'Giving voice to things that are special' Maryland's new poet laureate puts seeds of Jewish sensibility into works by Lisa Traiger My daughter's baking challah," Michael Glaser says by way of introduction last Friday afternoon. It's been barely a week since Glaser, a professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland, learned that he was appointed the state's newest poet laureate. Yet he's just as excited about the yeasty dough -- his aunt's recipe -- that in a few hours will warm his heart, as he is about his selection by Gov. Robert Ehrlich. In fact, his poem, "Chawa's Challah," speaks about the "measured rhythms of kneading/those careful dactyls and trochees, press push push, press push push/turn and fold and fold and fold." The job of state poet laureate, the professor explains, is an honorary one, but one he's excited to accept. Glaser, 61, who has been writing and teaching students at St. Mary's College for more than 30 years, believes poetry's time has come. "I think we need poetry and the arts now more than ever," he says. "We are becoming, I fear, an increasingly unreflective people in modern times. Poetry -- all art -- asks us to think more deeply and more passionately about who we are in the world and how we connect with other people at a time when we are becoming an increasingly globalized international community." The author of two books of poems, A Lover's Eye, and the recently released collection, Being a Father, Glaser crafts his poems with an attentive eye for detail and ear for the everyday cadences of speech. As St. Mary's College president Maggie O'Brien puts it: "He can say more in 10 words than most people can say in 10 pages." As poet laureate he plans to bring poetry to all areas of the state through readings, educational workshops in the schools and other creative ventures. "I'm especially interested in working with teachers in bringing poetry to classrooms around the state," he says. "I love sharing the artistic impulse with others." Maryland's youngest citizens, he believes, will reap the most benefit from learning and listening to, reading and writing poems that can distill their own life experiences. While poetry didn't always fascinate Glaser, words did. He grew up in Chicago and came east in 1970 to take a position at St. Mary's. Glaser's mother, Rona Schmidt, worked in her family-owned Jewish newspaper in Cincinnati, Every Friday, and she passed on her love for language and learning to her son, Michael. His poem "Love Seat" pays tribute to memories of his mother's warmth and interest in learning. "When I was 13 or 14," he recalls, "I discovered Martin Buber's 'I and Thou.' It gripped me but I couldn't understand all of it. My mother would sit down with me three or four times a week and, like two old Hebrew scholars, we would read." "It's a wonderful memory," Glaser says, and from it grew his poem "Love Seat." Living in St. Mary's City, where Glaser and his wife, Kathleen, raised five children, the poet laureate with the Jewish sensibility has found a small community of Jews to suit his needs. "My experience," he says, "is mostly in creating for me my own kind of spiritual community. My Judaism is based around family rituals and celebrations in the home." And that's when the heady smell of baking challah permeates his poems and his life. While Glaser is a Jewish poet, not all of his writings are distinctively or specifically Jewish, yet many still contain the seed of Jewish sensibility for family, for community, for ways to give thanks for blessings and for ways to knit together spiritual connections in hectic lives. "I try to be meditative," he says about living a poet's life in the fast-forward 21st century, "and I don't find [that practice] in conflict with Judaism." For Glaser, the bottom line in poetry remains the expressiveness of the word: "Many of us have been frightened by experiences we've had in classrooms," he acknowledges of those wary of esoteric poetical experiences with high school English teachers. But for Glaser, "Poetry is a way of giving voice to things that are
special and important and meaningful to us. The poet's job is to pay
attention to things that are meaningful to us in our lives. . . . It is
giving voice as honestly and as simply and with as much integrity as we
can -- it's all about expressing one's experiences." |
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