Interview with Bagel Bard Doug Holder

Images courtesy of Doug Holder.

Poet Doug Holder may be best known as co-founder of the Bagel Bards, a Saturday-morning poetry and writing group that meets at an Au Bon Pain in Somerville, Massachusetts. The name bagel bard perfectly captures Doug’s lighthearted attitude, his sense of humor, his social nature, and, of course, his poetry, which has been widely published.

In addition to being a poet and a sort of community organizer for Somerville writers, Doug wears many other literary hats, not to mention baseball caps and fedoras. He runs (along with two collaborators) the Ibbetson Street Press, an independent publisher of poetry. His column, “Lyrical Somerville,” appears weekly in a local paper, The Somerville News, and he hosts a literary talk show, “Poet To Poet: Writer to Writer” on Somerville community television. He teaches writing at Endicott College and Bunker Hill Community College.

For 30 years, he has worked as a counselor at McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Massachusetts, a place not unconnected to poetry. McLean is the psychiatric hospital that Sylvia Plath fictionalized in The Bell Jar, and the institution was morbidly fashionable among poets during the 50s and 60s. Poets Plath and Robert Lowell were treated there. Anne Sexton, Plath’s friend and rival, taught poetry seminars there before being admitted as a patient. Continuing the poetic tradition at McLean, Holder led poetry groups at the hospital for a decade.

I first met Doug when I lived in Somerville, contributed to The Somerville News, and occasionally visited the Bagel Bards. Doug generously granted me a phone interview, and many post-interview correspondences. We talked about his writing, his inspirations, and his approach to capturing the personal and uncomfortable.

Were you always a writer, or when did you start?

I started keeping journals in the 70s after I got out of college, and I got the idea from working as a teacher in a program for adolescent youth in the South End of Boston. It was actually housed in a mental hospital, Solomon Carter Fuller, and I noticed that they took notes every day about patients and clients, so I started just taking notes about my own life in journals, and then I started picking up snippets of conversation, impressions of things, snippets of readings that I’d done. Eventually all this stuff I collected became fodder for poetry.

What was your first publication?

The first decent one was not till I was like in my mid-thirties and it was in this Canadian magazine, subTerrain, and it was called “Public Rest Rooms.” It was sort of how I viewed bathrooms as religious places, you know: you wash your hands in the holy water, looking at the mirror to see your flaws—sort  of your meditation in your private stall.

Public Rest Rooms

I once viewed them as religious places
men with their backs to me,
in front of urinals
hands clasped together
as if in prayer,
facing the Wailing Wall
reading cryptic messages,
written in urgency, anger, bitter
humor.
A standing chant.
A prayer for the common man
as the vile within came out in a steady
stream,
and then a slow trickle...

The intimacy of the stall,

I saw the feet of my fellow congregants
alone with myself and my maker...
my silent meditation.

The mirror and the powerful light,
I faced myself squarely in its glare
my flaws in full view
and washed my hands
in holy water

 -Doug Holder

-Originally published in subTerrain

Who were your writing mentors?

 I used a lot of stuff that I read—novelists—in my poetry, like Richard Yates, John Updike, a lot of different people. And I was reading a lot of the beat poets, of course, and I was reading a lot of the novels of Jack Kerouac. But I was sort of on my own… I didn’t have any people I was seeing every day, actually, I didn’t have community of writers, that wasn’t till much later.

One of these later mentors was poet Hugh Fox. How did you meet Fox?

I can remember the first time I met him. ... This guy pulls up in front of my house in Somerville—I was living on Ibbetson St. at the time and was running a literary journal—and just pulls up and knocks on the door, talks like a Bronx cab driver, he says,  “'How ya doin’ Doug? Hugh Fox here.” And I was like in my pajamas. He says, “You got a blonde in there?” And I go, “Alright, my wife’s sort of blondish, she’s in there.” And then he sort of realized that I was not in a state to be talking, or whatever, have guests, and he just left, got back in the cab and left. And then after that I had him at The Somerville News Writers Festival, I’ve had him on radio shows, so, it’s interesting.

