Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part V)

The baby was in and out of hospital for surgical procedures. The school system wanted no part of a mother who wrote books and a child with disabilities. Public schools were not yet required to admit children with disabilities. Barbara home schooled with a curriculum she received through the mail. Visual artists from the co-op, musicians, and friends from the theater came to help.

Her neighbor, Verna, gave her a small letterpress. Printing writing by and for children, Ten Penny Players evolved from a theater to a publisher of small books made for little hands to hold in quiet reflection. Barbara's father, David, had been a book collector whose love for books was greater than his love of family or his children. Her appreciation for books was learned in his library, endlessly dusting volumes, carefully holding fragile leather to protect even more fragile spines. She had studied fine art print making at Hunter College, but put aside the acids and etching press to make the loft child safe.

At the New York Small Press Book Fair, held in Bryant Park (autumn, 1977), Barbara exhibited her letterpress books. The audience at the fair assumed her highly illustrated books were for children, but she insisted they were for everyone.

Little Poems


Athelantis Perry 1977-8

August 1978

Knee Scene

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part IV)

Athelantis was born with Apert's syndrome. Amid hospital visits and operations, Barbara continued her work in children's theater. She helped organize a conference, The Hurt Child and the Arts, at Fordham University. She completed a manuscript chronicling her struggle with hospitals to find medical treatment for her son. The book, a landmark in patient rights advocacy, was published by Avon in 1972 as “Care Without Care.”

Care Without Care (Chapter I)

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part III)

Ten Penny Players, Inc. was founded by Barbara Fisher and Barbrah Messing who were working together at the Chelsea Theater Center.

In August of 1970 Ten Penny Players produced Barbara Fisher's environmental play, “Noisy City Sam”. New York Magazine identified some of the characters as "Edna the Social Worker, Ice Cream Wrapper, A Decaying Apartment House, Willie de Waffle and of course, Noisy City Sam." The show was presented in Clinton Park. Children came from around the city. The price of admission was an empty soda can. The Village Voice wrote that the audience was asked "to bring empty aluminum cans as their tickets of admission. This action is one method used by the troupe to stimulate children to be active participants in the anti-pollution movement."

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (Part II)

Athelantis, our son from Barbara's first marriage, was the best man at the ceremony on the Brooklyn Bridge. Winds blew about us. I feared the ring might drop between the slats onto the cars and trucks crossing the East River below us.

After he administered our marriage vows, Jim Proud pointed to the sun’s descent between the twin towers. His wife, Susan, wondered whether it was by design. Had the architects planned for bridge pedestrians to see the sun set precisely between the two towers every summer solstice? Was there a mystical design that linked the Brooklyn Bridge, the World Trade Center, Earth's orbit, and the shadows that fell at Stonehenge? No. It wasn't by design. The harmony of the moment chanced to happen on our wedding day in 1983.

Twenty seven years later, the World Trade towers have gone; but the bridge remains; and Barbara continues to wear the wedding ring I placed on her finger that June day.

Teaching the Terrified Tongue (part I)

"O harp and altar, of the fury fused,"

Proem to the Brooklyn Bridge — Hart Crane

On the evening of the summer solstice of 1983, a hundred years after the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, a taxi brought us downtown from 799 Greenwich Street to the Municipal Building and the pedestrian ramp of the bridge. Barbara, Athelantis, Jane, and I walked up the ramp toward the bridge's first tower above the East River. From there we turned to look west, back at Manhattan. The sun was setting above the windows of the World Trade Center.

There was no need for a permit to hold our wedding on the Brooklyn Bridge. We didn’t bring a large crowd. Jane Braswell was there. She was our upstairs neighbor in 799, the artists’ co-op Barbara helped to legalize through her work with Artists Tenant Association. James Proud, an Episcopal priest and the attorney for Ten Penny Players, came to administer our vows. Joan Harrington, from Advocates for Children, arrived with her family from the Brooklyn side of the bridge.

From out the constant flow of everyday pedestrians crossing the bridge, a couple of tourists from Sweden, amused by our ceremony, stopped to take our picture.

Small Press Poet 5

After meeting at the planning session for the 1978 annual New York Book Fair, Barbara Fisher and I grew closer. I returned from Washington to work with Ten Penny Players. We were funded to develop new audiences for poetry through the New York State Waterways Project of Ten Penny Players, presenting a series of outdoor book fairs along the waterfronts, piers, and bridges of New York. We enlisted a cohort of 25 New York State poetry presses both small press and trade house.

NYS Waterways Project - 1979 1

Each poetry press had its own table. For the presses that could not attend, Barbara tended to a combined exhibit. Jackie Eubanks, Brooklyn College Research Librarian and Small Press activist, advised us:

Small Press Poet 4

PJ became my mentor in the mid 1970’s. Born at the end of the Nineteenth Century, he was forty seven years older than me. He spoke of living in the Village since the 1920’s and seldom traveling north of Fourteenth Street. His garret apartment, atop three narrow flights, was filled with boxes of journals, sketchpads, correspondences, and boxes of archived notebooks.
A frail, white bearded man, he lived alone in his garret. In the 1930's he operated a printing press in a basement off Minetta Lane, where he printed “The Poetry Quartos” for Donald Klopfer and Bennett Cerf at Random House.
When we met, he was using to a photocopier to print “Hue and Cry”, wherein he advocated nonconceptual (noncon) art. Mary Clark has written about him at her blog:
http://erinyespoetwriter.blogspot.com/2009/07/paul-johnston-american-philosopher.html

In 1975, the American Place Theater left its home at St. Clements on West 46th Street for a larger space near Sixth Avenue. The small theater in St. Clements basement became available for weekly readings. I invited small presses from the New York Book Fair to hold readings after 10 p.m. A small room on the top floor of the church became a small press library that was started with a dump display presented by CCLM. The large space in the church was made available to stage benefit readings like those to aid poets Kim Chi Ha and Kofi Awoonor.
I became an intern at the Literature Program of the NEA. Len Randolph was the program director. Literature, along with the rest of the NEA’s funded programs, was under attack. Congress was hostile to artists’ sexual license. Lines were drawn among artists between elitists and populists. The Endowment was transitioning from a Republican (Ford) administration to the Democrat (Carter) administration. Livingston Biddle chairman. When I returned New York, I felt tarnished by the experience.