Alone, tonight, in Amsterdam, NY,
I walk past your old haunts: this shop, that yard.
You’re gone. You’ve left your morning wait behind
stacked pallets, where day-shift buzzers drill
the air, sing for measured lengths of wood,
of time, and thoughts of adolescent wives.
The dust from those worn saws will always float
across your corneas. I picked that scab too.
But yesterday, before you left, we rode
Suzukis through the Adirondack foothills.
Along those paths, our tires bit the green
of aging mountains breaking through the rock.
—from “For My Brother’s Decision to Join the Navy”
By Stephen Haven
In his last published piece of writing, the famous psychologist William James describes a visit to Amsterdam, New York to visit the mystic, Benjamin Paul Blood. Of the City of Amsterdam, James says, “Mr. Blood inhabits a city, otherwise, I imagine, quite unvisited by the Muses, the town called Amsterdam, situated on the New York Central Railroad.”
William James was not often wrong, but he was wrong about the muses not visiting Amsterdam. They have visited former Amsterdam resident, Stephen Haven, many times. Stephen Haven is the son of Robert Haven, former rector of St. Anne’s Episcopal Church in Amsterdam, and Dr. Sally Haven.
I first came across Haven’s works when I was working in the Post Office and he was a struggling poet. A package of poems was returned to Haven and had ripped open. It was my job to repair the package and put it back into the mail stream. But I must confess that I first read a poem about an incident where a man fell from a factory smokestack and died, leaving his boot in a rung on the stack. I was struck then by the power of Haven’s poetry.
Haven has published two books of poetry–The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks, published by West End Press in 2004 and Dust and Bread, a collection of poems published by Turning Point in 2008.
Haven’s newest book, The River Lock One Boy’s Life along the Mohawk, published in April by Syracuse University press, is a memoir of growing up in Amsterdam and has been nominated for a National Book Award. Syracuse University Press describes the book this way:
“Pulled between the disparate spheres of home life with a minister father he loves and respects, and the world of sex, drugs, and violence of his closest boyhood friends, author Stephen Haven relates his journey of self-discovery in this poignant memoir. After a fourteen-year absence from his home in Amsterdam, New York, Haven returns in the week before Easter, 2003, to the town that molded his character.
A true bildungsroman, The River Lock traces the forging of Haven’s identity from the clash of his youthful home life and the streets of his native mill town. Through memories of adolescence, Haven reveals how a growing understanding of art, culture, friendship, spirituality, family, and class melded to create a man able to live fully in two distinct worlds.”
Stephen Haven is currently Director of the Ashland University MFA Program and Professor of English at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio.
Bob Cudmore also blogs about Stephen Haven and provides a link so you can listen to the interview he did with Haven on WVTL.
