Three Poets Hanging Loose
By John Kendall Hawkins
I recently spoke by Zoom with two editors of the small press, independent Hanging Loose magazine, Dick Lourie and Mark Pawlak, about poetry then and now, their resilience, their work with young poets, and some words about their own recently published books. Another founding editor, Ron Schreiber, now deceased, was my advisor in the English department at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. My first paid published poem appeared in Hanging Loose 45, in the year I won the Academy of American Poets prize there.
John Hawkins: Why should people care about poetry anymore?
Dick Lourie: What was that WC Williams quote about poetry carrying the truth?
Mark Pawlak: I think the quote Dick was thinking about was when Williams said that poetry doesn't give us the news. It gives people what they die for lack of. It's direct communication that's different from other media.
John Hawkins: "The exceptional truth of ordinary people."
Dick Lourie: That is partly because in a poem you have the freedom to use direct quotes from people. You can use metaphor. You can use symbol. It all it all goes in there together and it all goes in there in a concentrated way. And it all goes in there with a certain musical rhythm and all of that, the impact.
Mark Pawlak: Just to give some examples, I mean, we've been seeing a lot of poems by Ukrainian poets that have been shared on the Internet, and what you get there is -- going back to Williams again -- is that other kind of news. There's a real person on the other side speaking directly to you about their lives and concerns. And many of the poems are not strictly political in that sense. They're about everyday lives and the everyday concerns of these Ukrainians. So it gives you this sense of a human conveying to you something of their lives and concerns in a concentrated fashion there. And that that human kind of contact is what's really valuable about poetry.
John Hawkins: Another way of saying it is it's unmediated.
Mark Pawlak: Yeah, unmediated. You know, Ezra Pound, not a person one likes to quote always, because of his fascist tendencies, said, in essence, that what poetry does is about pleasure. It's the pleasure it affords us as sight (image), sound (music), and the intellectual content. And that was kind of his way of summarizing the different modes of poetry. And some poems focus on one of those aspects more than another. But they're all there. And it's the pleasure principle. We take pleasure from it in some deeply meaningful way that's different from any other communication.
John Hawkins: I personally prefer to hear poetry rather than read it, I like the musicality and the rhythm that's heard.
Dick Lourie: I'd like to get into particulars about Hanging Loose. The poems go around by mail. The submissions go around, everybody votes. The only purpose of those votes is to get that bunch of poems to the meeting. We're sitting around a table and everything that hasn't been summarily rejected is sitting on the table. Every poem that's sitting on the table has either some yes or some maybe votes on a sheet of paper. Right now, at the meeting, all those votes are nullified and we have to hear the poem read out loud in order to vote on it.
John Hawkins: That's great.
Over the years, Hanging Loose has been an extraordinary and unique venue for poets starting out, in high school, in university. My own first professional publication was in Hanging Loose. It was great to get a pay check, but also good to feel like I was part of a community of poets.
Hanging Loose has been around for a long time. Hundreds, maybe thousands of small press magazines have come and gone, since you started out. You guys are still here. Still bringing in youngsters and getting them excited about poetry and continuing on with it, making it part of their lives. What's your secret?
Mark Pawlak: Yeah, we don't know any better, you know? We just had a memorial service in Brooklyn for our co-founding editor, Bob Hershon, who recently died. He used to tell the story about staring up with Hanging Loose: "I came home after meeting with these guys and I said to my wife, you know, these guys are starting this poetry magazine. They want me to be an editor. How much work could it be? It's poetry." And then he said, "Little did I know it would be a life sentence."
John Hawkins: That's almost a poetic line in itself. Where did the name for Hanging Loose come from?
Dick Lourie: Well, we got started at Columbia University. Ron Schreiber and Emmett Jarrett had met there and then started a magazine called Things. As in William Carlos Williams. They had gotten to the point where it was getting really expensive to put Things out. This was on the cusp of the so-called mimeograph revolution. 1963, 64. So they wanted to dump that magazine and start a new one.
John Hawkins: Around the time of f*ck You magazine?
Dick Lourie: I think it was.
