 Hello, I'm John Harrison, and this is Arlington Community Media's Conversations with Great Authors. With us today is Dr. George Ellenbogen, poet, author, lecturer, memoirist, and retired professor of English and Poetry at Bentley University in Walfam. George received his undergraduate degree from McGill University in Canada in Montreal. He received his master's degree in the University of Montreal and his doctorate from Tufts University in Medford, in all cases he majored in English. During his last years at Bentley, he was chair of the English department of the university and founded the visiting office series. George has a poem in Kim Nagy and My Collection, Dead in Good Company, a celebration of Mount Auburn Cemetery. His poem is entitled Mount Auburn Cemetery, Winter Icons for John Harrison, bird photographer. Thank you for that accolade, George. George was my English poetry professor during my four years at Bentley from 1966 to 1970, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. We can all think back in our lives to a few teachers who influenced us, mentored us. George Ellenbogan is such a teacher for me. He unlocked the mystery of poetry for me and always encouraged my writing. His influence is certainly a great part of the books I have been part of for the past few years. I am indebted to George Ellenbogan for his influence. We have remained good friends for the 50 years since my time at Bentley. George Ellenbogan's journey began in Montreal, Canada, where he grew up. He will tell us of his youth there, which he chronicles in his memoir, A Stone in My Shoes in Search of Neighborhood. He has authored four collections of poetry, The Night on Stones, Along the Road to Eden, The Rhino Gate Poems, and Morning Gothic New and Selected Poems. There are French and English versions of his collections of poetry. According to conversations with great authors, George, for me personally, it's a joy and a privilege to have you here. Thank you, John. And thank you very much for those sweet words. It really has been a long time, my God. I think we're going back to 1966, several incarnations ago. It's interesting, John, as you can imagine, over a period of 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, I think it's over 50 years that I taught you. One remembers only a small proportion of the students that one taught, but you were an unusual student. I do remember that. I think you were a student at Bentley during Bentley's last two years in Boston before it moved out to Walton. Yes. And it was another kind of institution in effect. But you were different. I mean, I would have considered Bentley students at that point practical, very purposeful. They generally had a single goal in mind, becoming accountants and having reasonably programmed lives ahead of them. I remember you as being quite curious, reaching for something that you had not yet defined. And you clearly have had a very interesting life. I've got to say that when I first met you, I would not have envisioned that you would become a bird photographer and a splendid one. Just yesterday, as a matter of fact, I have your Mount Auburn book on my kitchen table and I was browsing through the photos and we had talked about the eagles in Medford the other day, but just looking through the photos of the foxes and raccoons and so on. And usually I focus on just your photographs, but I also noticed some of Kim's, specifically one of Robin's, the Robin, Robin Chicks being fed. Oh, with a nest. It's the very last photo with their beaks gaping open. Anyway, that's quite something. Both Pierce, who got you started with the bird photography and I are very proud of you. You really have made a career for yourself, John. Well, thank you very much and you certainly are a part of that. You influence me quite a great deal. But, George, when did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer and in particular a poet? Did you enjoy poetry as a youth in Montreal or did McGill instill the love of that form? I guess it's not so much a question of poetry specifically. I was a very scattered student all the way through in elementary school. I've got to say that after kindergarten, which was wonderful, we sat on the floor around round tables, cutting things out with scissors and coloring them in various ways. I loved kindergarten. After that, it was all downhill. When I entered the classroom and saw the rows all arranged symmetrically and multiplication tables on the boards, I knew I didn't have a pleasant time ahead of me. But I loved writing. I loved writing. I loved everything that was outside my immediate environment. The school environment was, to put it kindly, depressing. I remember as a child climbing the steep wooden stairs of Mount Royal Elementary School. Everything there seemed so tired, so worn, so gray, so depressing. I remember liking geography because it took me out of that milieu history because it allowed me to escape in time and writing, which allowed me to express the desire for escape. That was the only thing that I think I really excelled in. Arithmetic, anything pertaining to numbers, I always felt it was a conspiracy against my sanity that I eventually managed to master trigonometry and algebra and geometry to get out of high school and into college. I liked writing, and I've always liked writing. From that early point on, as to when writing came to me as an option, as something that might be central in my life, that didn't happen until I was at McGill. I had, as a professor of comparative literature, a man called Louis Dudak, who it turns out was one of Canada's grandfather poets. He's been at these last 20-odd years or so, but he had a major impact in my life. You mentioned that I had something to do with the path that you've chosen