B.U. Bridge is published by the Boston University Office of University Relations.

Contact Us

Staff

In defense of the demotic
Aaron Fogel wins 2001 Kahn Award for The Printer's Error

By Hope Green

Aaron Fogel is a poet who takes humor seriously. His work is laced with wit and irony, yet drives deep when the reader fully absorbs it.

Aaron Fogel. Photo by Vernon Doucette

A passionate but irreverent approach to the craft of writing is evident in Fogel's new collection, The Printer's Error, winner of Boston University's 2001 Kahn Award. Some of the poems are more conventional in style or somber in tone, while others entertain with wordplay or a quirky device. "BW" consists entirely of nine-syllable lines. "Dictionary Jazz" repeatedly pairs the letters j and d, as in "Jeanne d'Arc" and "dulcimer jigging." In "Words Intercepted by Numbers," numerals are sandwiched between letters at random, as in "we5re" and "tri8umph." And Orange and Green employs multiple words containing all five vowels, such as "pandemonium's tambourines."

"I'm interested in working on and identifiying the kinds of semicomic, semiserious formal devices that have not been identified yet," says Fogel, a CAS associate professor of English. "When I put numbers in the middle of words, I don't want people to think, gee, this is an intellectual excercise. I want them to think, gee, this is wild; I'll go home and try it."

Endowed by former BU trustee Esther Kahn (SED'55, Hon.'86) and juried by faculty members, the Kahn prize recognizes a book in the social sciences or the humanities that has broad public appeal. It is awarded annually to a BU faculty member.

The Printer's Error (Miami University Press, 2001), a sampling of Fogel's work from the past 25 years, is his second collection. "This book's publication startled me," he says. "It's a paradox to me because I had given up on having

a meaningful career as a poet or having a book out. I didn't think it was going to happen. Now it has happened and I've won this award at BU, and I'm just delighted."

Don't stop the presses

In his poetry Fogel aims to reach diverse audiences. Some of his poems are difficult and allusive, but others are comprehensible upon a first reading. Fogel believes the title poem in The Printer's Error fits the second category. Written as a tongue-in-cheek testimonial by a senior printer "of sound mind / though near death," the poem implies that typographical slips -- regardless of whether they are caused by accident, sabotage, or a genuine act of God -- are best left alone because the altered meanings they create may have divine significance.

"The book uses misprints in a number of poems, and there are some errors of allusion as well," he says. "These are tilts, or oblique mistakes, that show up in various poems and are kept as more interesting or lively than factual accuracy might be.

"I'll sometimes come upon a printer's error and use it in my teaching as a playful way into unconventional possibilities for reading," Fogel adds. "I'll point out this error that appears in an edition of an E. M. Forster or Jane Austen novel and say, well, what could this printer's error mean if it were intentional? I try to break the students' feeling that they have to be responsible readers."

An early influence on Fogel's work was Kenneth Koch, a poet with whom he studied at Columbia. "Although my sense of humor is different," Fogel says, "his use of laughter has been a major influence on my teaching."

Fogel's maternal grandfather, Menahem Boraisha, was a respected Yiddish poet, and incomplete knowledge of Yiddish is one of the themes of The Printer's Error. Another theme in his poems, as in his teaching, is the lower middle class. He is skeptical of the caricature of lower-middle-class people as earthy, cynical, and resentful folk like the detective Dennis Franz portrays on NYPD Blue.

"You come to a university in one sense ostensibly to get rid of your rough edges, as the child of a diemaker or a small factory owner or a candy store owner, to become a more graceful type," he says. "But one of my jobs as a teacher is to preserve [that edge] for students. That's one of the themes of the book; it allows people to hold onto what is creative about their lower-middle-class background. It's a defense of the class as having its own gracefulness even in its clumsiness, and I think that motif runs through a lot of 20th-century poetry."

Poets demystified

Fogel has been on the faculty at BU since 1978. By necessity most of his publishing endeavors have been scholarly ones; a project he is especially excited about at the moment is an anthology of poets' essays that he is coediting for Oxford University Press.

"It is meant to accompany the kinds of modern poetry courses I teach at BU," Fogel explains. "It is a little different from standard critical prose because it's usually more lively and idiosyncratic. It's an enormous amount of fun."

A perpetual challenge for Fogel in teaching about the great modern poets is in shattering the mystique surrounding them. "I don't think poetry is higher than baseball or painting or weaving rugs," he says. "It's a form of joy that people choose.

"I don't want to engage in a kind of popularization of poetry," he adds, "but I do tell my students that sometimes poetry is not only difficult, it's impossible, and because it's impossible, it's easy. In other words, once you get to the point where you know that you're not supposed to entirely understand it, you'll enjoy it."

To sample some of Aaron Fogel's poems, visit http://people.bu.edu/bobl/aaron.htm.

8 June 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations