For poets Mark Hillringhouse and Richard O’Brien, poetry is just one of many ways they express themselves.
Hillringhouse, author of Between Frames, is also an accomplished photographer, while O’Brien is a published novelist — author or Little Flower of Luzon — who has taken up painting.
And both will bring their eclectic mix of talents to the South Brunswick Library on Sunday, where they are the feature readers at the monthly reading series sponsored by the South Brunswick Arts Commission.
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| Mark Hillringhouse |
Hillringhouse, 59, lives in Englewood and has been writing since he was 14. He was influenced by a pastor at his church and started writing spiritual meditations that were published in the church magazine.
“I was a strange, quiet kid who liked to read,” he says in a publicity questionnaire. “I hung out in the public library after school. I discovered section 8.11 in the Dewey Decimal system, that’s the American poetry section and I discovered poets like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost and Ezra Pound, all the big names.
“I was into some philosophy then, too, and I would always argue religion or theories about the godhead with the minister of my church,” he adds. “I was about 14 and I wrote this spiritual poem that the minister liked and he published it in the church magazine. I thought I was a poet!”
He counts as his influences those American giants, but the shared New Jersey roots gives Williams a special place.
“Frost was the first major American poet I remember as a kid since I watched him read at Kennedy’s inauguration,” he says. “I fell in love with Wallace Stevens in college and William Carlos Williams. I later got to know both of Williams’s sons, Eric and Paul, when I ran the Williams Center for the Performing Arts in Rutherford. I interviewed them. I am still writing about Williams.”
And taking pictures inspired by his work.
“I did a year-long project writing and photographing the Lower Passaic River that was commissioned by the American Poetry Review,” he says. “The editor, David Bonnano, asked me to write him something about the Passaic. I thought a good thing would be to trace the locations mentioned in Williams’s 1938 collection of short stories titled ‘Life along The Passaic River,’ which was published by New Directions. I have a first edition of the text and I read and reread the stories looking for clues and finding that Williams being a doctor was very specific in mentioning places and street names.
“So I tried to follow the old roads that Williams took as he went on his house calls in cities and towns along the Passaic such as Wallington and Passaic and Garfield and Rutherford and Lyndhurst. I paddled canoes and kayaks up and down and took photographs of the river at different spots in different seasons and in different weather and I interviewed dozens of people close to the river. I got some poems out of it, too, like the poem titled ‘At The Arlington Diner,’ which is in my new book. The poem grew from doing the photo-essay.”
Williams, he says, “proved that you could take a place like Paterson and make it into a book-length poem and that an artist can turn his attention to what is here locally and create something that is as powerful and as important as anything exotic and remote. He wrote about where he lived and about the people he encountered.”
O’Brien, 46, says he began writing in high school, inspired by Percy Bysshe
Shelley.
“The line from ‘Ode to a Skylark’ haunted me for years: ‘We look before and after, and pine for what is not,'” he says. “Then, Bukowski when I was in my 20s, and Robert Creeley.”
O’Brien, who like Hillringhouse recently finished his Master of Fine Arts degree at Fairleigh Dickinson University, cites the MFA faculty there — H.L. Hix, Renee Ashley and David Daniel — as big influences and he is looking forward to Sunday’s reading.
“I don’t do readings as often as I like, but I value them,” he says. “The benefit is hearing your work aloud, and the work of others, of course.”
Mark Hillringhouse and Richard O’Brien will read at the South Brunswick Library, 110 Kingston Lane, Monmouth Junction, on Sunday, March 17, at 2 p.m. An open reading will follow the featured poets. Admission is free, but a donation of a non-perishable food item to the township Food Pantry is appreciated. The reading is sponsored by the South Brunswick Arts Commission. Arts Commission website: www.sbarts.org; South Brunswick Library website: www.sbpl.info.
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Hank Kalet 