Poets Honor Book Shop Anniversary

For 75 years, Grolier Poetry Book Shop has been a site for poetic pilgrimage. Last night, its devotees ventured away from the shop’s cramped quarters on Plympton Street to the spacious Sanders Theatre, where its most famous patrons gathered to honor the anniversary.

An enthusiastic crowd came to hear Robert Creeley, Martin Espada and former poet laureate Robert Pinsky read from their own poems and from works that remind them of the Harvard Square landmark.

“It’s not a shop, it’s a shrine,” said Eamon Grennan, one of the featured poets, who discovered Grolier while a graduate student at Harvard. “I suppose in its own way, it’s sort of a chapel.”

Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Jorie Graham called it “a sanctuary in the midst of an extraordinary...and astonishing madness.”

Grolier was founded in 1927 and its early years were shaped by its owner, Gordon Cairnie, who ran the shop as a kind of poet’s club throughout his tenure.

“I used to hate to go into the place—it was scary,” Pinsky said of the shop in the Cairnie days. “But I had to go in there because the books I wanted were there.”

Louisa Solano bought the store in 1974 and was instrumental in opening up Grolier to a less intimidating, more democratic clientele.

“It’s always been a place where you can go and find the book of poetry you want to find, which is unlike any other bookstore,” said Frank Bidart, another of last night’s featured poets and a Cambridge resident.

Solano preserved the store’s original purpose as a place that offered a selection of obscure and out-of-print volumes, as well as the most recent works. But during her years Grolier expanded into an important center for poetry, not just in Cambridge but in the country. For example, Solano runs a foundation that sponsors book signings, poetry workshops and an annual poetry festival and contest.

Alice Quinn, the executive director of the Poetry Society of America, which sponsored last night’s celebration, frequented Grolier in her student days when she took a summer course at Harvard.

“She made a web of interconnecting lives come together,” Quinn said of Solano. “The filament was poetry.”

Many of those who read at the podium last night are staple performers at Grolier’s readings. Peter Sacks, professor of English and American Literature and Language, had his first reading in the country in the early 1980s through Solano’s support. He said Grolier still holds an important place in his heart.

“The country of poetry has had its capital for me in this bookshop,” he said.

—Staff writer Alexandra B. Moss can be reached at abmoss@fas.harvard.edu.