The following is a New Hampshire Public Television special presentation.

♪♪ In partnership with the friends of the UNH library.

This is the New Hampshire Authors series from the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire.

♪♪ Hello.

Welcome to the New Hampshire Authors series.

I'm here today with my friend Marie Harris.

Here's a little bit about her.

Marie Harris's books include poetry collections Your Sun, Manny and Weasel in the Turkey Pen, among others, as well as the popular children's books.

G is for Granite and Primary Numbers that combine Marie's words with the art of Karen Holman, and about which one young reader said, Marie, if I covered up the illustrations and just read the words, I would picture it exactly the same.

She's collaborated with other artists on projects that combine poetry with photographs, paintings and music.

She's a generous writer and a long time member of the Skim Milk Writers Workshop.

She helps other writers along the road, including me as Poet laureate of New Hampshire she invited all the poet laureates in the United States here for the first ever Poet Laureate Convention, and most of them came.

[Laughing] For years she's brought poetry to children as an artist in the schools, inspiring them to appreciate poetry and to try it for themselves.

As young Kayla said, I want to be a poem-ist but it looks hard.

Maybe today Marie will tell us something of what it takes to be a poem-ist and to live the life of a writer.

Welcome, Marie Harris.

[Applause] Glad to have you here.

[Applause continues] Well, I thought we might start with a reading, of your poetry.

Maybe from your son, Manny?

I'd love to.

But this book's a little hard to excerpt from, because it's, It's something by way of a collage novel, history, poetry, story of the boy that we adopted when he was 14.

When we-when Manny came to us and I sometimes call it the accidental adoption because, in fact, when my husband and I saw him on television, one night when we were watching a show that we have never watched before or since, called Wednesday's Child, there was this boy standing looking right at the camera.

Manny has never been so articulate.

He said, I have never had a family and I would like one, you know, a man and a woman.

And that's how it began.

And, clearly looking back, his social worker decided that at 14, nobody had taken this boy into their homes and if we didn't, nobody would.

She didn't even mention the outhouse in the home study.

Not a word.

So, um.

[Chuckling] One thing led to another, and we met Manny and shortly thereafter, he came to live with us for good.

I will read you the part, where we met him.

And, this would give you an idea of how difficult the decision was once we did.

I'm Maria, Manny’s social worker The edges of her perfect English are softened with Spanish cadences.

We're sitting at a table in a darkened restaurant off a highway in Massachusetts.

She spreads sheaves of paper on the thick cloth, but does not touch them.

Let me tell you what I know.

The story of any boy's 14 years should tumble and trip over dogs and cousins and best friends, baseball gloves and birthday parties, hand-me-down bicycles, stuffed animals, crayon drawings, stuck to refrigerators with alphabet magnets, sports posters, lacy valentines from guess who, it ought to be filled with summer snapshots and winter report cards, ticket stubs and souvenirs.

A used encyclopedia, a library card, ice skates.

Instead, Maria's oral history flattens the features of Manny's geography into a landscape as drear as a back alley.

Born in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, to a mother who moved to Springfield and gave him to the state as she had his older sister and would his younger brother, then twice rescued, twice returned.

He spent a long time in a group home, and he's been in a foster home for two years, they don't speak English.

We have a very hard time placing.

She pauses and looks at us with quiet eyes.

Certain deficits, learning problems.

No one's quite sure.

Her voice trails off and her hands lie still on the pile of papers.

I'll get you copies of the tests, but you should meet him.

He's really special.

You should meet him.

Spanish speaking foster parents welcome us as best they can.

Manny sits on the living room couch, his drawings on his lap.

A small breeze lifts the sheer curtains of the window.

Three flights above an abandoned parking lot, above the sounds of skateboards and someone shouting.

I love art!

He speaks in English, his only language.

Now we're at the park and Manny holds our terriers leash and we hear birds calling.

I know my birds.

And we walk by a pond and see small fish.

Those are pumpkin seeds.

I like to fish.

Later he sees a red car.

That's a Fiero.

I like Fieros.

Charter and I drive the three hours home in silence.

