An interview with longtime Spare Change columnist and poet Marc Goldfinger
The nation’s oldest street paper, Spare Change News was founded in 1992 by James Shearer, Tim Harris, and Tim Hobson and backed by the Homeless Empowerment Project. The outlet has historically primarily been “by the homeless, for the homeless,” and includes everything from news to arts coverage and poetry in a print edition that is sold on corners—critically, via vendors who receive a cut—throughout Greater Boston.
As Shearer once explained, his group started the paper “to change perceptions and to educate the public by giving ourselves a voice and building a bridge between the haves and have nots.” BINJ has a similar philosophy, and so it’s fitting that SCN frequently publishes features from our MassWire news service.
Our guest for this installment of the BINJ “15 Minutes of Cambridge” series was Marc Goldfinger, a local icon who over the past several decades has been a Spare Change board member, poetry editor, and regular columnist. He is also one of the editors of “Spare Change News Poems: An Anthology by Homeless People and Those Touched by Homelessness” (2018), as well as volumes of his own work.
BINJ Editorial Director Chris Faraone spoke with Marc about the history, struggles, and successes that the unique newspaper has had covering homelessness and inequality in the shadow of America’s most elite university, as well as the role that Spare Change still has in providing news and income for some of the region’s most vulnerable people. As a bonus, Marc also shared some of his poems about the nightmare—and occasional follies—of addiction.
