Musings from Alexis Levitin

Meet you at the Osiris: a Parisian café in the American Wilderness

I live in the boondocks of upstate New York, just south of the Canadian border. From my deck I watch an Adirondack River flowing slowly towards Lake Champlain. For blue jays, cardinals, chickadees, Canadian geese, squirrels, chipmunks, ground hogs, deer, fox and beaver this is the place. For climbing mountains, kayaking streams, rivers, lakes, and reedy swamps, this is the place. For downhill or cross- country skiing, snowshoeing, autumn strolls on woodland paths, daily swims in local rivers and lakes, canoeing everywhere, if you can find a partner, this is the place, indeed. However, if you want to soak in culture, as you would be doing seated at a corner table at Les Deux Magots on St. Germain de Pres, forget it. You can’t get there from here.

Or maybe you can. For if you subscribe to Osiris, a modest, high quality international poetry magazine now in its fifty-second year, you might feel yourself part of the intellectual camaraderie of a Latin Quarter brasserie. Seated in your lonely abode in the American wilderness, when you pick up a copy of Osiris, you can nod with a smile of recognition at Simon Perchik, seated at his usual table with his usual café au lait. Across the way, you catch sight of Bob Moorhead, discussing graphic art and Post-surrealism with a wild-haired Frenchman on his third anis. Seated beside him is his wife, Andrea Moorhead, happy to be in the midst of the bustle, elegance, richness, and surging of languages, here in the café she established half a century ago. At the next table sits John Taylor, a long-term ex-pat writer and translator, married to and rooted in France, if not always Paris itself. And there’s the American poet, almost as old as you yourself, Paul Roth, publisher of Bitter Oleander Press, sipping from a straight-forward black coffee, steaming hot. And then you catch a glimpse of your old pal Gerald Chapple, seated alone with the ghost of the great Berliner Gunter Kunert, his long-term drinking buddy and intellectual confidante. And as you sip your hot chocolate, you revel in the languages flowing around you: the predominant French, of course, but also bits of Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, and quite a lot of English, both from Americans and Brits. 

How happy you are, as if seated in Les Deux Magots or Café de Flore, awash with the music of multiple languages and the intellectual buzz of people who believe that ideas and art still matter. And you can have all this while dwelling in the loneliness of the vast American expanse. Thank you, Andrea and Robert, for providing a home for those who never feel entirely at home.