So that's the beginning.

That's the beginning of Manny?

That's the beginning.

Yes, of the saga.

And you, at some point said, I want to write a book.

It had to have been when he left the house, so that we weren't raising him and writing about him at the same time, which would have been impossible.

But yes, I certainly had to write about this boy.

And you thought it might be sort of a memoir, a traditional memoir of your life with Manny, and somehow it evolved into a collection of prose poems.

I wrote it about 150 pages of the book as a book-book, chapter book.

And it just wasn't working.

It was it was getting boring and the story wasn't boring.

So I ditched the 150 pages.

One of the harder things I've done as a writer and started again with a different focus.

I began to take sort of, categories like sports or money or jobs or school and, and try to pick out some of the signal moments in Manny's life around those subjects and write that way.

And I used a lot of letters from teachers and, and, notes and all sorts of things to make this kind of pastiche.

And it was- it worked much better.

I remember one of my teachers, John Yount from UNH Saying that it took him five years to figure out how not to write the book.

Yeah.

And a year to write it.

And it sounds like, you know, you're continually discovering how to write the book, but you love or you do a lot of work in prose poems.

Yeah, I do.

Yeah.

I don't seem to ever learn either.

I just finished writing another 100 or so pages of a book that I ditched, and I'm starting again.

[Laughter] I could have learned and just done it that way the first time, but- You have to do it, you have to go through the process.

Yeah.

Could you talk about prose poems?

Because I don't really I mean, I know they're poems that are not written in lines, but in paragraphs-Yeah.

So, but what's the difference between a prose poem and a very short story?

A short story is a little longer.

But- [Laughter] Well, there you have heard this stuff like flash fiction, which is just a couple of paragraphs.

Is there a difference or is that really prose-a prose poem?

I don't-it's difficult to define the genre, but it, it seems to me to be exactly like a poem, except without the line breaks.

In other words, it still has all the, the things you would use to make a poem, metaphor and alliteration and heightened language.

It just doesn't have the line breaks.

And for me, it it lends itself in some ways to a little more toward narrative.

And so the paragraph form seems to fit that.

Well, Weasel in the Turkey Pen is also a collection of prose poems, although two of your, you haven't all-you don't always write in prose poems.

Just lately.

Just lately?

Yeah.

Just lately.

Do you have one from there that you want to read?

My husband Charter and I, Charter Weeks there.

Where is he?

There he is, often do projects together.

And one summer, we decided to wander around New Hampshire.

He was photographing all the kinds of, small events that happened in the summertime in New Hampshire.

You know, like motorcycle week at Weirs Beach.

One of my favorites.

And, we went to small, car races and one of one of the places we went in our travels was a, a little circus in Dover.

And, those small town circuses are an- quite extraordinarily wonderful.

And this is the poem I wrote about that one called Tent Circus.

The cop clown is out back, sitting on a hitch nursing his sciatica while the Puerto Rican balancer shares a ring with his juggling son.

Jana is changing out of her jungle queen cat tamer outfit into her trapeze rig.

She still hasn't gotten the neck spins right.

The ringmaster announces himself, then eats fire.

[Audience laughs] Tonight, the old man with the dancing poodles fills in for the chimp trainer, who has allergies.

Nostalgia hangs in the multicolored air, lumbering behind their aging aunties.

The last baby African elephants in captivity turned circles.

They roll on their backs for the shrieking children.

They remember nothing.

They are postmodern elephants, the final orphans.

[Applause] What an eye you have and how you see the world.

Lately I've been thinking about that.

But that's what we bring to the page as writers is how we see the world.

It's our perspective on the world that makes the work interesting.

It's not the circus.

It's how Marie sees the circus.

I so enjoy that.

I think writing is as well as other art forms, are a way of explaining the world to yourself.

And then once you've done that, you know you're explaining it to an audience, hopefully.

But I think it's just a way of of figuring stuff out.

Well, I know you've worked with Charter on projects combining poetry and photography.

