Michael Castro was an essential presence on St. Louis’ creative poetry scene when I discovered it circa 1988. I remember his name being spoken in the raspy, enthusiastic voice of Bob Putnam, then running 20th Century Books and Ephemera on the Loop. “You need to check out Michael Castro,” Bob told Sean Hilditch and me.
Michael had been doing for more than a decade exactly what we were trying to do when we tracked him down and checked him out. Michael was by then an old hand at helping bring together artists of different backgrounds, media, and institutional status. A Sephardic Jew from New York, Michael was happiest when black, white and other poets, musicians and others, from the university and the street — and from other places — were getting together and making good things happen.
That’s what Sean Hilditch and I wanted to do when we tracked down Michael Castro. Sean was a British exchange student at Washington University, an American Studies major from (literally) William Shakespeare’s hometown, who was the guiding force in our pursuit of some realer deal than the campus. Michael himself had been brought to St. Louis by the same university and understood our trip so much better than we did, but he was welcoming and encouraging, rather than didactic or dismissive.
From the first time that Sean and I asked Michael to perform at one of our poetry and music gigs on the Loop to the last year of his life 30 years later when Michael was still hearing me out about projects, he never once told me no. It was always, “Sure!” with this excited, forever-young grin in expectation that something good was going to be happening again and he was going to be in on it.
I later worked for Michael. He was a very cool boss. A mutual friend of ours had abandoned a course he was teaching in a university program that Michael administered, and I bailed Michael out at a moment’s notice and then had the job until I moved to New York. The university had a corporate model and Michael’s was not the most enviable administrative position. Though he never made faculty feel like he would support or lead the needed revolution from within, he also parroted absolutely none of the corporate nonsense. His palpable attitude was, “This is not the greatest gig, but it’s the one we’ve got, let’s not make this any harder than it has to be,” which suited me fine.
If you knew Michael long enough, you came to learn that he was close friends with various international luminaries in the arts world, but each connection would have to come out as a matter of course and with no pretension. Whatever rock star poet or musician was Michael’s friend could be yours, too, without fuss.
The most transformative figure in my poetic development was Jerome Rothenberg, who collected and systematized what you might call ethnopoetry. He was Michael’s longtime buddy, it came out one day, and so suddenly and immediately, once the connection had come up, the one thinker most responsible for pointing me in the direction that I needed to go — the Jerome Rothenberg — was “Jerry” to me. It’s notable that Michael’s friends, no matter their degree of rock stardom, also never said no to Michael’s other friends. Michael’s extended atmosphere was one of possibility and seeing what good we can get away with making happen together.
While I was still living in New York, Michael began what I consider to be his life work, his co-translations of contemporary Hungarian poetry with his buddy (another international rock star) Gabor G. Gyukics. I simply could not and still cannot believe how great this poetry is in Michael’s English. Michael toured Hungary with Gabor and they really were treated like rock stars, performing before rock star-sized crowds, but he would talk about this scene at some small local St. Louis poetry gig without a whiff of any sense that he resented returning to a city where poetry was more or less a secret. Secrets, too, were cool.
I don’t have much trust in official St. Louis or care much about official business, so when I heard that St. Louis was going to have a poet laureate for the first time, I was both impressed that St. Louis had discovered one of its best secrets and not terribly interested in how the process played out. When I heard it was Michael Castro who got the gig, I was truly, deeply impressed. I have been trying to think of how many things official St. Louis ever got deeply, truly right about itself, and garlanding Michael Castro as its first poet laureate tops (and pretty much finishes) that list.
In what would be the last year of Michael’s life, I asked him to work on a poetry project, and as always he said sure, yeah, let’s make something good happen. I am back in the classroom now (at our alma mater, Washington University) and also have a demanding journalism job, so my follow-through on personal projects is not what it used to be. To the end, Michael was never one to let go of any opportunity to make a good thing happen, and he was the last between us to circle back around and ask me when I wanted to get started.
Michael, I still don’t know for sure, but I still think it’s a good idea. Let’s get some musicians in St. Louis and Hungary together and start scoring those amazing Hungarian poems that you and Gabor translated together, that poetry is so fantastic. I know you’re not going to be around anymore in the same way, but I am going to get with Gabor and see what good we can do together. Okay? Okay. Cool? Cool. All right, man. See you later, brother.
Chris King, the managing editor of The American, also co-founded Poetry Scores, which translates poetry into other media, and is a widely published poet and co-translator of poetry.