to take. I don't know whether I would agree to that. It's very kind of you to say that, but Louis Dudak really played a major part in mine. I knew when I was taking his course on living, I never, never saw myself as a teacher, as a professor of literature at Bentley College. That just happened as a type of accident, I think. But I knew that writing would be the central part of my life, and I started, as you mentioned, as a poet, when my first, actually it's five books, John, my first book, Winds of Unreason, came back shortly after I left McGill in, I think, 1956 or 57. I had gone up to the Arctic, so I did my undergraduate degree at McGill, was writing poems during my last two years, started graduate work, was born out of my skull. I was sitting in the library from early in the morning until well into the evening, and asked myself what I was doing there, and could not give myself a satisfactory answer, and went home, I was living at home then, and told my parents who had virtually no education themselves, but saw education as a path to mobility, told them that I was going to drop out of school the next day, that I was going to work in the Canadian North in the Arctic, and that I was going to become a poet. I don't think that you would have poet did, or what a poet was, but they had incredible forbearance, they didn't try to pervert through dissuade me, and I came back from the Arctic with my first collection of poems, and I've been writing ever since then, John. So in recent years, less poetry, there's over the years I worked on a novel, never completed it, wrote a play many, many years back, before I met you, which was dreadful, the novel wasn't very much either, but I'm working on a novel now. I have written a play which developed from a long poem that you're probably familiar with called The Rhino Gate, which is the major, the major of the volume called The Rhino Gate Poems. And I see myself sort of going back to beginnings, trying to understand some of the things that happened for me that I didn't fully understand, and I think a lot of my work happens that way. It's in a sense, retrospective. So I'm just, at the same time as I'm working on this novel, John, I'm mapping out a piece on my six-month stay in the Arctic in 1956, I believe it was, ten years before I met you. Long winded answer. No, but that's a good answer. I didn't know some of those. I didn't know about your play, novels, so something to look forward to. That's terrific. I look forward to that. Now, you've traveled extensively in your life. You've lived in Greece, in England, in Mexico, in Spain, and as you just mentioned, even the Arctic, which seems like such an unlikely place, but for a poet, perhaps a perfect place. For me, only snowy owls could possibly lure me to the Arctic, but I expect for you, the Arctic was attractive in other ways. What did you learn from that experience? So where did that bring you in your writing life? Well, it wasn't something that I really planned, John. I had had enough of sitting in classrooms, listening to professors, talked about things that at that point in my life didn't seem particularly gripping. I needed to get away. I think had the opportunity been in the Congo or in Zanzibar, I would have gone there. As it turned out, there was a major construction project taking place in Canada. I think it was an American Canadian cooperative enterprise called the July, the Distant Early Warning Radar System. I went up on a six-month contract. It was the first time that I'd really been away from home. I guess it was my first experience with independent living. As it was, it was very strange, John, because as often happens with me, in a milieu, even if it's a totally different milieu as that one was, I was writing about something else. It was a very curious thing. Now I'm writing about it as though I'm driving and I'm looking and recording the experience through the rear-view mirror. What I'm involved in now is, in a sense, the process of discovery. It will be a series of vignettes, let's say nine or 10 vignettes. The arrival, the departure, this discovery of boundaries. There's a wonderful irony there for me, because I went up in June at that point of the year in the Arctic where there's virtually 24 hours daylight. I went up where I could see everything, and yet I understood very little. I understood nothing. I hadn't experienced it yet. I hadn't understood the solitude, the stark landscape, the different topography. Everything was the same, the kind of spongy earth that one walked on in the summer and that was frozen in the late fall. And yet what I left, I left in December when it was utterly dark basically, maybe a little bit of twilight for three quarters of an hour or so. It was dark outside, but yet inside there was light. I understood much more. So it's a poem, I think. I'm sorry, it's going to be a prose piece and maybe prose poem, but there were the elements there will be separation, boundaries, a recognition of boundaries, how one connects, how one connects with one's tenure, with other people, how one makes sense of things, how one reaches out to elements in one's environment to establish coherence. So right now, John, I'm on the outside of that along with you. As I work on this piece, understanding will come. Theodore Refke has a line I know by going where I have to go, and that's what will happen here. In other words, I'll write, I'll write, I'll write, and the piece will unravel, and I'll understand what it's all about, which is why I'm working on this piece because I always felt, John, that this was a pivotal part in my life. It was as though I was going along on a conveyor belt, and I wasn't ready to stay on that conveyor belt. I wasn't ready to become a goodness knows what. I hadn't