This was the flowering of the East Village and all the mimeograph stuff. And Emmett and I were in a seminar with Denise Levertov at the 92nd Street Y. And a kid named Gordon Bishop came up with the name Hanging Loose. The idea was to have a magazine that was printed on separate mimeographed pages. It was not bound together. Each page was put into an envelope and the cover was printed on the envelope and hanging loose. The idea was that you could that if you didn't like the poem you could throw it away, something you did like you could put up on your wall. And that went on for 25 issues until the bookstores started realizing that people were self-editing before they took the magazine out of the store.
Mark Pawlak: Back in the late sixties or early seventies, there was a bookstore on every corner of every persuasion, and they would display magazines like Hanging Loose, even after we became saddle-stitched. You could see the cover of the book on the bookshelves. And then as things got corporatized, they wanted to have spines, you know, so they could stack all the books up that way. And that's great. And those bookstores gradually faded away. It was a magical time in a way, as you know. And so in some ways, we joke that the evolution of Hanging Loose, its physical presence from loose pages to saddle stitch to perfect bound to three-color and now glossy 4-color magazine represents kind of the post-war to history of printing. Yeah, the whole printing industry, we sort of adapted as it's going along.
Dick Lourie: But now, everything, either for the magazine or for the books we publish, is in a word document. We never see paper again. You know, everything goes back and forth to the book designer, to the printer, copy editing, and it literally goes from word document to magazine without paper. I guess that saves paper, huh?
Mark Pawlak: Why we survived - when so many small magazines last a couple of issues and then vanish -- is an interesting question. I don't know. I mean, it's crazy to think that for none of us was this our primary occupation. We all had other jobs. And it was just a kind of commitment to the poetry, in a sense, that we were able to continue on.
John Hawkins: We're overwhelmed with information online. You could almost argue that its hive-mindedness is changing our thinking patterns dramatically, and how we respond to each other. People commenting on each other online -- the immediacy is great. But you look at something like reading poetry, or wanting to understand poetry in its essence, and it seems to require a different kind of time/space than we are giving ourselves these days.
Dick Lourie: I just want to go back for a minute to what we were talking about the resilience of Hanging Loose. A thing that we haven't mentioned is how it becomes personal. Emmett and Ron were friends. Bob and I became friends. And friendship is part of what's going on with the magazine, you know, with me and Mark and everybody. And as Mark was saying, we lost Bob last year. And was it wasn't just losing a colleague who worked at Hanging Loose, he was our pal. And being able maintain our friendship really has held us together. We're an independent magazine, we're not linked to a university, to anybody. Staff aren't coming and going, you know, no students come in and edit and then leave. We're all locked in. Yeah, it's a sentence, all right? Like Bob said.
I want to read you one of Bob Hershon's poems. I read this at the memorial program for Bob. It's a 14-line poem. It has eight lines and then six lines. This is a love song. You'll get the idea. It's called "Editors Editing."
THE EDITORS EDITING
By Robert Hershon
Nomi our neighbor
Asks Donna what are those
Guys doing out back
Sitting around the table
Table full of papers
And one guy goes blah blah blah blah
And the others all shake their heads
And go ahum ahum ahum
Then the oaks leaves fall
Then the white garden furniture
Covered with gray city snow
Bluejay walks across the table
And down somebody's leg
Blah blah blah blah
That's really another part of the whole thing.
John Hawkins: Can we talk about your "mission" now compared to when you started out in 1966?
Mark Pawlak: In the early days, I think we all largely came out of William Carlos Williams in a sense. You know, Ron Schreiber did his graduate thesis on Williams. We were all really very taken by his aesthetic. I think over time, we haven't abandoned that, but we've broadened the influences and the kinds of poems that we've invited into the magazine. So there has been a transition there. Mission? I think, trying to keep it fresh, really. We really want stuff that, in terms of language and imagery and formal invention, is really lively material. And I think what you alluded to earlier, you know, a real commitment to finding new voices, not only in the high school kids. We have now published, 250 books. No wonder I'm tired. Countless poets who whose first books we published, you know, and really kind of launch their careers -- such as poetry is a career. People like Sherman Alexie, Kimiko Hahn, who was I mean, the list goes on and on and on. Mandy Smoker, Eula Biss, Maggie Nelson, who's a very big name. And so and some of them started as high school poets. And one of our new editors, Caroline Haygood, started out as a high school poet. That's right. And another, not an editor, but very close to the press, Joanna Furman, who started out as a high school poet. And we've now published four or five of her books.
