By Cara Goldstone
Next year will mark Dr. Benjamin Goluboff’s 40th teaching English at Lake Forest College; this year will see the publication of his fifth book.
Moe Asch: A Speculative Life in Verse and Other Poems is Goluboff’s latest venture into the realm of what he calls “speculative biographical poetry”— narrative poetry about real people, with imagined specifics in the recounting of their stories.
“Reading and thinking about biography makes you recognize how many improbable things happen in people’s lives,” says Lake Forest College professor Benjamin Goluboff.
“I don’t like writing about myself and my own experience,” he explained. “I think it is more interesting to look for subjects outside of the self. I have a longtime fascination with biography, especially literary biography … it’s a great pleasure for me.”
This collection, set to be published this autumn by Kelsay Press, combines a century’s worth of American music history with decades of Goluboff’s literary studies to spotlight its namesake: Moe Asch, a Jewish-American record executive during the folk revival of the 1960s.
“He recorded all these remarkable musicians and poets and prose writers,” Goluboff said. From Woody Guthrie to W. E. B. Du Bois, Asch’s many connections provide just the right amount of historical record and unfilled gaps to serve as inspiration for a speculative poet.
The collection features three sections, the longest of which is dedicated to Asch’s life; the succeeding two emphasize the works of American painter G. P. A. Healy and other facets of Chicago history. The poems are unified through their exploration of Jewish identity and celebration of the “weirdness” of the human condition.
“Reading and thinking about biography makes you recognize how many improbable things happen in people’s lives,” Goluboff noted. “Part of what I’m doing is looking for the things that give me delight as a reader, and one of the things that gives me delight as a reader is the weirdness of other people’s lives.”
Poetry is a relatively new endeavor for Goluboff. “I didn’t start writing poetry until I was in my 50s,” he said. “Prior to that, I wrote a little bit of short fiction and some literary scholarship.”
Goluboff's office is brimming with books about Emily Dickinson, his favorite poet.
His primary emphasis in the literary world is not writing, but teaching.
“It’s a Cinderella story, no kidding,” he said, in reference to his work as a professor at Lake Forest College. “It was my first job out of graduate school… they gave me tenure, and I stayed.”
Goluboff describes his job as a “tremendous privilege”—for an American literature enthusiast such as himself, nothing is more rewarding than leading class discussions on the works that cemented his own adoration for writing. Emily Dickinson, for example, is Goluboff’s favorite poet; he teaches a seminar course on her work for graduating senior English majors.
Naturally, Goluboff’s poetry and professorial work influence each other in important and unexpected ways. “One of the things I try to make students understand is that texts don’t have fixed meanings,” he explained. “They are mobile and contingent. They remove with the remover; it’s always a different poem every time you come back to that.
“Because that’s always one of the messages of my classroom, while I don’t set out to write something that is contingent and transactional and hinged in the middle, I know that’s what I’m doing … that is the governing paradigm when I write, even if I don’t write with that intention.”
Even with nearly four decades of experience in the literary world and four published books to his name, though, Goluboff has maintained all the wonder and passion that drove him towards writing in the first place.
“Yesterday, there wasn’t a book by me about Moe Asch, and today, hey, there is. I’m still new enough to this—still enough of a book nut—to find that really intoxicating.”
Moe Asch: A Speculative Life in Verse and Other Poems is set for publication in the autumn of 2025. Read his poem “Bronzeville Manifests in the Studio as Moe Asch Records Gwendolyn Brooks Reading ‘Kitchenette Building,’ 1954” online at https://45thparallellitmag.com/bronzeville-manifests.