Janke reviewed designer’s drafts of his manuscript. Bock, however, hasn’t heard much from her publisher since her book was accepted in September.

She burst in. “You’re on Amazon?”

“Yeah, it got blurbed and everything,” said Hughey.

“When I was on Amazon, there was no cover,” Janke said. Janke had heard that his book was accepted after Hughey did, but Fence Books put his book on an accelerated schedule, so he was now furthest along.

Hughey asked Janke, “Is everything finished with the blurb and the jacket content?”

“Yeah,” said Bock. “What happened with that blurb?”

Janke had sent out computer files of his book jacket design, with author blurbs — quotes from other authors about the book — and jacket copy on them to the group, asking for feedback. He explained that he had edited the copy down and added an author photo.

In another interesting twist, he said the book would be designed with a cartoon image of a rat on the lower right hand side of every front-facing page, so that the reader could thumb through it and see the rat move, like a flip book. And, to his great relief, the book would be bound regularly. Because of the long lines of his poems, the publisher had originally wanted to bind it from the top, like a calendar.

All three poets are working in what might be considered the avant-garde of American poetry. Bock writes tight, sparse poems with haunting images, often exploring the big themes of God, love and death. Hughey’s poems explore perception, plumbing the domestic and mundane for lyric insights into our daily reality.

Janke’s poems in “Structure of an Embryonic Rat Brain” are frantic, stream-of-consciousness blocks of prose inspired by an anatomy poster he once saw hanging in a classroom at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

All three came to this area to go to graduate school in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, but not at the same time. Bock came from small-town Connecticut in 1993, Janke came from Boston in 1997 and Hughey came from Birmingham, Ala., in 2002.

Since graduating, all three have settled in Montague. Janke and his wife, Emily Brewster, own Suzee’s Third Street Laundry and the building that houses it, as well as a number of apartments. Bock and her husband, Geoffrey Kostecki, own a house in Montague Center. Hughey and husband, Chip Brantley, rent an apartment in Montague Center, but she said they’re toying with the idea of buying a place.

“We’re in that real-estate porn thing,” she said. “You know, where you’re looking at it a lot?”

Why Montague?

“Low cost of living is key to being a poet,” Janke said, when asked about living in Franklin County. He and Bock and Hughey all juggle part-time teaching jobs to get by.

“When I moved out here, I thought I was going to miss the city a lot, but when I got out here, I found that I didn’t miss Boston that much,” Janke said. He did fess up to missing what he called the “over-abundance” of perspective, energy and culture that city life has, but said that western Massachusetts has a lot more cultural outlets than most rural areas.

Hughey, on the other hand, said that she found a community of like-minded spirits living in the Pioneer Valley. “I haven’t found that anywhere else I’ve lived,” she said. “And I’ve lived in San Francisco.”

She said that being from the South, she was impressed at how many cultural institutions there were nearby in such a small-town setting.

Bock, who moved to Montague Center from Amherst a year and a half ago, said she was drawn to the pastoral setting. “It’s just so full of artistic people and interesting people and seems like the culture is growing and growing,” she said. “We really wanted to live in a place that was inspirational, filled with inspirational people. It’s just so beautiful. It just — it beckoned us. We feel like we belong here.”

Hughey said she had just recently come home to Montague from Alabama. “Just when I walked in my house, there was this feeling of relief when I walked in the door. The house is like a retreat. We’re always debating as to whether or not we should stay or get closer to family. It’s just so hard to imagine not being here and not having this.”

One thing that the poets all agreed on was that they had found a community here. “I think that a lot of it is being around people who are doing the same thing you’re doing, you know, which is some sort of creative work and usually multiple jobs to pay for it,” Hughey said.

Bock learned a new appreciation for her poets’ group when she went to a retreat with another member of the group. “People were pretty envious that we had a group that was pretty stable and we’re also all friends, which is a big deal,” Bock said. “It feels very rooted. For me — of course, we have all our big-poet influences — but more and more, my influences have been my peers.”

Janke was the original member of the group. He started it while still a student at UMass, five or six years ago. He was frustrated with the feedback he was getting on his poems in the workshops at school and wanted an additional outlet to talk about poetry.

“I was like, ‘I need a couple of other people I can talk to about this,’” Janke said. “People who had seen me at the workshop and who could explain to me what happened to me. Or they weren’t there, but I could ask questions about the poems, so I could understand their reactions.”