Dick Lourie: We didn't realize it when we started publishing high school poets, but we were inadvertently forming a farm team.
Mark Pawlak: From highly sophisticated kind of New York school poets, like Tony Towle and Charles North, to Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel, who grew up in a farm worker family. She actually was part of the Dust Bowl migration. At the age of 14 she and her family moved from Oklahoma to the Central Valley of California -- Grapes of Wrath. And at the age of 60, she started sending us poems. We ended up publishing four books of hers, and she was just totally stripped down language, these incredibly intense portraits of her community.
Dick Lourie: And she sent us this poem --
Mark Pawlak: -- On paper, I mean, handwritten on the back of a church envelope. So she really lived in poverty.
Dick Lourie: Maybe we have the originals she sent. Well, at one point Bob sent her a ream of paper, but it didn't stop her creativity with the envelopes. And at one point we're sitting around and we had two poems I think I was reading. I think it was my turn reading them out loud. And there were these two poems. One was about kind of a parking lot, and then the other one was about a woman driving a truck. And these were both on the backs of envelopes. And I looked at these two poems and I realized, Oh, yeah, this is the top half. This is the bottom half. They were originally written on the same envelope and they were originally one poem, and she just tore the envelope apart and decided to make it into two poems.
John Hawkins: Okay, let's talk about the canon. I miss the canon. In some ways. I miss being forced to read the ancients and Shakespeare and the Romantics and the Victorian Poets. Although, I also love the postmodern opening it all up so that all the voices that have been so obviously disenfranchised from the whole acculturation process are now let in. But, I'd like to see a new canon, but expanded. How do you two feel about the canon? Are we missing it?
Mark Pawlak: I mean, I remember going to museums as a kid growing up in working class industrial Buffalo, and we never went to museums. I mean, they would take us on school trips. And the feeling was: I don't belong to this, and this doesn't belong to me. And so I think the idea of forcing people to read things...I'd rather find ways to engage them with where they're at. So some of the contemporary spoken word poetry is a way in so that young readers and young poets can enter into an engagement with poetry and then discover the canon for themselves. If it really grabs them, they find an entry point; they're not going to leave. And they will go back and find the antecedents and the Shakespearean era, etc. So I much prefer to approach it that way.
John Hawkins: Yeah, well, it's debatable. But I don't know what I would have done if someone hadn't introduced me to the Romantics and Victorians, because my young life was so unstructured.
Dick Lourie: Mark, you were going to say something about our guest editing thing. Oh, yeah. Which we're reintroducing.
Mark Pawlak: We're going to revive that idea. Asking poets, whose work we respect, to curate a supplement in the magazine and hopefully to introduce us and our readers to people we don't know, new writers. So it's a way of kind of broadening, the landscape.
John Hawkins: Mark, you just put out a book about Denise Levertov. Is there anything you want to say about the book?
Mark
Pawlak: It's called My Deniversity.
And the idea came from Ezra Pound. He was living in Rapallo,
Italy, in the thirties, a lot of American poets would travel there. People, like Louis Zukofsky
and others, the next generation to kind of study at the master's table. They
just would hang out with Pound. And he just opened his letters and he would talk
to them. And they would just share conversations, share meals. And he referred
to it as his Ezuversity. So I borrowed that idea since after being introduced
to Denise Levertov at MIT, where I was studying physics, I got hooked on poetry
and started to hang out at her house.
Mark
Pawlak: She
died 25 years ago in December. She was a star of the post-war American avant
garde. Her non-academic poetry was first published and came to prominence
really in the "New American Poetry," the
anthology that kind of represented that generation of previously underground
poets, really. She grew up outside of London with an unusual family background.
Her mother was Welsh. Her father grew up in a Hasidic community in the Russian pale and converted to Christianity
and ultimately became a minister in the Church of England. And she had an
almost Victorian childhood. She was home-schooled by her mother and they would
just sit around after dinner and read novels aloud. She said she learned French
history by reading Balzac with her mother -- Balzac and Dumas. That was how she
learned French history.
Dick Lourie: You could do worse.
