Local poet, publisher and educator Doug Holder is the Somerville Arts Council’s artist of the month for February 2017. — Photos by Jaclyn Tyler

Interview by Gilmore Tamny

Could you tell us a bit more about yourself and your background? Did you always want to be a poet and/or drawn to poetry?

Well, I was born in Manhattan in 1955. And my mother’s side of the family was long-involved in the book business. They started selling books from pushcarts on the Lower East Side of NYC back in the early part of the last century. My late Uncle David Kirschenbaum was a prominent book dealer, and eventually founded the Carnegie Book Store in New York City’s Book Row. So I was always around books, they were very much part the texture of my life. I started writing poetry in the 70s when I was living in a rooming house in the Back Bay of Boston. I recounted much of my life as a poet during this time in a lyrical memoir that was published, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Poseur: 1974 to 1983 (Big Table Books). I think what jump started me was when I inadvertently found On the Road by Jack Kerouac on the shelves of the now defunct Barnes and Noble in Downtown Crossing in Boston. From there I read all the Beat poets and writers, and then went on to other genres, Eventually I went on to graduate school to further my education.