Remember
“Remember me,” I tell her, starting to give her/open up all my albums going back to just-born through grammar and all other schools, Avignon and Madrid, her mother and aunts and uncles, copies of my poetry books, a print-out bibliography, DVD’s and way-back tapes of my readings and talks, my piano music played on the Steinway over in the Hart Hall at the university, the whole area around her and her little frog-legs filling up. “I’m going to need a storage-room,” she says, “archive-space..,” her archivist father laughing, “She has great recording ears..,” tears in her eyes, “But no memory,” water-hands, rain-eyes, snow-hair, “Je ne peut pas parler…/ I can’t talk….,” the night opening the windows, the hands coming in and hearsing us off to fossil anonymity. “Not just a time to time-visit, but continuity.” “For how long?”
Hugh Fox was born in Chicago in 1932 and spent most of his life (after getting a Ph.D.in American Literature from the U. of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign) teaching writing and film. He taught for ten years at Loyola University (now Loyola-Marymount) in Los Angeles, forty years at Michigan State U., was a Fulbright Professor for two years at the Instituto Pedagogico in Caracas, two years a Fulbrighter at the University of Santa Catarina in Brazil, one year at the University of Sonora in Hermosillo, Mexico. He also received an OAS grant and studied Latin American Literature at the U. of Buenos Aires, and another OAS grant as an archaeology to do archaeological research in the Atacama Desert in Chile. He had married a Peruvian, Lucia Ungaro de Zevallos, while at the U. of Illinois, and started visiting all the pre-Columbian ruins in Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, etc. and slowly began to discovered heretofore unknown links between the ancient Americas and the so-called Old World. He already has 4 books published on pre-Columbian archaeology and another one (REDISCOVERING AMERICA) will appear soon, published by World Audience in NYC, a publisher which published his collected poetry (540 pp.) last year under the title THE COLLECTED POETRY OF HUGH FOX. World Audience also published a book by Fox on French film. Altogether Fox has some 110 books published and is retired from teaching now….is currently visiting his Brazilian wife´s family in Florianopolis, writing his third book of poetry in Portuguese, which he will translate into English when he returns to the U.S.
