Joe Torra Interviewed by Doug Holder:
THE SOMERVILLE, MA. SCENE

08 Oct 2001

Joe Torra is the kind of guy you can just hate. While most of us struggle with one artistic medium, Torra, 46, is an accomplished poet with a number of collections (Keep Watching The Sky, 16 Paintings, etc...), a novelist (Gas Station) an editor of lift magazine and PRESSED WAFER, and if that isn't enough a painter and a Rock musician, with a band named, SAMMY. Torra seems to be involved in a swirl of activity, including raising his young children and working as a bartender and waiter at a local eatery. I interviewed him at his home just outside Union Square.


DH: Can you talk about your background, and the influences that lead you to the expressive arts?

JT: My background is working class. My father came from Italy in the late 1940's, so I am very much blue collar. I was not much on education or academia. There were not many books in the house to nuture a love for the expressive arts.

A collection of events lead to one thing and then the other, which eventually lead me to the arts. I was very open to change...to grow in a direction that was scary. The Arts, especially for someone from my background, was a frightening place to go. I started with music early on, listening to the Beatles, etc... I was never a great musician. My first instrument was the guitar. I was probably eight or nine years old when I began to take music lessons. Orginally, my folks wanted me to play accordion, but I wound up with the guitar. Basically, I wanted to play Beatles music... music that I was hearing on the street. In some ways I came from a repressed backgound...strict Roman Catholic. Something about the freedom of Rock music appealed to me. I thought if Rock could anger my father, there must be something in it for me. It was an alternative to a repressed life that didn't make sense to me.

Poetry came much later. I didn't begin writing till after high school. I worked many different jobs, loading docks to life insurance. I realized that I couldn't live this life, it would only give me misery. In my early 20's, I started reading a lot of history. Of course, later I ran across the BEAT writer Jack Kerouac. I couldn't believe that a guy from my background did all that stuff and lived that life, with all its freedom. He appealed to me. I admired his sprituality, his background, his boyishness. This lead me to the BEATS, and as a natural progression other authors. It opened a door for me.

DH: You have lived in Somerville for over two decades. What do you find attractive about the city as an artist? Any drawbacks?

JT: I like the diversity of the city, the people,cultures, all the eateries. I don't find a disadvantage here, other than that the working class or poor are priced out of the real estate market. Although gentrification brought some good things, it also took away that die- hard blue collar town. Another generation will be gone. In East Somerville you can still get the flavor--its like Brooklyn, even there the prices are starting to climb. On the same token there are things to be said about the different kinds of people and places like McIntyre and Moore that are around town. This is a place where I want to raise my kids.

DH: You were the founder of lift magazine and are an editor for PRESSED WAFER. Can you talk about the genesis of these two publishing ventures, and what niche they occupy in the literary market?

JT: I am on the editorial board of pressed wafer with Jim Behrle, William Corbett, and Dan Bouchard. Pressed Wafer has no place in the literary market. We are small press--underground--maybe 200 people read us, from all over the world- but at most 200. I started lift magazine with a group of other poets in 1990. We were looking to create a forum where we could publish, say 12 to 15 pages of our own poetry, as well as others. In issue 5 my wife made personal covers for over a 100 subscribers. A lot of local poets were published here. We did a double issue of Bill Corbett and the late Boston poet, Steven Jonas. We have also published people like Barbara Blatner, Nick Lawrence, and many others. A lot of these poets have moved away since then.

With lift I was looking for more avant- garde work. Mike Franco had a reading series in Cambridge, and many lift people attended. lift would never have survived without it.

The idea of PRESSED WAFER came about at a time when I wanted to start a press but neither had the time or the money. Bill Corbett and others discussed this idea, and as a result we put it together. We decided to put together chaps and a mag under the name Pressed Wafer.Pressed Wafer was the name of an old book by ( Boston Beat poet) John Weiners.

DH: In an article you wrote in Pressed Wafer 2, you dealt with the late Boston poet Steven Jonas. Jonas was in the center of a group of Boston area poets in the early 1960's, including John Weiners, Joe Dunn, Carol Weston, Raffael De Gruttola and others. Is there a community of poets comprabable to this presently, or is it more disparate?

JT: I think there are many poetry communities in the city, they overlap some, but not a lot. They are not Somerville specific. The Boston area has always been a transient place, that's why these scenes come and go. At one time you had Jack Spicer,( North Beach Poet), Steve Jonas, Charles Olsen, and others in the area...a pretty good crowd! In the 50's poets like Spicer, Jonas ,Weiners were all living on Beacon Hill. Today I go to Bill Corbett's reading series at MIT, and Jim Behrle's program at the Brookline Booksmith. There is a scene, but its spread out, not Boston or Somerville specific.

DH: You wrote a novel, GAS STATION that was about your young adulthood in Medford, Mass., working at your dad's service station. The novel has been described as written in the tradition of Jack Kerouac, in that you deal with your blue collar roots and use a stream of consciousness style. Can you coment on this, and why did you choose this style of writing?

JT: Stream of consciousness is a term a little too generalized., but close enough. The style chooses me. I didn't start to write sentences that way. I don't have any reasoning behind my style. It is the natural voice of the speaker. I was trying to get these stories out of me. I don't think about the style. Rules have to go out the window if you are an artist. If I wrote this book in a standard form it would be horrible. All my books are written intuitively.

DH: In your poetry collection, KEEP WATCHING THE SKY, you have a number of poems that traverse the dream state and reality--life amid signs of decay, impending death. In the poem THE BODIES you capture beautifully the line between this tangible existence and the release into the Cosmos. I loved this powerful last paragraph:

Processional configurations stretch across the sky,
translate rings around planets...
Soon remains will be permitted to become
the silence they are about.

JT: Yeah. I didn't think about what the poems in this collection were about. The poem you quoted deals with various ways we can think about physical bodies. It deals with all the things you said and I hope more. I was pouring out a lot of images, then editing them down. I let the work tell me where to go. I work spontaneously when I write poems. This poem came out of a huge installation I saw in New York City. These images didn't come out as "literal" on the page, they retained their mystery. Writing has become a spiritual practice for me over the years. My poems these days are a little more deliberate and clear, than years ago.

DH: Any future projects?

JT: I am working on a new prose memoir. I will continue to paint, and play in my rock band SAMMY. We played LILLI'S last month, and we will be out in Gloucester next month.


By Doug Holder


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