Do you have a writing routine now?

Whenever I get a chance, ’cause I work three jobs. Could be on the toilet or in a coffee job. Whenever I have a chance. Downtime at the job. In between doing lesson plans and grading.

How did you get into the mental health field?

I got into teaching, mental health, actually, 'cause there was a big fiscal crisis in 1980 and I got laid off from the teaching job at South End and then I got hired as a clinical educator, you know, working with adolescents, at McLean—they had a school there. But then I was offered a job as a mental health worker, too, and there were opportunities for overtime. I figured I needed the money, so I took the job. But I always taught on the side—I was a substitute teacher—to make extra money.

  

Do you like Sylvia Plath’s work?

I don’t know if I like her work that much; it’s not my style. ….She’s part of the confessional poets. I don’t know. I guess I’m a bit more raw than she is. She wasn’t to my taste. A bit too refined, I guess.

What do you mean by raw?

I guess my poetry is a bit more accessible than hers. I think she uses a lot of classical references, used mythology, all kinds of things. I don’t bring that much into it. I’m very much a realist type of writer. And just sort of certain melodrama in her poems, about suicide and things like that, sort of posturing, I guess I don’t like so much.  But you have to remember that Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, they talked about who was going to commit suicide first. …There’s a lot of posturing and craziness, romanticizing suffering that seemed a little off-putting to me.

Is it difficult to write about working at McLean?

No, I wrote a book of poems about it, called Poems of Boston and Just Beyond: From the Back Bay to the Back Ward. It’s not difficult to write about it. … The situation is extreme and the people are challenged. In any good form of writing, you have to have conflict. If you’re writing about cookies and mom’s apple pie and hot chocolate and rosy cheeks, it’s not gonna make good writing.

Did you ever worry about breaking patient confidentiality through your poems?

No, because I never used their names, or anything like that, and they’re usually a conglomerate of different clients.

Cigarette on Psychiatric Ward

 
“Can I have a light?”

What was that sudden spark in her eyes?

that flame

from cloudy, dormant pupils,

when I lit her cigarette?

That sudden, driving ambition

to inhale,

the sunken chest’s almost boastful expansion.

The smoke filling the yawning cavity.

A woman of substance…

until she exhaled

© 1998 Doug Holder, from Poems of Boston and Just Beyond: From the Back Bay to the Back Ward

Do you write about people who are still alive in your poetry?

Well, I don’t identify them, but yeah. I’ve written a poem about my mother recently. Don’t have to be dead, no.

Do you worry that your poems will make the people you portray uncomfortable? 

Yeah, that is true. You know, if you’re gonna be a writer, you to have to be honest, like Philip Roth once said, “If you really wanna be a writer, you have to be willing to insult your mother.” Not that you have to insult her, but if it’s for the purposes of the poem and you have to bring out some warts or something like that you have to be willing to do that, write honestly. That being said, I haven’t always followed that.

If you write a poem about somebody, capturing somebody, do you show it to them before you publish it?

No. I wrote this poem “Mr. Freimour” that wasn’t very flattering about a childhood friend of mine, and I never showed it to him. I don’t know how he would take it. But it was a good poem; I liked it, and it was published in an online journal that’s pretty good [The Blue Jew Yorker].

What’s your favorite of the poems you’ve written?

I wrote this one about the Boston Public Library, the eccentrics of the Boston Public Library. When I was writing my thesis there, I would go there every day, and there was a whole cast of characters there. A homeless woman, disheveled, reading a stack of books with a little magnifying glass. There’s another guy who sort of walked the halls; he had a Brooks Brothers suit and a watch chain. It housed all these eccentric characters, always been a fascination of mine, and then being there, I took my place among them, ’cause I was there every day writing and mumbling to myself, eventually.