After 'Hindsight,' writer turning over a new Leaf

The young Newburyport native wrote his new collection, "Lost in Hindsight," about a decade ago, while still in his teens. Frankly, he now has a love-hate relationship with the work.

"I've grown a lot since then. If I won, I'd be shocked, and possibly appalled by the state of poetry," he says with a smile.

Still, the work - a heady mix of traditional Gothic love poetry and avant-garde experiments in language - has earned wide praise and been nominated as well for the prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize and the Massachusetts Book Award. To kick off National Poetry Month, Leaf read from his work on March 27 on the radio station of Goddard College, the small liberal arts school in central Vermont where the writer is studying.

His plan is to earn his MFA with a thesis on Lord Timothy Dexter, the eccentric Newburyport trader, philosopher, and author of one highly unusual literary work, "A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, or Plain Truths in a Homespun Dress." Leaf sees Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and William Burroughsall as fellow followers in Dexter's rule-breaking tradition, and he hopes to make a case that the largely forgotten Newburyporter (1743-1806) was as influential to the development of Ameri can letters as Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"It would be controversial in the academic world," says the intense yet personable writer.

Leaf was fascinated by Dexter from a young age, when an uncle was hired to paint the self-made man's historic house after a fire. "There were tunnels in the basement to the house next door," recalls Leaf, who grew up just down High Street from the Dexter house. "Inside the medicine cabinet there was a ladder to a new flight. All these secret passages."

Dexter, who made his fortune selling strange cargo in unlikely markets - warming pans in the West Indies, for instance - outfitted the grounds of his estate with dozens of statues of great men (including himself) and a menagerie of lions. Curious to see how he would be remembered when he was gone, he staged a rehearsal of his own funeral.

"Odd, quirky facts having to do with literature have always fascinated me," says Leaf, who now lives with his wife and toddler son in a fourth-floor walk-up in downtown Lowell, just around the corner from the Old Worthen, where Jack Kerouac often drank. For five years Leaf ran an art gallery near Boston named for his wife, Sylvanwillow. He still dabbles in art sales but says the market for fine art has dried up in the troubled economy.

"I heard the other day that people are buying antiques," he says. "They want to be around the things their parents and grandparents were around."

The walls of the Leafs' small apartment are covered in artworks, including a minor work by Dali. As a writer, he sometimes thinks about how the great painters approached their work. "Picasso said it took 45 years of learning technique so he could paint like a child," says Leaf, who is wearing a soft pair of dance shoes around the apartment.

He took his wife's last name when they married (it would've been "a crime" to ask her to give up the name Sylvanwillow Leaf, he says), and he now publishes as C.S. Leaf.

"It just sounded good, honestly," he says. "It gives the sex ambiguity, not that I think the poetry is feminine. Actually, I'm quite sure most of it reads masculine."

Growing up in Newburyport, his family name was Bask. He was a punk-rock kid, wearing top hats and nail polish and acting in productions for the Theater in the Open, but he also played varsity soccer.

Rote learning was never his forte. "I would skip school to go to the library," he recalls. Now he relishes the opportunity to design his own curriculum at Goddard.

This semester he is working with faculty member Francisco Ibanez-Carrasco, the Chilean-Canadian author of the short story collection "Killing Me Softly." Leaf is the cofounder and chief editor of Anamorphy, a small press based at Goddard, and he says he is working with James Grauerholz, the late William Burroughs's literary executor, on a possible Burroughs project.

Leaf's own poetry has taken a radical turn from the playful alliteration, palindromes, and Shakespearean shout-outs of his early verse. He has become obsessed with language for its own sake, studying Claude Shannon's "Mathematical Theory of Communication" and devising dense blocks of text that become different poems through several pages of transparencies.

"He has a very real sense of vivid imagery and an exotic sense of language," says Walter Butts, a Goddard faculty member who has just been named New Hampshire's poet laureate. "Ultimately, language is all we have. It can never accurately replicate an emotion or a frame of mind, but it can certainly evoke it. And I think that's what Craig does."

The traditional literary world, says Leaf, doesn't always know what to make of his work. And that's OK with him.

"The problem is that this poetry seems too new," he says. Oliver Wendell Holmes once called Leaf's hero, Lord Dexter, "the founder of a new school" of writing. The kid who once climbed around the secret passages of Dexter's house would like nothing better than to follow in his footsteps.