The membership in the group has fluctuated over time. Now, there are about eight regular members, most of them living in Greenfield or Montague. The group meets about once a month. Hughey is the most recent addition. In fact, the first meeting she attended, last August, she had already heard that her book was to be published.

The high point

Janke showed up to that meeting with a bottle of sparkling wine and a six-pack of Miller Hi-Life, “the champagne of beers, which is my usual thing to bring to the group,” he said. He was bringing the bubbly for Hughey, but he had another reason and he couldn’t keep the big grin off his face.

That very day, he had gotten an e-mail from Rebecca Wolff, editor of Fence Books, with the subject line, “You win!” He thought it was spam, until he saw who it was from. Janke had sent that manuscript out about 30 times to contests. A prolific writer, he has four other manuscripts that he has sent out to contests — probably a total of 150 mailings. “I’ve stopped counting,” he said. Three of the manuscripts had been finalists in various contests previously.

Aside from being a landlord, a Laundromat manager and a part-time teacher, Janke also co-edits a book series, Slope Editions. So he’s quite familiar with the business side of book publishing. His book will have a press run of 1,000 books and he estimates that though they will all sell, it will take “three to five years” to do so.

“From the time you’re accepted until just after the book comes out, that’s really the high point,” Janke said. After the book comes out, he said, a poet realizes that even with a book out by a reputable press with nationwide distribution, poetry is still a relatively obscure art without much, if any, financial reward.

Even so, having a book published is a validation for a poet. Hughey said that the day she heard her book was taken by Iowa, she had just been to “a horrible job interview” in Boston. She was contemplating driving to Boston for a couple of days a week for a 9-to-5 job.

“I was thinking I would have to leave the poetry world for a while,” she said. But she got home and got the call. “It reminded me to stay in the game,” she said.

Bock heard she was getting published in September. At the time, she was going back and forth to Maine to take care of her dying father and her ailing mother, driving five or six hours each way, spending two days a week in Massachusetts to teach and the other five up in Maine, acting as the primary caregiver for both parents.

She got word from a voice mail message on her home answering machine while she was up in Maine. She was able to reach Jeffrey Levine, editor of Tupelo Press, on a cell phone.

“I cried,” she said. “My mom and dad both saw me pacing back and forth on the phone. They were ecstatic when I told them.”

Her father has since passed away.

Reading March 17

Since both of their books are due out in the spring, Janke and Hughey, along with another UMass alumnus living in Chicago who has a book coming out, are planning a reading series. They might do another one in the fall when Bock’s book comes out.

“It’s an interesting process, because it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of going back and forth and approaching people you don’t know very well to help you,” said Hughey.

Janke said organizing the series was tricky. “You’re trying to book all these places at once … if Montreal can do the second, then we want Albany on the third, but if Montreal can’t do it until the fifth, then you don’t want to do Albany and then New York and then Boston. You know what I mean? Everything’s dependent on everything else.”

Hughey and Janke plan on giving a reading in Amherst late in April, coordinated with the annual Juniper Festival at UMass. Janke said he was hoping to do some other book signing events locally, as well. Currently, there is a reading scheduled for all three poets on Saturday, March 17, at 7 p.m., at the Montague Book Mill, 440 Greenfield Road, Montague Center.

Meanwhile, the three poets are still in that honeymoon phase, basking in the knowledge that soon they will have a book out. At the table in his apartment, Janke got out his author photo, a picture that he said his mom, who lives in Greenfield, helped him pick out.

“That’s great, the tousled hair!” Hughey said.

“He’s cute, he’s earnest,” Bock said.

Hughey turned to Janke. “Your mom did a great job.”

“Yeah,” said Bock. “It’s really good.”

“You’re going to have students having crushes on you,” Hughey said.

As the books are released, they will be available online, at readings and at area bookstores, including World Eye Bookshop in Greenfield and Amherst Books.

To contact the poets, Hughey, www.elizabethhughey.com; Janke, (413) 863-3105; Bock, (413) 367-2003 or flutteringmudflap@yahoo.com.

An award-winning poet, Andrew Varnon lives in Greenfield and is a former reporter for both The Recorder and the Valley Advocate. He can be reached at: avarnon@mtdata.com.

Staff photographer Paul Franz has worked for The Recorder since 1988. He can be reached at pfranz@recorder.com or (413) 772-0261 Ext. 266.