Malinda Words: How Grolier Poetry writes 'Harvard Square'

There was no ‘Harvard’ in Cambridge, Massachusetts before September 8, 1636. Indeed, at that time, there was no Cambridge either, at least not in the state of Massachusetts. Apparently it was settled as New Towne in 1630 by the Massachusetts Bay Company but was organised as a town not only in name six years later when it was picked as the site of Harvard College. This town was renamed Cambridge two years later.

So much has happened in the almost four hundred years that have passed since then. A moment can transform, in fact. And so, one should not be surprised to return to any place, Cambridge included, say thirty years after spending a few years there, and find the landscape unrecognizable.

Memory demands that we look for things that were so much of the everyday in that other time. We look for corner shops, bakeries, book shops, the shapes of buildings and even park benches. Some have gone, as the Beatles’ song ‘In my life’ goes, and some remain.

Harvard Square is reputed to be the most vibrant place in North America in terms of street artists. Maybe I arrived at the wrong time of the year or perhaps the wrong day of the week and the wrong time, but I didn’t see any solo artist with a guitar who perhaps entertained the dream that one day, just like it happened to Tracy Chapman, fame and fortune would arrive. No jugglers, no clowns and no hustlers with a deck of cards.

The Au Bon Pain bakery-cafe outlet had shut down in January 2019, not too long after Cream Cafe, Chipotle, Tealuze, Urban Outfitters and Sweet Bakery had left what the relevant proprietors had turned into landmark locations in Harvard Square. Pavement Coffeehouse stands in its place. There are lots of tables outside and some of them have chess squares embedded. There are still chess players. There are pigeons too. And there are things that have been missed or completely forgotten.

I went looking for bookstores, for there were many back in the day. Splendid places they were for one never felt the time pass. Fancy ones and places that sold used books. Grand ones and quaint shops that seemed to have been taken from fairytales. Many had closed down years ago, I found out.

I wondered if the Harvard Book Store was also gone. It was there, but more importantly I noticed a sign directing the random passerby to Grolier Poetry. A bookstore dedicated to poetry. How could I have missed that, I asked myself.

So I walked in. So I browsed. I found a poet who has been walking all over my mind the past few days. It so happened that the translator is also a poet I had read and written about. So I flipped through the pages of ‘If I were another,’ by Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Fady Joudah. And, as often happens, a random page yielded words that spoke to all the thoughts I alluded to above. Here’s the relevant verse from ‘The “Red Indians’” penultimate speech to the white man’:

There are dead who sleep in rooms you will build
there are dead who visit their past in places you demolish
there are dead who pass over bridges you will construct
there are dead who illuminate the night of butterflies, dead
who come by dawn to drink their tea with you, as peaceful
as your rifles left them, so leave, you guests of the place,
some vacant seats for your hosts…they will read you
the terms of peace…with the dead!

These are, after all, times of places being demolished and people being evicted so their homes can be seized. Much like the ‘Red Indians’ Darwish speaks about. Yes, he writes of one thing but speaks of and to many other things.

Grolier Poetry didn’t exist back in 1630. Adrian Gambit and Gordon Cairnie set it up in 1927 and it was only in 1976 that Louisa Solano turned it into a bookstore that only stocked poetry. Apparently she had first stepped into Grolier at 15 and had later helped out Gordon who had paid her with tea and cookies. When he died in 1973, according to Louisa, ‘ten of his customers got together, got a bank loan for me, and I got this store.’

Louisa Solano passed on April 20, 2022. One day, someone who once stepped into that bookstore will visit Harvard Square and find that Grolier Poetry does not exist any more. There may come a day when no one remembers the name Louisa Solano. She once said, in an interview, that ‘poetry is the texture of life and language, and if you don’t have it on an actual page in front of you, you are losing your language.’

Maybe we’ll not have ‘pages’ either, but she’s right about poetry being the texture of life and language. And that’s why walking around Harvard Square was like reading an old poem — there are always layers of meaning that one has missed and always one is surprised by the layers that seem to have got added or have been added.

After all, one might say that Darwish wrote that poem for it to be read today in a world to wish he continues to gift the world life, love and language even though he’s passed to a place where, hopefully, he’s become what he wanted as he wrote in 2000 (‘Mural’).

There’s Harvard. Cambridge. Chess tables and a cafe. Roads that change their clothes from time to time. There’s a bookstore called Grolier Poetry. It’s on Plympton Street, Cambridge. It’s still there. There is a name that lingers. Louisa Solano.

There will always be poets writing the textures of life and language offering a random visitor a Harvard Square that’s never existed before. It will disappear in a moment and yet be collapsible to dimensions small enough to be carried far away from Cambridge, Massachusetts and the United States of America.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 253rd article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below]

26 October 2023

How Grolier Poetry writes 'Harvard Square'

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