Moving to a New Place

by Ron Schreiber

“Ron Schreiber’s poems are clear vision; they can be literal and magical—sometimes both at once. Through his language and rhythms, his sensibility and his intelligence manage to fuse the political and the personal in a true I mean that he compels us to experience ourselves in the world, and to take the risks in our lives which he takes in his life and in his work.”
—Dick Lourie

72 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1974

About the author

Born January 25, 1934, in Chicago, IL; died of pancreatic cancer, August 22, 2004, in Cambridge, MA. Educator, editor, and author. A former professor at the University of Massachusetts—Boston, Schreiber was a poet, advocate of gay literature, and founder of the literary periodicals Things and Hanging Loose. After receiving his B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1955, he served in the U.S. Army for two years, returning to his studies at Columbia, where he earned an M.A. in 1959 and a Ph.D. in 1967. His work with small press publications started with Things, a journal he cofounded and published from 1963 to 1966. Next, after Things went out of business, he began the magazine Hanging Loose, which eventually morphed into a full-fledge publishing house of the same name. While editing Hanging Loose, Schreiber joined the University of Massachusetts—Boston faculty as an assistant professor, eventually rising to the post of full professor, chairing the English department, and retiring as professor emeritus. During the 1970s, he also worked as an editor for the cooperative publishing firm Alice James Books. A tireless advocate for the poems of gay and lesbian authors, Schreiber, who was himself a homosexual, became known for developing innovative classes for the study of gay and lesbian literature. He was the editor of Thirty-one New American Poets (1968) and published several poetry collections, including Living Space (1972), False Clues (1978), and John (1989).

Reviews

[Vasha7]

Just as in the collection that followed this one, False Clues , Ron Schreiber comes across as a very likable guy, writing warmly about friends and wistfully about lovers, and with a rather tentative reflectiveness about his displacement in society and his anxious internal changes. The last few poems in the book seemed particularly striking to me, with their questioning of marriages and their attempts to think about relationships in a new way. All the poems are very personal, where he sounds like he’s talking to himself most of the time, or to someone very close. There isn’t much formal structure at all to most of these poems, mostly the words just seem to spill out. But he’s trying to shape his lines, as he says:

this rhythm.   slow movement of lines across a page.
not jays leaping from tree to stream bank back to tree.
more like gulls over the beach, no place to land
because of people walking there in couples, trailing behind their dogs.