Mark Pawlak: Yeah, you could. Absolutely. And of course, she was steeped in English literature as a kid, a teenager. She sent a poem of hers to T.S. Eliot, who was then living in England and editing books there. And he wrote her back, encouraged her. And she came to the US and married a guy from Brooklyn, Mitchell Goodman. And she said she always thought that Eliot was an English poet until she till she settled in New York City and learned otherwise. And so she you know, she had to gradually acclimatize herself to American culture and the American idiom. And it took her a while. Dick was in the first poetry class she taught in the mid-sixties. And then she taught at MIT. She was in residence for one year. So there I was studying physics and thought what the hell. I'll try this poetry class. And I read poetry casually.
Dick Lourie: And how much time can it take?
Mark Pawlak: Yeah, how much time? And it completely transformed my --
Dick Lourie: -- Life.
Mark Pawlak: She and her husband, Mitch, were very active in the anti-Vietnam War Movement and were prominent national figures. The two of them figure prominently in Norman Mailer's "The Armies of the Night." And Mitch was actually indicted with Dr. Benjamin Spock and the famous Spock trial, which was the first Vietnam era conspiracy trial for trying to persuade young men to resist the draft. And so they were really national figures in the antiwar movement, and that was very instrumental in my life.
And so Mitch and Denise, they sort of became, for me, kind of my intellectual godparents. And so the memoir is about that and then just really committing myself to poetry and just hanging out at her house and, you know, reading books in her library and having conversations with her. And so the memoir really talks about her life and her influence on me, and how I came to Hanging Loose when she was guest editing one issue of Hanging Loose, Number 12. She did a little anthology of poems by her students in this MIT poetry class. And that was how I got my first poem, ever, published. And it was in Hanging Loose. So she was an important influence on my life. She introduced me to the English Romantics, but also to the classics of Russian literature, which she was deeply invested in.
I've been promoting the book, each time picking a different aspect to read an excerpt from. On one recent occasion, I actually read from the memoir about our conversations about Russian literature, and then I read her long poem called, "A Conversation in Moscow." It takes place during a junket when she travelled throughout the Soviet Union, largely between Moscow and Saint Petersburg, and visited Yasnaya Polyana Tolstoy's country retreat. She gets into this conversation with these Russians at a dinner hosted in her honor. And the conversation is just so wonderfully rich about Russian culture and Russian history and Russian literature. And I think it captures the sense of what it was like to be in her presence, her conversation. It's included in her early seventies book The Freeing of the Dust.
John Hawkins: There are creative non-fiction takes on famous poets streaming online - Dickinson and Byron. Have you watched either of those series, or others?
Mark Pawlak: I did not see the Byron. There's certainly been some really interesting writing about Dickinson's work in recent years, including discovering all those poems that she wrote on envelopes. Really fascinating. Almost works of art in a certain sense. Independent artifacts. Really cool. One of the interesting things about her poems is her use of dashes in place of line breaks, and they're clearly intentional. And I remember Levertov talking about this, that she once got into a fight at a dinner party with Robert Lowell, who was kind of trashing Dickinson and saying, you know, that he was distracted by all these dashes, and he thought she didn't understand what she was doing. And Denise just lit into him, and said, no, it was really intentional. And if you really follow closely the sound and ideas, that that's what she's highlighting. By using these dashes, you'll see that there's a really powerful kind of poetics behind it.
You know, the plethora of media that enters our lives. Someone asked me recently, you know, do you miss a kind of slower pace or the space in our lives to be quiet, to be alone, to read a lengthy piece of work and just really delve into it without being distracted by so much going on in the media world that we engage with. And I find email oppressive --just because there's so much, so many emails, and I have to at least look at them to see if I'm going to trash them or not. They take up so much time. God, I miss writing letters, you know, I mean, going back and reading Rilke's letters, for example, which go on for pages and pages-letters in which whole lives and philosophies and aesthetics are contained. And that's just lost. That's a great loss.
John Hawkins: I can relate to that. You know, I've been overseas for about 30 years. My overseas adventure began in Istanbul. And I was writing all the time by longhand, but I also had my portable typewriter with me. And I would write to people back home. And receive said same longhand or typed letters back. And then all of a sudden, we're all on the web. And that was it, you know. No more longhand.
Shakespeare again. He seems quaint to those who are unaccustomed to his wit, vocabulary, rhythm, and situational context. At the same time there's coherence in the gestalt presented by the form itself - the elegance of the 8-4-2. Most of the stuff I write these days are sonnets. High-brow, low-brow, post mod, like the Bard himself, re-contextualized, a different Globe burning.
