Hanging Loose Press: What are this past year’s accomplishments that you are most proud of?
Mark Pawlak: I finally completed and published in the literary annual “Spoke #10” the lengthy essay and memoir about the poet Etheridge Knight, who was a friend, that I began writing shortly after his death thirty years ago. My tenth poetry collection Away Away was accepted for publication by Arrowsmith Press and officially launches this May. I’m pleased to have my book added the distinguished Arrowsmith list.
HLP: You wrote quite movingly of him. I especially appreciated the distinction you wrote of hearing Etheridge Knight saying his poems rather than reading them. Can you expand on that some more?
MP: Etheridge was a vernacular poet who came out of a Black oral tradition. His conception of poetry, despite the fact that it was printed in book form, was that of speaking directly to his audience. “Saying”his poems during poetry “readings,” I felt, and I think I was not alone in feeling this, that he was speaking directly to me. He may have been on a stage with a podium, but he moved about on the stage, declaiming and gesturing to the audience, speaking to us seated rapt by his performance. I say “performance” but there was nothing self-consciously theatrical. He was merely–naturally– channeling his Black oral tradition: saying, telling.
(“Spoke #10” can be purchased at spokeboston.com or madhat-press.com)
HLP: Any particularly difficult experiences/challenges for you this past or current year? And how did you work through them?
MP: Returning home after the November 2023 dual book launch weekend of Maria Dylan Himmelman’s Sundry Abduction in Brooklyn and the Bob and Elizabeth Hershon collaboration Unveiling in Manhattan, when I had pushed my arthritic knee along sidewalks and up and down subway stairs feeling much pain, I resolved to have a knee replacement operation. Surgery was early March and I can report making good progress regaining mobility post surgery. Looking forward to standing for hours behind the Hanging Loose Press table at the Brooklyn Book Festival in September!
HLP: Yes, what a relief that the surgery was a success! Can you give us three books you’ve read recently that have made an impression on you?
MP: Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened: A Banquet for Victoria Amelina, a collection of tributes edited by Askold Melnyczuk to the young Ukrainian novelist and human rights activist who was killed by shrapnel from a Russian missile strike near the front lines in the town of Kramatorsk in 2022.
All the Time You Want: Selected Poems 1977-2017 by Keith Taylor, a poet I’ve long admired.
The Sphinx and the Milky Way: Selections from the Journals of Charles Burchfield, the Western New York 20th Century painter of mystic and visionary landscapes.
HLP: Ah, the cover image of your new book evokes something of the mystic and visionary. Coincidence?
MP: I struggled to find an image that conveyed my sensibility in the poems in this book. With a deadline from my publisher looming, I literally awoke in the middle of the night thinking “Louise Hamlin!” Louise is an artist I have long admired. Her paintings and pastels have graced several covers of Hanging Loose magazine over the years. She is the widow of the poet Gary Lenhart, a Hanging Loose author. The painting I chose does have visionary and mystical resonance, true. I don’t think of my poems as mystical or visionary, but in their attention to detail and to the fleetingly evanescent I admit they do approach a Buddhist kind of visionary mysticism. I suppose that’s why I’m attracted to the paintings of Charles Burchfield.
HLP: Oh yes, I love her portrait of Charles North. Any upcoming projects?
MP: A sequence of poems about the ongoing war in Ukraine titled “After Goya” (think Goya’s “The Disasters of War”). I’m surprised to be returning to a Bertolt Brecht inspired mode of political poem that I haven’t used in decades.
I’ve drafted a proposal for a festschrift about Ron Schreiber, a founding editor of Hanging Loose, who died in 2004 and would have turned 90 this year. Ron was a terrific poet and influential gay poet and educator in Boston. I’m hoping to entice a literary journal with this project.
HLP: His collection, John, in memory of his lover is quite moving. A festschrift is meant to be presented during a writer’s lifetime. How will you adapt this understanding into your proposal?
MP: Yes, strictly speaking a festschrift is a celebration typically at the end of an academic career, a summing up with tributes to a person’s accomplishments. But the concept can be expanded to pay posthumous tribute, which is my intention. Although Ron spent his career in academia––near the end he was chair of the UMass Boston English Department––he was always a rebel, pushing against academic strictures. As a poet, he thought of himself as outside academia, outside the establishment where closeted gay poets were favored against his proudly gay stance. John, Ron’s last poetry collection chronicles the slow death from AIDS of his lover, whom Ron devotedly nursed until the end. But it is no less powerful than many of the poems in his earlier collections. Simply put, Ron was a terrific poet, deserving of renewed attention.