I know you do a lot of collaborations with other artists.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Because I think there's a, a myth, maybe it's a myth or a cliché that writers are solitary, we’re holed up, we’re very pale typing all day.

Locking the door, don't bother me.

But I know that you really enjoy working with other artists, artists, and other media.

Would you talk about some of the things that you've done?

And don't forget the Nashua Symphony.

The collaborations that I've done sometimes have just come to me, like one, one of the earliest ones I did was with the Emile Birch the wonderful sculptor from Canaan, and he had applied for a grant to do a sculpture for Sunapee State Park, and he wanted a poem to go with.

That was the first poem I'd written to engineering specifications.

[Laughter] He'd already gotten his sculpture in mind, and he needed a poem that was so wide, so long, you know.

So letters were this high.

So they can only be, you know.

So that was one of my first.

And, and I've collaborated with musicians and again, my husband Charter, I've done a wonderful project as part of the Portsmouth Poet Laureate program with, with, photographs and poems.

It's it seems to me a tremendously exciting way to to deepen the writing because you're pairing it with something else with another art form.

And it's not just yours, that's the other thing I like that you have to collaborate, you have to cooperate, and you have to listen.

Or look.

So it’s poetry on demand?

Yes, it is.

Write a poem or rea- You wrote a poem for the inauguration of um-But What About the Urinal?

and the- I had to just set this up.

All right.

So that when there was, when we did the, poet laureate convention conference thing, the word got out.

It was, it was written about in lots of newspapers all over the country.

And shortly after the conference was over, all the laureates in the country got a letter.

And you opened the letter and in it was a-in it opened the envelope and it was a letter and a check for $100.

And the letter said, you may keep this check whether or not you choose to cooperate with my project.

My name is Michael Zinman.

Michael Zinman is a very wealthy man, and a little bit, a little bit, how shall we say eccentric Michael Zinman had given an enormous amount of money to the University of Pennsylvania to rehab the urinal men's room in the library, but he would only agree to actually write the check for that if they would agree to publish the poems that he solicited from the laureates all over the country on the subject of urinals.

And-and they were it was in the bathroom that they were in fact published?

Yes.

And-and bless their hearts, almost everybody said yes.

Almost everyone who was approached did it.

It's inspiring, really.

Well, it was.

[Laughter] It was, yeah.

I got-I gave it a lot of thought and I, I, it's not a place I've been a lot in my life.

Did did you do some research?

I didn't need to do some research.

I needed to cast back into my younger days in Greenwich Village.

And I decided that my poem would be written.

Well, you'll see, I'll just read.

I'll read it because the the title tells you what I did.

Poem’s called, Note Written on a Urinal Wall in Revlon’s Fire and Ice Lipstick.

[Audience laughs] I think I secretly wanted to be the girl you dreamed about as you stood staring at the phone number smeared on the tile wall by the stalls in a basement jazz club in Greenwich Village back when me-Monk or Mingus or Miles could have been standing beside you between sets, dreaming of a number.

And here's my chance.

[Laughter] [Applause] I've never read that poem out loud.

It- it reads well.

It takes Becky Rule to get me to read a poem in public about a urinal.

That was just a beautiful thing Marie Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Before we leave the subject of collaboration, would you read the poem that you wrote for Charter's photograph?

One of my favorites.

This one's very much of a sound.

Kind of a poem.

It's called Fish Crow.

And the, Latin name for fish crow is croaking bone breaker.

So this is the poem Fish Crow.

Grind of purple clam shell and chew of rusted rocker panel and spit of mussel hinge and caw caw whistle of rising drawbridge rattle of pebbles behind retreating wave caw whistle caw of descending bridge and hoot, hoot horn foghorn fog folding dark wings over encroaching night clatter of anchor chain mutter of moon light on shiny black.

Thank you.

[Applause] We like poems.

We like poems.

I do want you to talk about the Nashua Symphony.

A man called Eric Valliere, who is the executive director of the Nashua Symphony, decided that he needed to do some audience development with younger people.

And his idea, which was so smart, was that, if he could involve high school kids in the symphony in some way, they would potentially become the next audiences.