Still, there's so much deconstruction around his work in academia that he seems to be interrogated to bits. I wonder sometimes if Shakespeare will go the route of longhand and just become obsolete.
Dick Lourie: I don't think Shakespeare will die out. If Homer hasn't died out, you know, and Chaucer hasn't died out, and Aeschylus hasn't died out, I don't think Shakespeare is going to go. I think there's always going to be enough vitality in a population of people to keep it alive.
Mark Pawlak: But going back to what you were saying about the sonnet, in regards to the effects of postmodernism, I think that despite the prominence of free verse or non-formal structures in poetry, there's always a return to formal structure. People get interested again and want to explore it again, and find value in those forms. They are a way to kind of surprising yourself, if you're primarily a writer of free verses.
Dick Lourie: I'm just thinking of Sherman Alexie again, some of Sherman's pieces, if you remember it. The piece looks like a short prose passage, but there's 14 of them in a certain movement, and he calls it a sonnet. So it's 14 elements going from here to there with a clear structure. Yeah, okay. I'll call it a sonnet.
John Hawkins: Yeah. I did a super sonnet that was 14 sonnets together, which each sonnet itself was a line in the larger sonnet, and the poetry was a collage. It's just fun to write.
Mark Pawlak: Yeah. What you're suggesting reminds me of one of the poems that we published with some frequency, Charles North. He invented a form which is called the baseball line-up.
Dick Lourie: Just called line-ups.
Mark Pawlak: Just called line-ups, and hard to describe, but he'll have painters -- Caravaggio playing second base. He has a whole sequence of them.
John Hawkins: PEN America recently did a support rally online for Ukrainian writers and poets to bring to the fore voices from the warzone that otherwise get lost in the noise and fog of war reporting. Do you have plans to do something?
Mark Pawlak: I think we're hanging loose. We're an old technology. It's hard for us to respond quickly enough in the magazine. If we get two issues out a year, we're really lucky. And so the process is time consuming and slow. And so at the moment we don't have any such plans, although on our social media platforms, we certainly have been sharing any such events that help promote these events. And so I think we're very much invested in celebrating the living cultures of Ukraine, but I think our print platform is not the way to do it very effectively.
I thought the PEN thing was great. I mean, my good friend Askold Melnyczuk, an English professor at UMass, is a Ukrainian-American novelist, founder of Agni magazine, has been publishing translations of contemporary Ukrainian poets and has helped put together a number of such online celebrations of Ukrainian poetry, including getting people, several poets currently still in Ukraine to participate online, which is wonderful.
Dick Lourie: Right.
John Hawkins: Do you have any political things you want to say about the war?
Mark Pawlak: The thing I would I would say, which gives me some hope, is just the bravery of the Russians who are coming out into the streets and protesting the war, knowing that they're going to be brutally beaten and tortured and incarcerated, that there is still resistance there. And there's a long tradition in Russian culture, going back to resistance to the Tsar, among the intellectual class. And so, just to see that this is still happening, despite all odds, gives me some hope.
Dick Lourie: And, of course, the amazing resistance of the Ukrainians.
John Hawkins: One more thing. God's dead. Can poetry be far behind?
Dick Lourie: I think it really goes back to what we started with. I don't want to ruin the language. Too much language, too many people on too many, "platforms" saying too much. Poetry has the concentration and the depth and the freedom to move around from here to there. From direct to indirect to "the image." It's unique as an art form. And it's not going to go away any more than painting or dance or music is going to go away.
Our first guest editor coming up in 113 is going to be Yolanda Wisher, who is an African American poet from Philadelphia. She's the former poet laureate of Philadelphia. We published a book of hers called Monk Eats an Afro. And she and I have done performing together, poetry and music. And we don't edit the guest editor. We give her part of the magazine. Whatever she does, it's hers. We're very excited about having her.
John Hawkins: Who are some favorite poets you have been reading? I like Charles Simic.
Mark Pawlak: It's hard to narrow down a single one. What I would say is that I've been looking for inspiration a lot lately from a group known as the Objectivists. Charles Resnikoff, also Lorine Niedecker, very obscure. But now coming into some prominence. They really wrote very stripped down poetry. Looking less inward than outward. And just had a wonderful discipline and importance of line that I really admire a great deal. And Resnikoff in particular, who largely wrote almost all his work late in his life, was self-published. He wandered the streets of New York writing, just writing, writing, writing poems about what he observed. Anecdotes he overheard. Just a charming poet. One of the major city poets, a big influence on other generations. I think our colleague Bob Hershon was kind of indirectly influenced by his work in many ways.
