Hugh Fox was born in Chicago in 1932. He spent his childhood studying violin, piano, composition and opera with his Viennese teacher Zerlina Muhlman Metzger. He received a M.A. degree in English from Loyola University in Chicago and his Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He met his first wife, a Peruvian woman named Lucia Ungaro de Zevallos, while at Urbana-Campaign and was a Professor of American Literature from 1958-1968 at Loyola University in Los Angeles. He became a Professor in the Department of American Thought and Language at Michigan State University in 1968 and remained there until he retired in 1999. It was at MSU that he met his second wife Nona Grimes. They were married in 1970. He received Fulbright Professsorships at the University of Hermosillo in Mexico in 1961, the Instituto Pedagogico and Universidad Católica in Caracas from 1964 to 1966, and at the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil from 1978-1980. He met his third wife Maria Bernadete Costa in Brazil in 1978. They've been married for 28 years. He studied Latin American literature at the University of Buenos Aires on and OAS grant and spent a year as an archaeologist in the Atacama Desert in Chile in 1986.
He was the founder and Board of Directors member of COSMEP, the International Organization of Independent Publishers, from 1968 until its death in 1996. Editor of Ghost Dance: The International Quarterly of Experimental Poetry from 1968-1995. Latin American editor of Western World Review & North American Review, during the 60's. Former contributing reviewer on Smith/ Pulpsmith, Choice etc. currently contributing reviewer to SPR and SMR. Listed in Who's Who: The Two Thousand Most Important Writers in the Last Millenium, Dictionary of Middlewestern Writers, and The International Who's Who. He has 85 books published and has another 30 (mainly the novels and plays and one archaeology book) still unpublished on the shelves.
WELCOME TO HORRORFACEVILLE
You don't need to watch the old Frankenstein-Dracula-
Harry-Potter films to get creeped-out and nightmared,
all you need to do is get on the Alewife Red line at
Park Street and let the bored hit-shit , gotta make it
to the top/hate those fuckers already up there faces
demoning around you enter your innocent Illinois-
grass soul.
MAYBE IT'S ME
After a month in Retiresville San Diego,
Carlsbad, West Hollywood, Carpinteria,
Sunnyvale, Frisco with survival addicts with their
book-ballet-opera-poetry talktimes, flax, oatmeal,
walk-along-the-beach walks, Starbucks and the
latest poetry prize write-time, Japanese gardening-around
in the already-climbed- to-the topville paradise, then to
Boston-coast-it into the other side of the always-the-same Real
class-struggle grunchface world which I don’t want anything to do with.
FINDING
Slowly finding my (Ben and Jerry's, Boston Chowder,
Newton Market Place, Fine Arts Museum eatery, Harvard
along the river, wherever there's a Howyadoin, Fox? face
to grace my mellow-dramatic afternoons) salvation pill-yoga
remaining time schedule, however much (20 years?) or little (20 minutes?) that may be.
THE MAGIC
Across the bridge to Kendall-MIT and the water cloud-scraper
magic cantaatas for a few monumental moments before
we re-tunnel it again into gravestone depression.
HARVARD SQUARE
Harvard Square,
like in the subway
Spare Change,
spare
faces
spare
nations
finish college owing half a million,
house out there whispering "A million and
a half,
Blessed are the Poor for they Shall See Spare Change.
GETTING USED TO
1.
Getting used to the Cuban-facist waiter in our hotel
eat shop, the Colombians at the table next to me who
identify me as ("Debe ser Colombiano...o Argentino")
Columbian or Argentinian (for the 500th time in
the last twenty years), the charmante old Haitian woman
who takes care of our room, Ça va, Ça va bien, chaque
jour meilleur, The Gimme-Some-Moneyers, the seventh
floor back-of-the-hotel we’re in overlooking a concrete
courtyard perfect for suicide.
2.
Getting used to Teavana tea stores and Papyrus paper
stores, Swarovski jewellers, Aldo Shoes, Yankee
Candy Company...Sax...like it was still soaring...
or did it ever soar, getting used to being from Chicago,
the 1930’s Czech grandma Cicero and brogue Christian
Brothers of Ireland, and the nuns, all believing that
paradise was just around the next mein kampf unemployment
corridor, God with outstretched arms waiting to
welcome you to an eternity that seems to have vanished
along with (priesthood=sainthood) everything else.
TURNING OFF
Turning off the socio-economic analyst for a while, sitting next to a bench with an ancient stone-marker
with The Newtowne Market carved into it, J.F. Kennedy Street opposite Drayton Hall, kitty-
corner from The Garage, in front of Peet's Coffee-Tea,
the Bombay Club off to my right, sparrows and pigeons
pecking away in front of me waiting for a little treat, after
the weather forecast of "heavy rain all day," the ground
covered with maple leaves, the sun squeezing out,
a currey-enhanced baby-breeze, Hindu, Chinese, Greek,
Korean, Russian, even some gringo students sauntering
by, one pair of old-fashioned brown tights, brown suede
booted legs walking by, two Lesbians holding hands, a
professor sitting next to me talking on the phone to his
son about how badly his students did on their mid-terms,
an enormous elephant-man walking by eating a seafood
salad wrap, another (Armenian?) doll walking by carrying
two cups of very capped, very hot coffee, as the springish
sun momentaries behind a cloud.