So his idea was that, I would come in and I would, there they have a spring concert and usually a, a symphony or some major work.

And what he said was take the major work and the themes of that work, discuss that with the kids, come up with poems around those themes, and then we will give the poems to contemporary composers who will set their work to music.

And then the Nashua Symphony Chorus will perform their work.

Oh my word, it was absolutely stunning.

I did say to the kids that their poems would only remain theirs on paper, that once we gave them to the composers, heaven knows what would happen.

And that, of course, is, you know, what did happen, the composers would take a little bit of this and a little bit of that and, and, and recombine lines that they liked.

And it resulted in finally after three years, Kevin Siegfried, a composer who lives in Dover, New Hampshire, putting together a piece called Three Songs for a New World, and they were they were performed by the symphony orchestra and chorus and by the Nashua High School Chorus and combination.

So some kids were singing their own words.

There wasn't a dry eye in the house.

It's absolutely stunning.

Wonderful thing.

I know you've done a lot of work in the schools over the years, and you continue to do work in the schools.

And the two books that you’ve wrote, illustrated by Karen Busch Holman, have been kind of a ticket into schools as well, because kids love to meet those who write children's books.

I can't believe my eyes.

A real live author.

They say.

So would you talk about these books and how they came to be?

These are very popular books.

I see them everywhere.

Well, I hadn't ever, written children's books.

And in fact, I still feel that until I can write a children's book for the finest and most demanding of audiences, which to my mind are 10 and 11 year olds.

I haven't really done it yet, but, this was a beginning, and I actually, insinuated myself into this series when I discovered that, Sleeping Bear Press had, had published a book called A is for America.

I was curious because I thought, you know, that would be kind of an interesting, project to do an alphabet book and then I when I went to the website and discovered that they were doing a book for every state, I called them up and I said, have you done New Hampshire yet?

And they said, no.

I said, pick me.

And they said, why?

And I said, because I am the New Hampshire Poet Laureate.

[Laughter] And they were suitably impressed.

They didn't have any idea what that actually meant I don't think, but you know.

So I got the job, never having done such a thing before.

I was, I leapt in and, and and did the book, which took much longer than I thought and was much more difficult than I ever thought it would have been.

Yeah.

And you wrote poems and you also include prose.

And so these books work for lots of different levels of kids, I think for very little kids who look at the pictures and for the older kids who read the poem, and then for there's lots of information on the side.

So it's a multilevel.

And that's the way all of the state books that they do are set up.

It’s a great idea.

Yeah.

It is.

It's a terrific idea.

Do you have a favorite page?

I had to rewrite this one.

No.

His unchanging profile juts through the clouds.

Oh, the Old man of the Mountain.

Yeah, he fell off.

Well, what does it say now?

I put it in the past tense.

Oh.

I don't think I have the copy of the book here that has the, has the revision.

The other one that is a favorite.

Just because the kids love this story so much.

I say to them, that sometimes authors make mistakes.

In fact, sometimes authors make glaring errors, and we have a discussion about the difference between a mistake and a glaring error.

And this poem, as it is in the first edition of the book, has a glaring error in it, and I'll read it to you and see if you can find it.

It's not in the pictures, it's in the words White-tailed deer graze under maples and birches, Does and their soft fawns, Bucks with their sharp horns all through the woods where the purple finch perches.

Can you can you identify the glaring error?

Somebody said their antlers.

Their antlers-Antlers.

Bill said it.

And then I say to the kids, any idiot knows that.

[Laughter] And I like on your website, you've got a quote from a little kid who says, and she doesn't even try to cover up her mistakes.

[Laughter] They appreciate that honesty.

I know you're working on a new project.

You said that writing for 10 and 11 year olds is the ultimate challenge- I think so.

-And that you're working on a new project about New Hampshire's own Amy Beach.

So would you talk about that?

I discovered Amy when I was writing G is for Granite, because one of the sidebars on H is for Sarah Josepha Hale, the sidebar says, and other famous New Hampshire women.

And I looked up other famous New Hampshire women and stumbled upon a woman who, in her day, was more famous than Eleanor Roosevelt.