Those were the ones getting some attention. But I was just in an email conversation with a poet in New York. About somebody that we published in Hanging Loose, Robert Lax, who was someone who went his own way. He went to Columbia, was close, almost a protege of Thomas Merton's -- did a whole bunch of wild things in his life, but ended up in the last half of his life living as the life of kind of hermit in the Greek islands of Patmos and Kalymnos and went from writing formless verse to a very abstract kind of poetry that has been collected in a major collection. He uses repetition of the simplest words sun, blue sky, sun, blue sky and on and on and on, creating this wonderful cadence and almost a trance like sense of observation. And so there's so much, so many directions of poetry and so many interesting things to explore.
Dick Lourie: What I was going to say about favorite poets. It's hard for me to pick out, one, as Mark said. I always go back to Whitman, and to Ginsberg because Howl was the first thing that opened me up to poetry early. And, and I have to say this, I used to tell Bob Hershon that he's my favorite poet. And I still have to think that, you know, I mean, how much does a half century of familiarity and friendship matter?
John Hawkins: Is there anything you guys want to add?
Mark Pawlak: I don't know if you saw Dick's latest book. Dick's been playing blues saxophone for as long as I've known him. It's deeply influenced his new book, Jam Session. There's a wonderful long poem in there. The conversation between the personification of blues and jazz, having a conversation about the forms. That's really one of Dick's best poems, I think.
John Hawkins: Do you want to say more, Dick?
Dick Lourie: I've done this before. My previous book was a book about my 20 years visiting the Mississippi Delta. And, yeah, in this book, the centerpiece, and the title piece, is that poetic dialogue between jazz and blues. They're talking about their differences and their similarities. A lot of stuff comes up in that conversation. A lot of things come up in other poems in the book. There's a poem about imagination versus memory, not as two things that help each other, but as things that are opposed to each other. And a lot of music and musicians come up in that poem. And I found myself doing something very uncharacteristic, jotting down about ten pages of notes, because I'm writing about a lot of different musicians in the poems. And some of them are musicians that people will not know about; they're obscure to civilians, so to speak. I felt like I had to identify and say something about musicians. I had a lot of fun writing about a musician named Slim Gaillard, who was just wonderful, kind of, what's the word, like a medieval jester of jazz and blues and, you know, quoting him and comparing him to Plato and things like that.
And so yeah. One of the other masters of my soul is Melville. There's a thing in which at the beginning of Moby Dick, he's got a dusty clerk who has all these quotes about whales that he has found. Melville and I did the same thing. No, I don't think he invented them. I went out and found a lot of quotes about jam sessions and put them in this little kind of Melville frontispiece. So it's a book very connected to both my music and my poetry.
Justice
It's been reported that when the Beatles
were introduced to Steve Cropper-white genius
of Black Memphis music-the four of them
all stood as one and bowed from the waist: an
appropriate homage I'd say displaying their
good sense-and making me wish that those who buy
records were that astute instead as we know
Steve Cropper's name is not yet a household word
except when compared with that of Lowman Pauling
his own acknowledged inspiration now
forgotten who all through the forties and
fifties played guitar and sang with the Five Royales
Black musicians making Black people's music
in the USA of lynching and Jim
Crow colored water fountains and early
death for Negroes who didn't know their place
in a better world we would all stand up
you and I John Paul George Ringo and Steve
"The Five Royales" we'd say as if we were
up on stage proudly introducing them
before a huge enthusiastic crowd
"Johnny Tanner and Eugene Tanner on
lead vocals" we'd say "Jimmy Moore Otto
Jeffries Obadiah Carter singing
harmony and on bass harmony and
guitar: Lowman Pauling Ladies and
Gentlemen" we'd say "this is like gospel
sweetness caught and held by the sting of that
guitar-soul starts here" we'd say "and doo-wop
starts here so will you please welcome the Five
Royales" and then we would all kneel and kiss
their shiny shoes
from Jam Session (2021) reprinted with permission from Dick Lourie
