Remembering Doctor B

– by Phoebe Martel

Barbara DeCesare remembers Gary Blankenburg as a ‘godfather’ to the poets at Catonsville High School in suburban Baltimore.

 Blankenburg (1942-2020) – affectionately known as “Dr. B” by his students and disciples – was a prolific confessional poet, a Snodgrass scholar, a collector of outsider art and a skilled fisherman. He frequented Balimore poetry haunts like the One World Café near Johns Hopkins University and the Angel Tavern on Bank Street, and co-founded the Maryland Poetry Review.

DeCesare, a working poet in York, PA, first met Blankenburg when he was wearing his teaching hat. This was before he began sporting his distinctive “lush beard,” the subject of odes he wrote, reading them in class in an overstuffed leather chair. He’d also screen German expressionist films like “Metropolis.”

Blankenburg hosted a regular reading series called Function at the Junction at a Catonsville venue that is now Franco’s Italian Bistro on Frederick Road. There, high schoolers and Baltimore street poets mingled and shared an open mic.

DeCesare first attended Function at the Junction with a couple writer friends who found an “enthusiastic audience” in Blankenburg’s students, often aspiring poets themselves or seekers of extra credit.

“I bet one in five people will tell you that, even if they graduated from high school, went to MIT and became electrical engineers, their experience with Gary was valuable,” DeCesare said. “He was absolutely heroic.”

Countless Blankenburg acolytes, spanning his thirty-two years at the helm of Catonsville’s creative writing program, went on to pursue art in some form.

A Baltimore Sun profile written by Gary Dorsey in 2004 prior to Blankenburg’s retirement detailed how a significant number of Catonsville writing graduates continued their careers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. There was also a pipeline from Gary’s classroom to the writing program at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, then run by the poet Richard Jackson, who Blankenburg had published in the Maryland Poetry Review.

 Paul Bradley, Catonsville Class of 1990, received a four-year scholarship to UTC and went on to Iowa for his MFA. He remembers Blankenburg as his earliest and most important mentor.

Those who didn’t go the academic route also testify to the legacy of “Dr. B.”

Chris Freeland, Catonsville High Class of 1996, a record producer and former drummer for metal band OXES, remembers Blankenburg as someone who treated his students like adults. Blankenburg was allowed to develop his own curriculum, which meant the same students could take his class year after year, immersing themselves into a dedicated writing workshop space.

“As a young musician, I was always afraid that an older musician would be like, ‘Oh, you suck,’” Freeland said. “Gary did the absolute opposite of that, where it was like, ‘Here’s your community, you’re already in it. You’re expected to write two poems a week and you’re expected to read them.”

Freeland said that Blankenburg, the author of seven poetry books, would often share excerpts from his own work, often written in a persona he called Mr. Electric. He’d regale eager neophytes with debauched tales of his days as a young Beat poet, pre-sobriety. Such drunken adventure stories dealt with themes of desperate hedonism and sexual encounters tinged with sorrow. Freeland remembers one line, in particular, about a nude woman in a rowboat with a scar under her navel.

For Freeland, Blankenburg’s unorthodox approach to high-school English was instrumental to his development as a young artist.

“All music is fear and comfort playing off each other. Most songs, the vibe is one or the other, but if you can’t show both, it’s going to reach the heights of ‘great art,’” Freeland said. “There was an edge {to Blankenburg}, and he wanted to show it.”

  Some 15 years after graduation, Freeland was recording bands when the rock duo Batworth Stone walked in. He instantly recognized the lead vocalist, Jenny Keith, as one of the guest poets who’d visited Blankenburg’s class.

Keith remembers Blankenburg’s poetics as championing art as a “therapeutic device” and “pressure valve,” refined with an eye for beauty.

Blankenburg guided his students through contemporary poetry in the vein of Anne Sexton and John Berryman, all while welcoming a star-studded roster of guest poets, including Lucille Clifton and Michael Collier. He also served as an adviser to the CHS literary magazine, Ellipsis.