And then I discovered that all- almost all of Amy's archives are right downstairs.

And Bill Ross, who's the head of the Special collections department at UNH welcomed me, along with all the other wonderful staff members down there.

And I have been living with Amy Beach for about four and a half or five years.

And so she's become my obsession.

I listen to every piece of her music.

I've read a wonderful, definitive biography, and I'm trying to make something of her life, of myself, Something of her-Well, what I mean is the biography is already perfect.

Oh, I see.

So I have to, I have to re-imagine Amy's life in a different way and write a different kind of book than the biography that Adrian Fried Block wrote.

That's a challenge, isn't it?

When, when the definitive biography has been written- Yeah.

And yet it's Marie Harris's take on Amy Beach- And I think I’m- -that we’re interested in.

And I think I'm trying to do it for younger readers.

And for younger readers.

Yeah.

And hoping maybe to have a CD in the back so people could really meet this woman in her in her whole three dimensionality.

She led an extraordinary life, and her music is completely sublime.

Yeah.

Well, I, is there anything else you'd like to read to us today?

I know you brought quite a few different things.

Well, maybe I'll just finish with one.

That's kind of funny.

I'll ask you.

What I ought to do is to read the Valentine poem.

We have dropped the anchor, and it holds on a mud and sand bottom in a cove, ringed with shell beach and pine groves, stands of roses, hips, orange rose, a swamp of cattails, sibilant and dozy in the evening’s dying breeze later under a sky deepened by stars.

You laugh the way you've told me the Japanese laugh when circumstance bewilders and call me apt to watch as you pour the dishwater over.

Look, you say as you spill our dinner’s litter.

Come look my love at the glitter.

Thank you, thank you.

[Applause] Well, it's been my pleasure to ask you a few questions and get a few answers.

And now we have audience members who might want to ask a question or two of Marie Harris.

I just like to say I was a part of the Nashua Symphony Orchestra.

I was a junior in high school at the time.

And it was it was great.

It was like like- Did you work with Roger or- With you.

You did?

I was a poet.

In our group?

I was a student poet I worked with you in the stude-in the workshop.

Oh, fantastic.

Yeah.

And I went to the show.

It was, a year later, and, like, I, I forgot about it, like, you know, by then, and it came up, and I was like, sweet.

I went, and it was mind blowing.

And now I majored in, in, English here, at the school, and that whole experience, that was, it was like a large part of it.

And my focus is, is on, poetry.

It's like what I want to do, really.

And that was like, huge part of it Isn’t that wonderful?

So thank you for that.

[Applause] Thank you so much for saying that.

Wonderful.

Oh, man, that makes me so happy.

That's just that's fantastic.

You change somebody's life and you didn't even mean to.

I know that you have a writing son.

And I wondered, what it was like to watch his, sensibility and his poetry evolve, if you wouldn't mind sharing his story?

No when he was younger, it was exciting to to to watch him learn and be excited about the same things I was.

But then as he got older, we've become peers now.

We send each other our work and critique, and as if we were in a workshop and it's, it's a- really gratifying and exciting.

He's a terrific writer.

It's very nice that you're asking these questions because I always, I always, feel like if I miss something, you'll help me out.

What's your worth- Work ethic like?

Are you disciplined that you get up every morning and you write?

Or only when it moves you?

What’s your process?

About, 12 hours a day.

It's never only when it moves me, because then I would never write.

I don't I don't really put much stock in inspiration.

But, I like many people that I know, I would, I would wish I were more disciplined.

So I try to structure some time for writing in every day, but that doesn't necessarily always happen.

That's the intention for all of us, isn't it?

Yeah, but then somehow the days get away from us.

But we keep coming back.

Coming back to that project.

Can't let Amy go.

No.

Amy needs attention.

I will say thank you all for coming.

And Marie thank you so much for being here with us.

It’s been a great pleasure, thank you so much for inviting me Thanks for coming, everybody.

[Applause] This program, made possible in part by a grant from the New Hampshire Humanities Council.

♪♪