chosen the profession. I didn't know what I was going to do. Had no ideas. I mentioned that I was going to be a teacher, and I feel that this experience had a shaping effect on my life. It didn't give me a sense of how I was going to word my living, but it confirmed my sense of occasion. I was going to be a writer, and I came back, as I mentioned, with a collection of poems, and I gave them to my old teacher, Louis Duda, who happened to be the editor of one of Canada's avant-garde presses, and that was my first book. If you don't have a copy of that book, John, after all of these years, I think I owe you that. Well, I'd love it. Along the road to Eden, I'm sorry. The Nine on Stones is the first one that I have. That's the first one that I received from you. George, what brought you to Bentley? So, we're reaching back to him, because that is in 1965. At that point, I was doing a PhD at Tufts, and I was working on my dissertation, I think, or preparing for my orals, I can't remember which, and driving an old 1959 Pujo, and I blew a pistol on the Pujo on the way back from Montreal to Boston, and it occurred to me that I would have to earn more than the $2,000 per semester that I was earning at Tufts for teaching two sections of freshman English. And I think someone had mentioned Bentley to me. I'd never heard about the place at all. And I went down and spoke to a chair then, a gentleman called Jim Kiley, and I taught part-time for the second semester of that year, and then the next year, I taught full-time and was really able to earn a living then. I think it was all of $8,000 a year, which really was quite good. So, I no longer have to go to meat auctions and so on. Because at that point, I was married with a child. So, I never planned to stay at Bentley, John. I thought it was going to be a temporary thing, but the market for university English teachers really closed up. And it was, although there were possibilities for me to return to Canada, I stayed at Bentley. And at that point, Bentley had very limited offerings in English, but the situation changed when I became chair, I think, in 1980. And we're very fortunate we were able to hire a lot of people, and it became just, for me, a very exciting place to be. I really look forward to going and had wonderful colleagues. And no regrets, no regrets. I still love teaching. I still love teaching. Don't get to do much of it. As you know, I retired in 2004, but I still do readings abroad. And sometimes I'll teach an intensive course in creative writing for a week or a few days. I've done sessions in the United States here for, let's say, a couple of days or so. And that's a wonderful way of doing it. I don't have to serve on any committees or great papers and so on. So I get the best of it that way. Yeah, you keep quite busy, I must say. I admire your ethic and your stamina for that matter. Can we spend a couple of moments on mechanics? There are different forms in poetry, free verse, blank verse, the sonnet, Haiku, Sestina, Ode, Villanelle, and others. Have you explored most or all of these forms and which are you most comfortable with? A little bit of background. My mentors were people who were really locked into the free verse movement. The Abongard centers that I was aware of when I started writing seriously in the 1950s were the Contact Press poets in Montreal, the Black Mountain poets, and a little later, the City Lights poets in San Francisco. But as a result of my own reading, I was also compelled by poems in a priori forms like sonnets, villanelles. I love villanelles. So I wouldn't say that I lean one way or another, John. For me, it's taking whatever comes. So I don't start with the notion that the next poem I write is going to be in the form of the villanelle. When I'm working on poems and the new poem comes, I don't know what the poem is about, a line will come, a couple of lines, maybe four lines, sometimes more if I'm lucky, and it'll come in a particular package. So it might be whose words these are, whose words these are, I think I know. It's the first line in the cross poem that's familiar to you. So it might come in a dynamic measure and the line that I mentioned to you, Theorefties, I know by going where I have to go, that defines where the poem is going to go. If the poem, let's say, starts off as, let's say, the Cummings poem does, simulating a falling leaf being carried this way and that way by the wind, well, then I'll follow that particular course. So I probably write more poems in free form or free verse. In other words, no regular metrical pattern, no regular rhyme pattern. But then there are times where I'll hear something, you know, one of those old rhythms, one of those old meters, one of those old line patterns, and I'll go with it. It's like a dance, John. And to some extent, the partner dictates the manner of the dance. Yeah, I understand that. That makes perfect sense to me. Now, no one can begin a discussion at this time with someone in the odds or especially a writer without at least minimally touching on the coronavirus. You were in the seaside town of Javier, Spain, when the coronavirus exploded. How did the lockdown in Spain impact your daily life in this idyllic Spanish town? It made some difference, John, but nothing drastic, really. I had, I really had an idyllic situation there. I was high up on the 11th floor with out of one window view of the mountains and the other full view of the Mediterranean. And although the town was locked down, I mean, you really, you could go outside only to go to a supermarket or to a pharmacy or to a bank. So I missed walking by the seaside because I got a lot of my exercise that way. And I missed sitting at a cafe and having a cafe connexia and looking out at the Mediterranean and