Somerville poet and educator, Doug.

By JT Thompson

Doug: grey beard, brown suit jacket, blue baseball cap, 61 years old, is a poet, professor, publisher, newspaper journalist and host of an interview show on SCATV. Doug has been a key player in the local poetry scene for over 20 years; he’s published and interviewed hundreds of poets, and taught hundreds of students.

We meet at Union Square’s Bloc 11 café, where he is a fixture; his usual spot is in the tucked away, tiny backroom, where he does a lot of his interviews, as well as his own writing.

Before I start the interview, he wants to interview me for his column in The Somerville Times. I guess I get animated, because I knock over my coffee, flooding the table, soaking his notebook and splashing onto his jacket. Luckily, Doug handles the clean-up process with aplomb and amusement.

When we get started talking, he has a gruff toughness I imagine is helpful in the classroom, and a good humored sensitivity I imagine is helpful when he interviews poets. He has an affection for the bohemian, artist’s life made possible by low rent neighborhoods, which would seem nostalgic, except for how actively and steadily Doug is engaged in creating that kind of community in Somerville.

Doug was born in Manhattan, near Central Park, and his earliest memory is of being with his mother in a park in Forest Hills, Queens. Although the family then moved to Long Island, Manhattan always remained vivid in Doug’s imagination.

His grandfather’s family is Jewish, and came over from Russia and Poland, fleeing the shtetls to make a new home in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Doug’s uncle Dave Kirschenbaum made his living by selling books from a pushcart, and gradually became an established and well respected bookseller, founder of the Carnegie Bookstore. A measure of his place in the literary world is that, among many other such projects, he was asked to assess the library of T.S. Eliot.

“I asked him if he knew Gershwin from the neighborhood. ‘Yeah, he was a good kid’ he told me. But he was very matter of fact about it all. The bookstore was to make a living.”

By the time he was in high school, Doug had become an avid reader of newspapers.

“We lived just thirty miles outside Manhattan. I read three papers a day, the Daily News, the Post and the Times. I was pretty well informed for a kid. My dad was a P.R. man, a Mad Men kind of guy, and he always had newspapers with him, staying informed so he could make good pitches. I always admired how he could talk about a lot of issues.”

Doug started college at B.U. but was “bumped to Buffalo by the recession. But I came back to Boston, living in boarding houses, working as a short order cook, lots of jobs like that.”

He laughs.

“I’m getting like my dad. Things aren’t like they were.

“But my memories of New York are that there was more sense of community. The artist’s bohemian life was possible. It’s too expensive now. Gentrification everywhere.”

“In Boston in the 70s, you had rooming houses in Back Bay, Cambridge. Now, forget about it. It was a lot cheaper then, a lot easier to live that sort of life.”

After his various odd jobs, Doug got a teaching certificate at Emmanuel College.

“My first job was in a mental hospital, for African American kids, DSS kids from Roxbury. There were some bad crimes.”

“And the irony of a Jewish kid from Long Island teaching African American history to them. It ended up being more about teaching reading.”

He then became a health worker at MacClean hospital, but got laid off in 2008 during the recession. He is still there part time, but to fill out his work life he put his Masters in English from Harvard to use and got two teaching jobs, at Bunker Hill Community College and Endicott College.

Endicott now provides funding for Ibbetson Street, a small press that Doug founded in 1998.

“My wife and I were living on Ibbestson Street in Somerville at the time. She became ill, so to cheer her up I decided to start a literary magazine, something we’d talked a lot about.”

“The first issues were stapled together, now it’s a glossy magazine format. We got into print on demand, chapbooks, found a design partner.”

“And we founded the Bagel Bards, which was a reaction to the academic cliques. We wanted to be open to the general public. We have accomplished poets, we have beginners. Every Saturday for the last 14 years we’ve met, first at Finagle a Bagel in Harvard Square, now at Au Bon Pain in Davis. We put out a yearly anthology.”

I ask him what he likes about Union Square.

“Somerville is the city for me, I’m very involved. I’ve worked with the Arts Council, I established the first poet laureate for the city. I write for the newspaper, do interviews on the TV station.”

“I like the atmosphere here. Writing, cafes, everything feeds off each other. Gary Duehr, an acquaintance of mine, said that if someone sees you taking a photograph on the street in Medford, they think you’re an insurance agent. In Somerville, they think you’re an artist.”

“There’s a great mix here. Everyone’s in close proximity, you run into other poets. And we talk poetry more than real estate investments,” he says with a wry grin.

I ask Doug what he loves most about his life now.

“Not anything unusual. Stuff that bothered me when I was younger doesn’t now. I’m well into the second half of the rollercoaster ride.”

“I don’t waste time. When I was 30, I had lots of projects I wanted to do, wasn’t sure what to do. Now, I’m more focused, more confident. In my 20s I was roaming around, insecure, posturing as a writer, not putting the work in. Now I know what I am and what I’m not. Have to live with it.”

I ask him if things he loves about America are coming to mind.

He thinks a moment.

“The best time of day is the end of the day, when I sit down with my wife with a Canadian Club, and listen to some Chet Baker, some jazz. It’s my own little bistro. Jazz is an elixir. I’m not a big aficionado, but it’s a very American art form.”

“And we have the freedom to create. I love the energy people bring to advocating what they think is right.”

“A few years ago I visited Israel. All the check points. Kids with machine guns. When I got back to Logan I metaphorically kissed the ground. We have freedom and security here. I realized how thankful I am living in this country.”

“Are there things about America that you think are great?”

“There’s the idea of America, what it should be. Trump has no idea what it is.”

“I love my life, getting to express myself without fear of being thrown in jail. I can live the way I want to live. There’s tolerance. We’re not killing homosexuals like in Africa.”

“We can travel freely. I’ve never had my life on the line. Been shot at. I’ve lived a good life. It’s not like Somalia or Syria here. It could be. But it’s not. So I’m glad for that.”

Doug’s commitment to free expression – his support of poets through Ibbetson Street and the Bagel Bards, his teaching of writing, his featuring of poets in the Somerville Times and on his TV interview show – creates an inspiring model of how a community of artists can come alive and thrive.

I think of Doug’s vivid memories of his grandfather’s involvement in the book world, of seeing Gershwin around town as a kid. I wonder if that sense – that there’s creativity everywhere, that artists now in the pantheon of greats were once just kids in the neighborhood – fuels Doug’s involvement in the local poetry scene. At a Union Square café, that person next to you deeply involved with their notebook might be a future T.S. Eliot.