Wordplay
Worcester-born poet Diana Der-Hovanessian visits the old neighborhood.
by Sally Cragin
Illustration by Lennie Peterson
Like Elizabeth Bishop, fellow poet Diana Der-Hovanessian grew up
in Worcester and left as a child. Still, this city is imprinted on both women's
work, to varying degrees. For Bishop, Worcester is the site for one of her
greatest poems, "In the Waiting Room," (Geography III). In it, a young
Bishop waits for her aunt Consuelo to finish a dentist's appointment by passing
time reading the National Geographic. It is then that she has a
breathtaking insight: no one else will be her, and she will never be anyone
else. "I knew that nothing stranger/Had ever happened, that nothing/ Stranger
could ever happen," she writes. In this poem, Worcester is neither personalized
nor explored -- it's just a setting. But Der-Hovanessian's Worcester, where she
spent her youth, is very real, because it's the place where her family thrived
as Armenian immigrants, a central theme in much of Der-Hovanessian's poetry.
In "White Lamb, Blue Mulberry," which appears in Der-Hovanessian's moving new
book of verse, Any Day Now (Sheep Meadow Press), a visit to Hope
Cemetery, where her sister and other relatives are buried, becomes an
opportunity to reflect on the power of comradeship, particularly for Armenians
who've endured years of Soviet occupation and, before that, a near geonicide by
Turkish rulers. "Stone angels stand guard near/Your white lamb in the
Armenian/Section of Hope Cemetery/Exiles, dead before you were born/Are buried
under the curving/Armenian letters of their homeland/Telling their names and
villages." It turns out that an Armenian relative has also been laid to rest in
Hope Cemetery, but in an unmarked plot. "Pa did not want him forgotten and
unvisited." Her grandfather is also there, under a mulberry tree planted by a
grateful stranger. As the poem unfolds, the reader gets the sense of a village,
albeit underground, of immigrants "far from their mountains, old men/Who
escaped massacres and starvation/Sleeping more than seventy years."
The bittersweet tone in "White Lamb" is echoed in another Worcester-inspired
work, "Flying Back," albeit softened and filtered. Here, the poet remembers a
snowy, Sunday afternoon spent with her grandfather at the Waldorf cafeteria,
where the oatmeal is thicker and more tasty than the "thin gruel oatmeal/Made
with salt, Armenian style, that/My grandmother and mother prefer." Her
grandfather reads the comics to her, and they discuss Buck Rogers's flying belt
-- a talisman Der-Hovanessian covets. "I will invent one, I promise myself,"
she tells the reader, adding, "Every once in a great while/I smile at the
broken promise. Then remembering poetry think/It was not broken after all."
Though her father's job (he ran a dairy in Marlborough) prompted the family to
move from Worcester, the time she spent living with her grandparents near the
first Armenian Church were critical in her development, primarily because of
her parents' and grandparents' work: for years, they "helped bring a lot of
Armenians to Worcester. They would come and work in the wire mills, and then
would go to night school."
A slight woman with flowing hair and penetrating amber-brown eyes,
Der-Hovanessian carries her complicated heritage lightly but seriously. For
Armenians, all aspects of the culture are to be examined as well as embraced --
even the unspeakable pain of genocide and subsequent massacres. In her poem,
"Songs about Land," she returns to Worcester where she watches her grandmother
drying her hair in the back yard. She tries to amuse her by singing a song in
Armenian, but when she sings a song in Turkish, her grandmother weeps and asks
where she learned it. "How could she not know?" the poet wonders. "Her husband
had learned it/As a boy in Tadem before/The massacres, when Turks/Were
neighbors not/Murderers, when songs/Were made to share/Not used as weapons."
Der-Hovanessian has an incredible family dynamic that most writers would envy,
but her relationship to it is tangled. "I don't know whether it's exorcising
the past or just remembering," she says. Early influences were the Armenian
martyr poets Siamanto and Daniel Varoujan, whose work her father read aloud.
"He was always reciting him in Armenian, and I was always . . .," she
pauses, and then laughs. "Running away." Her mother favored set-pieces of the
Western canon, like the long poems of Tennyson. But a turning point came when
her father asked her to translate some of Varoujan's work for a public reading
where not everyone spoke Armenian. "I did four poems and thought, these aren't
bad." Der-Hovanessian was particularly drawn to the work Varoujan did in
prison, after being detained on April 24, 1915 (the date that the Armenian
genocide is commemorated), along with dozens of other poets and writers, by the
Turkish government. "Some they killed immediately, but Varoujan was put in
jail. He wrote homesick poems, sweet pastoral poems set in his village. You'd
never have known he was in prison waiting to die," she explains. "His notebook
was ransomed by a jailer to a priest and published six years after his death."
Der-Hovanessian began looking at other work and "wondered if they worked in
English." She sent her translations to Yankee, which published his
"country poems."
Fellow poet Lloyd Schwartz found to his surprise that when he was granted an
audience with the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church in Jerusalem, His
Beatitude Torkam Manoogian asked if Schwartz knew his translator, Diana
Der-Hovanessian. "She's extremely well-known in the Armenian community all
around the world," says Schwartz. "One of the things that the poetry community
around here doesn't know about Diana, as well as it should, is that she's a
very important translator," he says.
Der-Hovanessian has spent much of the past year in Europe, traveling and
teaching on a Fulbright Commission fellowship, but she still finds time to act
as president of New England Poetry Club (NEPC), which she's been for the past
20 years. Her tenure, in fact, has exceeded that of past presidents'. Conrad
Akins, Robert Frost, and founder Amy Lowell were all presidents of the
presigeous organization. Under her leadership, the NEPC has brought
international readers like Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Vasilis Vasilikos to their
first Stateside public readings. It holds a number of poetry contests, and each
summer sponsors a reading series in the Longfellow House garden in Cambridge.
She also began a panel-discussion series in association with the Boston
Globe that is held at the Boston Public Library. Bringing poetry to a
larger audience is Der-Hovanessian's other mandate -- which isn't so far from
her family's passion for bringing Armenians together in Worcester.
For information on the NEPC, send a self-addressed, stamped envelope to 2
Farrar Street, Cambridge 02138.
Sally Cragin edits Button, New England's tiniest magazine.