maybe scribbling some notes, but I could sit in my balcony and do that. So I have family here, a lot of friends here and so on. So I left early and as it was, I was fortunate in being able to get out. And finally, my transatlantic flight, I think was probably 5% full. It was though they had scooped up the last stragglers leaving the planet for another planet. And my situation over there is not much different than my situation here, except that here I can actually take walks outside. But it, I think more important is the way it impinges this virus impinges on one's imagination and awakens one to what really has been a part of our history, whether it's the great plague in 1381 or the 1666 plague in Britain that had cataclysmic effects. But it works in a number of ways. I find, for example, that I've become very much aware of the place that I happen to be inhabiting my own home. I'm enjoying it in a way that I never have. When Evelyn, my late partner, and I lived together, we lived together for 30 odd years and we lived here for, my God, over 20 years. We hardly ever sat in the living room and so on. We spent a lot of time where I am now on the third floor at our studios, they're next to one another. But I, the morning I very often will read and listen to music in the living room. So I spent time in different rooms and just as my time in the Arctic was being dropped into a particular milieu. And in a sense, getting to know that milieu as it pertained to me was, in a sense, my neighbor, my partner. Well, in a sense, this house has become that. It's very odd. It's as though I've been living in this place or I have been living in this place for so long and I was have made it with it in, I would say, limited ways. So. Yeah, I think a lot of us will feel that way once this is over that we have enjoyed certain aspects of it, even though we're all antsy and they're cabin fevered and want to want to get out now. Will this unprecedented pandemic find its way into your writing poetry in time? Do you think or absolutely will or probably will or maybe or how do you feel about what that that might impact on you? It's very hard to say, John. Subject matter for me is an unpredictable thing. I mean, something could be important in my life as this is. I'm riveted to it as to how we're dealing with it at all. I think as a writer it's as though it's not an act of volition in my part seems ought to say that because ultimately I do the writing. It's almost as though the material has to come out and reach me and grab me by the lapels. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. In the case of the Arctic, for example, it's a long time ago, John. How many years? 44? 20? It's over 60 years that I've been in the Arctic and it's only now that I'm addressing it. Now that I'm compelled by certain images, now that I feel I want to get my arms around it and understand it. So who knows? It might well be that I might be on a cruise, maybe be out on a boat in the Galapagos since I was at one point and that will come to me. This awful situation where these chaotic creatures, these viruses, simply want to stay alive and we're their hosts basically. That might come to me in such a way that I raise my hand and start to put something down on a page. Well, I expected will in time. I think it will grab you by the lapels ultimately because it's been such an unbelievable part of our lives for, even though it's a short period of time, but we've learned how drastically the world and our lives can change in such a little bit of time. That's one truth that's coming out of this. Absolutely. Yeah, it's really unbelievable. You think about it, John. In a sense, I must say over the last 30 years, probably for both of us, we live with a certain amount of smugness, maybe justifiable smugness. We're comfortable. We get three squares a day off of our own choosing. We get to travel where we want to travel, walk where we want to walk, read what we want to read, listen to whatever music we choose to listen to, and it's wonderful. It's as though this could go on forever except perhaps for a minor change here and there, a friend who's involved in the car crash. You can't walk any longer and suddenly you see something like this and everything changes. Very interesting, John. You might enjoy this book, an American historian, Barbara Tuckman, the book called A Distant Mirror. It's a history of the 14th century and there's a lengthy chapter on the plague. You take in one bald fact of it wiping out a third of Europe's population, but it's more than that. It's like whole professions disappearing and the whole culture as a result sags basically. There are things that somehow or other people can't do any longer. We're living with a level of anxiety that we haven't been touched by yet. In my life. We will never forget this. Would you read frozen white for me? Frozen white. Have you ever noticed on a day when ice cuts through wind and spears across the lake that you don't touch her hand across the sheet, the white full frozen and you don't reach across through glasses of the can and you don't touch her reaching phrase, but let it drop into the twisted falls of the roof rug and you don't even stare at the fire as the cold pushes at the outside hinges and barrels down the roof, drifting up the windows and you don't and you don't and you don't. Thank you, George. Always a pleasure to hear that and just going to end with this thought in the introduction to your collection Morning Gothic, John Kinsella wrote about you. He is one of the most human and humane poets I have ever read. Yes, indeed. That's the George Ellenbogen I have known for more than half a century. George, thank you for joining us today to tell your story. It has been a joy. Thank you. Thank you, John.