In 1983, Blankenburg wrote his doctoral dissertation (through Carnegie Mellon University, while at Catonsville) on the confessional school – chiefly Sexton, Berryman, W.D. Snodgrass and Sylvia Plath.

The son of movie-theater operators in Decatur, Illinois, Blankenburg came to Baltimore around 1963 to teach high school in Sparrows Point, near the Bethlehem Steel mills. According to Dorsey’s article, Blankenburg completed an M.A. program at Johns Hopkins before enrolling in a Ph.D. program in British literature at the University of Delaware. 

The pursuit of a Ph.D. was abandoned due to his alcoholism. Blankenburg landed at Catonsville in 1972 and from that point on experienced considerable tumult in his personal life, weaving in and out of alcohol relapses. His devotion to the classroom, however, never wavered.

 “He made a lot of mistakes,” DeCesare said. “Someone like that, who’s forthcoming about the choices they made that didn’t serve them is someone that you can trust to understand you, face-to-face or in the context of writing fiction and poetry.”

  In Dorsey’s 2004 profile, Blankenburg reflected on the meandering trajectory of his career.

 “Maybe it was the combination of getting beat up by my addiction and having to earn a living this way,” he said. “But what little humility I had, I gained because I had to teach at the high school.”

  Baltimorean David Beaudoin is an artist, poet and founder of Tropos Press (1976-2000), an independent publisher that issued the first edition of the Mr. Electric poems in 1990.

“His poetry was confessional, but it had a certain perspective; it was never a total kind of self-absorption, a ‘woe is me,” said Beaudoin. “He could always step away from his misery and go, ‘the whole situation is pretty much ridiculous.”

  Over the decades that Beaudoin knew Blankenburg – as an editor, publisher, conversational companion – what stood out to him the most was his friend’s extraordinary skill in fostering young talent.

  “His real claim to fame, other than poetry, was his ability as a teacher,”  Beaudoin said.

  Clarinda Harris, another longtime friend, hired him as an adjunct professor at Towson University when she headed the English department. She’d bring him in to speak in her poetry courses. One time, he read a poem about dancing all night with a trans woman who came into a bistro, distraught after an assault.

  The introductory class was mostly made up of lacrosse players and “jocks,” said Harris, recalling that as Blankenburg read, “the number of people with tears running down their face was incredible. I think it was probably 90%.”

Bill Jones chaired the Catonsville High School English department in the late seventies. There, he made a lifelong friend in Blankenburg, who encouraged Jones to write. When Blankenburg persuaded Patuxent Publishing, owner of the Towson Times, to create a weekly poetry column, he published Jones’s first poems. He found venues and arranged public readings for his friend and other newly published poets. Catonsville students often attended.

After retiring, Blankenburg published several more volumes of poetry, which took an increasingly introspective tone on themes of mortality and faith. The second-to-last, Above All Things (2015), included his drawings of vegetable gardens and barren trees. 

Jones says that Blankenburg was proudest of this collection; odes to resurrection and redemption which captured the “spiritual nature of the man he had become.”

During the last few years of Blankenburg’s life, Jones and another friend, Larry Yateman (sometimes DeCesare), would drive north to Blankenburg and his wife, Jo’s farmhouse in Sparks.

They’d have breakfast at the Ashland Café on York Road, where Blankenburg would be drawing cartoons and drafting poems on the paper placemats when his friends arrived.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, Jones continued to see his friend, albeit outdoors in mid-winter, overlooking the vegetable garden that was Blankenburg’s joy in retirement. On one of these visits, Blankenburg’s illustrious beard caught on fire, an episode he chronicled in Beyond That Valley of Wildflowers.

“He smoked cigars, and the ash would fall down in his sweater and burn holes in it,” Jones said. “One day, he burned a hole right through his beard. He always saw great humor at his own expense and it was really fun, you know, to live with a person who could do that.”